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June 9, 2025 22:55-23:56 - CSPAN
01:00:58
Conversation on Possibilities of Biotechnology
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Former Wisconsin Republican Representative Mike Gallagher talked about biotechnology and its potential uses during a discussion with leaders in the industry.
Speakers also address how adversaries like China could create viruses or weaponize the industry.
This was hosted by the Hudson Institute.
It's about an hour.
Good afternoon, everyone.
It's great to be with you all at the Hudson Institute to discuss an important, but I think still underappreciated topic, which is the biotechnology race we're in against the Chinese Communist Party.
When we talk about the technological aspects of this new Cold War with China, I think our mind immediately jumps to artificial intelligence, quantum computing, or some element of the military competition.
But I would submit to you that biotechnology is becoming just as important as the other domains.
And if you're asking why, just look at how China is trying to use advanced biotechnology.
Forced DNA collection, genetic surveillance, the genetic enhancement of soldiers for the People's Liberation Army.
Genetically tailored weapons are already a trending topic in PLA military circles.
These threats that were once contained to science fiction novel are now becoming a reality.
They can be scary.
But the good news is that there's no one better to discuss these threats and how we win this competition than the man joining us today, Jason Kelly, the co-founder and CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks.
Jason is truly a pioneer in this space.
We were honored to have him testify before my committee in Congress's select committee.
He did a fantastic job.
He got his undergrad and PhD from MIT, which is a small school that I think no one's ever heard of, in bioengineering and started Ginkgo right out of school.
In 2014, Ginkgo was the first biotechnology company to do Y Combinator, right when Sam Altman took over as president.
Sam even said that Ginkgo was his favorite YC interview ever of all time.
As someone that's gotten to interview Jason and pepper him with questions twice now, this time not under congressional oath, I can't disagree with that assessment.
It's partly why I think Jason was the perfect choice to chair the National Security Commission on Biotech, which is now chaired by Senator Todd Young, whose final report came out just a month ago.
And under Jason's leadership, Ginkgo has raised over $2 billion since its appearance at Y Combinator and went public in 2021.
Not an easy thing to do.
In fact, when he took the company public, he put a 50-foot T-Rex On the outside of the New York Stock Exchange, which leads me to my first question, Jason.
Where are we going to get the, when are we going to get Jurassic Park?
So to dig into that and many other important, dare I say, existential questions, please join me in welcoming the CEO of Ginkgo Bioworks, Jason Kelly.
I will answer that, actually.
Let's just start there.
Okay, good.
Let's start with dinosaurs.
That's where everyone's head immediately went in.
Did you see the dire wolves that were de-extincted?
Colossal.
Colossal.
Yes.
I met the CEO.
He was telling me about the dire wolves.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm going to be there later this week.
I didn't know they ever existed in a universe other than Game of Thrones, let alone that they would be resurrected.
Yes, yeah.
So, A, amazing technical work, right?
So this is being able to basically edit a mammalian genome and make a bunch of changes to it.
In this case, they started with a wolf and they added back in some of the features that make it look like a dire wolf, interestingly.
And there's a lot of debate.
It's not the whole genome of a dire wolf.
But boy, it does look like a dire woman.
It's big.
It's beautiful white fur, whole thing.
And I think President Trump should put them on the South Lawn.
That's what I think.
He should be just patrolling.
Patrolling.
Yeah.
I mean, let's get biotech.
But I do think it shows biotech can capture the public imagination.
So we do, and I think we're going to talk a lot about human health and therapeutics and also infectious disease, when you can misuse this stuff to hurt people.
But like, you know, biotech, I think also as it falls in cost, is going to be almost like a consumer product as well.
Well, let's take a step back before we get to dire wolves or T-Rexes patrolling the White House South Lawn and other critical elements of our defense in depth.
Let's just start with the basics on biotechnology.
Because I think, you know, like quantum, even like AI, it's one of these sort of buzz phrases that you hear deployed without a sufficient understanding of what it actually is.
So assume you're talking to like a washed up member of Congress and you really have to dumb it down.
We've all had to learn how AI works.
No one understands how quantum works.
Is biotech comprehensible?
Make it comprehensible for the lay audience.
I will teach you to be a genetic engineer.
Fantastic.
Okay.
All right.
So, all right, so let's start at the beginning, right?
So biotech got going in 1978.
Okay.
This was out at UCSF, a guy named Herbert Boyer was the first person to take a gene from one species and move it into another.
And this became the foundation for a company called Genentech.
And their first big product was human insulin.
Okay, so let me explain to you, because my dad was a type 1 diabetic.
So when I was growing up, this is before all this started, my dad would take insulin that came from pigs' pancreases.
That was where we used to get insulin, right?
Because diabetics, type 1, childhood diabetes, you don't make any insulin at all.
So you got to take it with a needle.
All right.
So what did they do at Genentech?
So they got the gene from a human, okay, a human insulin gene, and they did a process called PCR.
Okay.
And the first thing to understand is inside of all your cells is digital code in the form of DNA.
So there is a piece of code that equals the insulin protein.
And what Genentech did was they used this process to make many copies of that gene in the lab.
So they could identify where it was and they could make lots of copies.
And then they took those copies and they cut them with a thing called restriction enzymes, which could cut the ends and make them sticky.
And today, we'll talk about a thing you've probably heard about called CRISPR.
That's the modern generation of being able to cut DNA where you want.
But back then, they cut the ends of this insulin gene.
All right.
And then here's the magic part.
They took bacteria that they could grow in a big tank, a little bit like a brewery.
You know, like how you make beer by putting yeast in a tank and feeding it sugar, except in this case it was bacteria.
They went in its genome, they cut it with that same enzyme.
The genome opened up.
They put in a copy of that human insulin gene.
They patched it back up.
They put those microbes in a tank in South San Francisco.
And boy, oh boy, they started making human insulin.
Interesting.
No human involved.
Okay, and suddenly my dad could have the real thing.
You could have human insulin, not pig insulin, being made through the power of biotechnology.
And that was the beginning.
And so the way to understand what we're doing with biotech is you have digital code in the form of DNA, and we're building the tools to let you make changes to that in order to make new products on the economic side.
And we can talk a little bit about the defense side.
But that's the core technology.
And it's rooted in this fact that DNA is code, right?
Much like programming a computer or, you know, you know, or your phone, you add new code and the cell does something new.
In this case, you add the gene for insulin and it starts making insulin.
Interesting.
Does that make sense?
Well, it does make sense, although I think my takeaway when someone asked is that it's akin to making beer.
Yeah, yeah, you see.
You know, for a lot of your therapeutic drugs, it's a little bit like making beer.
If I were to apply the process or look at the process you have today at Ginkgo, which if you haven't visited the facility, it's phenomenal, it's eye-opening, and like compare it to what was happening in 1978 or early 80s.
Like, what would be the biggest difference?
Like, what tool do you have now that they didn't have back then?
So the major change is the scale that we're able to do.
This is enormously bigger now.
So, for example, back then, you could only cut and paste.
So, I had to have a human gene from a human.
I had to cut it out and then paste it into that bacteria.
Today, we have a technology called DNA synthesis.
So, I go on a computer, I type ATC, GG, GGG, whatever gene I wanted.
It could be the human insulin, it could be anything I want.
I hit print, and in our labs, or in their DNA synthesis companies, like a company called Twist out in California, a piece of DNA gets built letter by letter, exactly as I designed it.
So, now you have the ability to access any gene from any genome that's ever been read out in the world.
Okay, and so that's one half of the technology called DNA synthesis or DNA printing or DNA writing.
And this is one of the things people are worried about on the biosecurity side, because what if I print smallpox?
Okay, so that's writing.
And then the other technology that's improved massively is DNA reading.
So, you might remember the Human Genome Project, right?
It was like the Clinton-era thing, 2000.
We sequenced the human genome, right?
Well, that's DNA reading.
You take a cell up, you grind it, you put it into a machine called a DNA sequencer.
It's like the size of a washing machine these days, all right?
You put it in there, and if I ground up your cells, the book of Representative Gallagher would show up on the screen.
Yeah, and we would see all four billion letters of your genome read out on the computer.
So, we turn cells into that DNA code, and we can now access it.
All right, and that's true not just for humans, we're all we love ourselves, but for every plant, animal, microbe in the environment, we can also read their DNA and get that as a huge collection.
And then, with DNA printing, I can pull any gene out of that library and get it in the lab, and then put it into any other organism I want.
And that's modern biotech today.
We have all those tools.
Okay, but to go, sorry, go finish you up.
Last thing I was going to say, if you want to understand, like the last bit, reading, writing of the DNA, if you then want to put it somewhere, okay, this is editing, and this is where CRISPR fits in.
So, back in the 80s, you didn't get to decide where in the bacteria your gene went.
It was like pretty sloppy.
Now, with CRISPR, you can say, okay, if you have this, I forget the exact, whatever, X number of bases cut at that site, and then it'll open there, and I'll put it in right where I want it.
So now I can paste exactly where I want in a human genome.
And that's why you're seeing all these recent advances in gene editing for treating disease and so forth.
Fantastic.
Which we can talk about, actually.
Okay, but to go back, I mean, you are a founder, which now that I'm in the private sector, I realize it's like the coolest thing to be.
It's not enough to be a CEO.
You have to be a cool founder.
Yeah, that's really awesome.
What was the fundamental insight you had either as an undergrad at MIT or a grad student where you thought, okay, this is the direction I want to go?
I'm going to pour all of my energy and ambition into building this company.
Was there like a light bulb moment that you had?
I mean, so it's a little, as I got to learn a little bit about the Hudson today, that the we were two very different like communities coming together when we formed Ginkgo.
So we were really engineers first, right?
So I was a chemical engineer.
My co-founders were all computer scientists.
And we had this idea that cells could be made really engineerable because they run on code.
And we kind of went over and engaged with the biologists.
And they were like, you guys are idiots.
And that was sort of the beginning of the company.
Because it was like, okay, we really believe fundamentally that you can program this stuff because it's code-based.
And the counterpoint, and this, I think, can come up a little bit as we think about how to defend against this technology.
We didn't design these things.
So like a computer we program, but humans build computers.
A bacteria, when we program it, we didn't design the thing.
So it's much more difficult to get it to do the things you want it to do.
It doesn't act exactly as you expect.
Have you discovered who designed it?
No comment.
Leave that to the reader.
Either God or God?
Yeah, somebody.
So yeah, but that's the, so that's, that was the, and that, like, we had a big chip on our shoulder that we thought these engineering approaches could make a difference.
And now you play out today, and it's pretty widely accepted, but it wasn't 20 years ago.
So that divide is no longer as pronounced as?
Not as, but it is still a little bit there.
Yep.
Yep.
Okay, let's see where the technology and your business meets geopolitics.
So one observation I had with any, sort of anything we did in Congress talking about China, we kind of obscured a debate about like what is our long-term goal, right?
We sort of had consensus over short-term measures.
Like, so why, if you look long-term, if you looked at 2050, like why should we care where do we want to be, particularly relative to our geopolitical adversaries in this space?
Yeah.
What do we get from it?
Yeah, I love it.
Yeah, yeah, I love it.
Yeah, yeah.
So let's talk about this first because I think it's worth getting this down before we talk about how this stuff's all going to kill us.
Okay, so the upshot on biotech, I don't know if you saw there was a sort of baby KJ was in the news recently.
This is an 11-month-old infant, genetic disorder, where, and this was a very rare mutation in the genome of this baby.
Okay, so it's like a one-of-a-kind thing.
It wasn't a disease that was widely held.
So there was no existing FDA-approved therapeutic for this baby.
And the disease prevents, it basically breaks a protein.
It's kind of like how my dad didn't have insulin.
In this case, it's not like you don't have it.
You have it, but it's broken.
And that's because there's one letter of DNA that's wrong.
There's a C, you know, ATCG.
There's a C that's supposed to be a T.
And it's a C in this baby.
Okay.
And as a result, it's not going to make this enzyme that when it eats food, okay, it breaks the food down and certain things such that there's going to be an accumulation of ammonia.
And as you accumulate ammonia, you get brain damage, all this bad stuff happens, and it's a death sentence.
So what they did, and this is an 11-month-old baby.
So they started this work, I think 11 months ago.
They designed a CRISPR editor that targeted that exact spot in that baby's genome.
Remember, everybody's genome is a little bit different.
But because with CRISPR, remember I told you, you get to put the exact sequence that you want to go make a cut in.
And this CRISPR editor was designed to go to that sequence and turn a C into a T.
Okay?
And a couple things were special about this disease.
It's primarily a disease of the liver.
That's the easiest place today to get editors to show up.
You don't need to change every cell because the baby only needs to make enough of this stuff to break down.
some of the food and not accumulate ammonia.
So they were able to add this editor, edit about 10 to 20% of the genomes of the cells in the baby's liver.
And then now as the baby grows, the ones that are right, the C's that got turned into T's, are going to make more copies that are correct.
That's why you do it when baby's little.
And it's working.
That's an N of one drug developed in 11 months.
That was like a new regulatory paradigm, da-da-da.
And like, knock on wood, like, could be curative for what would have been a death sentence.
Wow.
Okay, and that, that, and that happened like last month.
Okay, so that's just some of the stuff I would highlight.
Like today, there's these openings around disease, okay?
Where I think, particularly for these like genetic diseases, these technologies are important.
Since human insulin, half of your therapeutics today are made with biotechnology.
Back then, that was the first one.
All right.
So fine, that's a good thing.
What do we think we could do by 2050?
So I think the goal on the disease side, and this is like we have a lot of debate in this country about healthcare costs and everything else.
If you had perfect biotechnology, perfect medicine, the only reason you would go to the hospital is to go to the emergency room.
Something traumatic.
Like you got in a car accident, you got shot, right?
But if we had perfect medicine, we would not have disease.
Okay, you would be down to just the ER department.
Yeah.
Okay, right?
That should be the aspiration, right?
That is how you get costs out of the system.
That's how you get costs out of the system with technology.
Not with policy this or insurance company that, but with technology, right?
Like what our goal should be is to only have ER departments.
Okay, and I don't know if we're going to get that done by 2050, but that is what medicine has implicit in it if we really nail biotechnology.
Because, shocker, we're made out of biology, right?
This is the natural technology.
This is the one.
This is the one that will work on us in a way that the historical drug industry, by the way, was chemistry.
Merck and J5.
They're all in New Jersey.
Why?
Because that was where the chemical industry was in the United States.
They were chemists.
And so they're making chemicals that were going to hoping they hit the right stuff and everything else.
It's kind of shotgun approach.
This thing, just last month, went to the exact spot in the genome and made the exact change to fix that.
Now, not every disease is fixable that way, but that type of precision is biotechnology.
And as we go up that curve, I don't see why we can't end disease.
Do you believe that's possible?
Oh, 100%.
Yeah, I believe it's possible.
Why wouldn't it be?
Now, why wouldn't it be?
Right, like if we had the perfect ability, if we totally understood, right, now it's a question of timelines and how fast, like the real limitation today is we don't, we didn't design humans.
Yeah.
We don't really understand how we work.
We know the big, the major bits.
Yeah.
But like a lot of the, once you get inside the cells and stuff, there's a lot of complexity in there.
So that's what makes that such a hard problem.
That's why we actually call it drug discovery.
Okay, like we have to discover the, you know, like Apple doesn't call it like iPhone discovery, right?
Like, you know, like they go in, they engineer a product and they hope you buy it, right?
But like when we go out in the therapeutics industry, we're off in the wilderness discovering how our bodies work.
And so that's the challenge, but that would be the goal.
Second point.
This has defense.
Okay, so that's one goal.
I think you want to get down to.
Elimate diseases.
Eliminate disease.
Just get down to the ER department.
Thereby eliminating costs.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
With technology.
It's the source of our debt.
You got it.
Second, human enhancement.
Okay, so this now gets more into the defense side of things.
You might have heard of these GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic.
I started taking one four months ago.
My little public discussion.
Thank you.
I've been waiting for you to say it.
Thank you.
I do.
Okay.
So this thing, I won't ask for a show of hands, but in order for me not to be obese, I have to basically not eat breakfast, try not to eat.
It's an enormous amount of mental energy for me to stop myself from being now.
I'm a willful person.
I can do it's horrible.
And I still mostly suck at it.
Okay.
I took this thing one day later, 24 hours.
I eat when I want to eat.
It's crazy.
Okay.
It is like, it has changed my human performance with regard to a thing that I care about.
It was even about weight loss itself and more about completely mental.
Yeah, it's like I now decide when I want to eat.
I decide what I want to eat, which was not even, I founded a company, right?
Like the human willpower to do that is very difficult to eat that salad or whatever.
Not anymore.
Okay.
And I suspect there are many other, you're in the military, not me, that are like mental blocks that affect performance.
Okay?
This thing does that for one area of performance, nutrition.
Okay.
And I think people aren't appreciating that that's what's going on.
Okay.
So basically, thinking about it as an instrument for human flourishing, longevity, quality of life.
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
Would you like, have you ever seen the another, these myostatin bulls?
No.
Oh my God, you should Google a picture of this, include it on the Hudson chat afterwards.
They're like, it's like the biggest, like the musculation.
So there's a certain gene that if they have a mutation in it, you just get muscle growth.
Yeah.
They're just the same bull eating the same grass, and this one is just jacked.
Okay, right.
And it's known.
It's a known thing.
So, just so you know, people have been going to an island off the coast of Honduras to get a non-FDA approved gene therapy to affect their myostatin.
That's happening today.
Okay, so because people are like, I would like to enhance my muscles.
Okay.
And so that's another example.
Sleep.
I would love to have eight hours of great sleep every night.
I don't know about you.
As I get older, it seems to be getting harder.
Like, why can't I get that?
Right?
So all these things are like, I think GLP-1 is the break in the dam.
They're coming.
Okay.
They're going to come.
They're going to have commercial applications and they're going to have human performance applications.
And you're manufacturing these things.
We would like to, no, we would help design them.
Okay.
Yeah.
So the trick of like, how do you, like, back to that insulin?
Insulin's an easy one.
Cut and paste.
You know, my dad was just missing a thing.
We all knew what it was.
If I could just make it, there's your drug, right?
Okay, well, that's not the case for like a cancer treatment, right?
We're trying, or to treat Alzheimer's or something.
You're like, oh, I got to go in and I got to, like, I kind of know how the disease works, and I want to go in and affect it.
There, it's discovery.
And to do that, I got to make a lot of designs.
I got to try a lot of different pieces of DNA and see which one does the thing I want.
And that's an iterative process that involves trying things in the lab, getting data back, and then trying more things.
And we at Ginkgo, we automate all that so that it becomes lower cost.
We use AI model to computational stuff to get better at it.
But that's that activity.
That's the real valuable thing for the United States to protect is our ability to discover and develop new medicines.
Manufacturing is important in a crisis.
Don't get me wrong.
Like, we saw that during COVID.
Like, I was a little touch and go that, like, China makes all our antibiotics.
Okay.
But, like, you could bring that back.
That's a little more straightforward.
The ability to have the innovation to design these enhancements first, to be the first country that our people shift by a decade.
Yeah.
Your 30s are like your 20s, your 40s are like your 30s.
Your 50s are like your 40s.
To get to all that stuff first requires preserving and building our innovation technology in biotech.
And that's actually what we're currently in the process of losing.
Well, I think it's important to start with the positive because, in some sense, analogous to AI, I think like we, i.e., those who are in the national security or technology space, sort of make the mistaken assumption that people, that the benefits are obvious, right?
Like, trust us, AI is going to improve all your lives, it's going to cure cancer, like whatever.
But I think, you know, what I would encounter in Northeast Wisconsin is like, I'm kind of more worried about like the killer robot hypothesis.
So having established the positive 2050 vision, let's talk a little bit about the scary stuff.
Because the flip side of that is you can't ignore the dystopian side of it.
And obviously, there's need for guardrails.
So how could the technology be misused?
How is it being misused?
Yeah.
Okay.
So I'd love to chat with you about this, actually, get some of your thoughts too, Mike.
So I think the thing to draw your attention to is human pathogens.
Okay, because there's a lot of other stuff, you know, like, okay, are we, and like I said, I actually think enhancement is going to be a thing that's coming for all of us, right?
But let's put that in a bucket over here where it's like a second-order risk, right?
It's like making someone else's soldiers better or something.
Fine.
Yeah.
Viruses?
Let's just, let me ask you a different question.
You're in the Marines, right?
Yes.
Okay.
So I assume you know how a rifle is.
It's ultimate performance enhancing.
Truly.
I appreciate your service.
Could you tell me how a rifle works?
Like, how does it work?
I press, I pull the trigger and it works.
Okay.
It's magic.
It's merry.
At one point, I had to memorize something about LM gas, lightweight, magazine fast.
There we go.
So you were taught how that weapon does its job, right?
And it's got this in the chamber and the movie.
Okay.
So let me talk to you about a virus.
Okay, let's just use COVID-19 as an example.
Yeah.
All right.
So, first off, so let's say I had COVID-19 right now.
Okay.
And I cough or something.
This floats across to you.
What's floating over?
So it's a little capsule made of protein.
And inside it is a piece of RNA.
And RNA is a piece of that digital code.
There's DNA, makes RNA, makes proteins.
It's basically the central dogma of biology.
But it's a piece of coded information floating in a ball that's about one 700th the width of a human hair.
So it's totally invisible to you.
It floats in, goes into your mouth, and it lands in, it's going through your upper respiratory and it's sliding down.
And it has, remember these spike, spike proteins?
They're on the spike proteins.
Okay.
So it has a little thing sticking out of it, a little ball.
And that's why it's called a coronavirus.
It's like a crown of these little things sticking out of it.
And it slides along trying to find a certain protein on one of your respiratory cells that it fits in like a key fits in a lock.
All right.
And that protein that was on your cell does something totally different.
Okay.
It's like an, it's, again, it's one of these enzymes.
It does a thing that is important to your body.
All right.
It's just sitting out there doing its job, minding its own business.
But it's shaped like this.
And that little molecular ball hits it, and it, oh, it likes to be there.
That's like the perfect spot for it.
It's exactly like a key.
It's stuck in there.
And now it's right next to your cells, in your either esophagus or in your lungs.
Okay, it's right there.
It's stuck next to you.
So what does it do?
So now that protein ball right next to your thing, it has gotten close enough that it can basically merge with your cell and bleb in, like two bubbles coming together, like two soap bubbles.
So now what was inside of it is now inside of you.
It's inside of your cell.
So in goes the RNA.
And well, RNA is code.
So your cell is like, oh, great, I see some RNA.
I know what I'm supposed to do with that.
I'm supposed to start reading it and making proteins.
So what proteins does it make?
Well, it makes viral proteins.
So that little RNA starts making copies and it's making more proteins, making more proteins.
And by the time it's done with that, when it's worn it out, it's made 10 to 100,000 more copies of that one little thing that floated into your mouth.
And they come out and they go into all your other cells where they make tens of thousands of copies.
And then you cough and it floats over to the next guy.
Okay?
And then if it does it enough in your lungs, oh, well, then the fluid goes into your lungs and we need to put you on the ventilator.
And then if it gets bad enough, that's the end of you.
Okay, so it is a molecular weapon.
I mean, Jesus Christ, like, look at this.
What is this thing doing?
Yeah.
Right?
Like, imagine if that had been designed, you know, like if that had been designed like a gun, right?
Like, you'd know everything about how it worked.
Okay.
You don't know how it works because we treat it not like something humans made and we understand, but just like a thing that happens to us like a hurricane or something.
But it is not.
It is an actual physical object that really does what I just said.
Really does.
Yeah.
Okay.
And so that's scary, right?
Like that, that's a thing that like we should be worried about.
And that's before I try to give you that physical intuition because we also have just a very practical economic and social experiment of COVID-19 as a pandemic.
$2 trillion, million deaths, massive social upheaval.
Yeah.
Because it's an invisible weapon.
What's not to be scared about?
So I think we have a bit of a blind spot though on the defense side where all of this stuff lives in the world of public health because we've been managing epidemics since the beginning of humanity, Black Death, right?
Like I mean, we killed 30% of Europe or something.
It's like ridiculous, right?
So this is not a new problem, public health, right?
But our tools to understand it, the ability to make it worse, all that stuff is really ramped up.
And I think we need to treat it like that and we need to be protecting it from a defensive standpoint, just like you would worry about how to protect yourself from a bullet.
Well, let's get into that.
Well, first, so I want to...
Does that make sense?
Totally makes sense.
I would say, well, the threats as I see it, having just listened to you, there's human enhancement in the hands of a regime or a group that is trying to destroy us and enhance their people who are dedicated to destroying us.
There is, you know, making naturally occurring viruses more chimeric or creating new viruses in a lab and using them as a weapon.
There's perhaps underneath all these things a lurking ethical question about like what it means to be human at some level of enhancement.
I don't know to what extent you grapple with these in your day-to-day, but that's more of like a philosophical question.
Sorry.
Yeah, I put one pin in that one because you are starting to see a bunch of like sort of usual Silicon Valley ridiculousness around some of this stuff.
The big dividing line is germline, what's called germline editing.
So importantly with Baby KJ, those edits were in the liver.
They were not in the gonads.
So those edits will not be passed along to the next generation.
Of course you can make edits that will be passed along to the next generation.
Okay, so that is a Societal question for all of us.
Okay, right.
What should be in parents' control?
What's not, all these sorts of things.
And that question is coming like a freight train, even with just in vitro IVT and selecting embryos.
But there is a whole thing coming there.
But I will leave that aside for today, because I think that is an ethical topic, but it is this particular niche around what's called germline editing.
And that's if you want to understand it.
But if it's not germline, hey, it's your body, you know, right?
Like, you want to be, you know, jacked up, Mike, go for it, right?
Like, as long as you're not imposing it on your kids, it's less of an ethical topic.
It's more of a, you know, like Botox.
Like, you know, like, we don't, we let people do a lot.
You know what Botox stands for, by the way?
No.
Botulism toxin.
Botulism toxin.
Yeah, yeah.
Poisonous substances on Earth.
Did you know that?
That you willingly injected.
Yeah, because it's a nerve agent.
It makes your festivals go away, baby.
Fast.
Yeah.
Okay.
But recognizing the risks, what sort of countermeasures or monitoring standards do we need in place?
How should Congress be thinking about this?
Is Congress or a regulatory body?
How do we be nimble enough to develop the regulatory structures to defend?
Yeah.
Okay.
So again, if I could flip one switch, I would flip the switch of having this thought of not just as public health, but also defense.
So that's the first switch.
And you're starting to see that in President Trump's recent budget.
There's a line item around bioradar, for example, which I think is like a good first step in this direction.
But what is the golden dome for that?
Yeah, exactly right.
So how do we actually deal with this stuff?
So there's two big buckets from my standpoint.
One is countermeasures.
Okay, so something happens.
How do we treat it?
Obviously, we had Operation Warp Speed was like the fastest development of a vaccine.
Fine.
Okay, right?
Like there's that, that sort of stuff.
You could invest a lot in making that better.
Okay, there are a set.
There's not an infinite, those little lock and key thing I mentioned.
There's only so many ways over the billions of years of biology moving that viruses have invented to get into our cells.
They are incredible freak machines, but there's only like so many doors that they're opening.
We should cut all those doors off.
We've cut them off, by the way, on our phones.
Okay, like we skate, you know, we are antivirus, all this stuff, right?
But we ourselves are unpatched.
Okay, we just let those things in and we trust that our immune system, natural immune system, will just do its best to fend them off.
But we should have better, we should, for every class, major class of virus, we should have an off-the-shelf pan solution for any variant of it.
That's technically impossible today, but I don't think it's technically impossible in the scope of what could be done with biotechnology.
So that's countermeasures.
While you're building those, you would like to know what's going on.
So we have at the moment, basically, little to no monitoring of what's going on with viruses.
Like what is showing up and where is it showing up in the way that we monitor, for example, for missiles?
Okay, we literally have in space.
I don't know if you know about this.
They're in space orbiting the planet just 24-7, protecting us from missiles, a thing that has not hit the United States ever.
Okay.
Meanwhile, we have a viral, I'm not going to call it an attack, but a viral event in COVID-19 that put us on our ass.
Yeah.
Okay, right?
And we have no monitoring for that.
Yeah.
Okay.
So what would monitoring look like?
All right.
So what you should do is monitor in the places that people are like our inlets into the country, like our borders, our airports, or places like that.
You should be monitoring all the time.
We actually do do a program, we Ginkgo, with CDC where we monitor in like 10 airports in the US.
We also run a program with the Qatari government in Doha Airport in Qatar, which gets like MENA region.
And what you do is when planes fly into the airport, we collect wastewater from the plane.
So it's anonymized.
We don't know who it came from or anything like that.
And we look in the wastewater for viruses, 60 different pathogens.
And if we find one, remember the DNA reading technology I mentioned?
We read the DNA and we get the variant.
Remember the variants from COVID?
We get the variant and we put that into a database.
And then we also, this is important, we store the sample.
Why is that important?
Well, if you had had a program like this monitoring at airports, say around Wuhan in 2019, we might be able to go back in a freezer right now controlled by us in the United States and pull out a tube and say, hey, what was in here?
Yeah.
Okay.
But we do not have that monitoring.
And so we have to have fights and it's an intelligence failure.
And so that type of monitoring is imminently doable today with the technology of DNA reading, which is also called genomics.
And so we should be collecting environmental sampling and looking for the DNA that's in there for infectious disease all over the world and then have a baseline.
And if you see a baseline and then you see a weird spike of some new thing, that's like a missile taking off.
We should go see what that is.
Yeah.
Well, your airport example.
That's one example.
You also do it on, you know, just as another thing.
You might remember during COVID, aircraft carrier got put into port for two weeks.
Everybody was, I think the last time that happened was World War II.
Right?
So like also on our ships.
I mean, they are basically cruise ships, right?
Like they are the easiest place in the world for everybody to get sick, right?
Like, that's why no one takes cruises, right?
So like that, you want to, this little floating thing that I just did is very easily a guy on shore meeting someone at a bar.
Okay?
Who's there to meet him?
Right?
And that's it.
And then they come back and hey, you know, I'm the poor guy who has lunch with you and now everybody's got it.
Right.
Like that, that's a that's a very easy vector, right?
Does this imply some multilateral body necessary to coordinate among nations?
And I want to use this as a bridge to get into where China is right now.
So obviously we've got to do it.
So I personally don't think so.
But just could I say, I think one thing COVID revealed is the insufficiency of the experience.
That was exactly what I was doing.
Yeah.
That's what I thought.
I could not agree more.
I think our experience.
So the WHO was basically created to monitor for viruses via politics and policy, not technology.
So the way they get their information is they engage with the public health departments of other countries.
And the way those public health departments get their information is when they see things at hospitals.
Okay.
So just to be clear, you don't end up in the hospital unless you're already infected.
This is like way after boom, okay?
Right?
And so, so, and we had this experience, like, because we were running this airplane program.
Remember, like the Omicron wave, like that whole thing?
So we caught Omicron at an airport a month before it showed up in nearby cities.
So you get a lead time because you're checking before everyone has already like become a cluster of infected people months later, right?
Like that, that's the, that's the advantage.
So that, that is, that, so I do think you don't get that at all with the traditional WHO system.
Okay.
You only get way after boom by definition.
And then you only get it if they want to tell you.
And hey, I'm a tourist-based country.
I don't really want anybody to know about this outbreak.
Maybe it's going to go away.
Like, there's a lot of reasons people don't want to tell us.
Yeah.
Okay.
Not all of them are nefarious.
Some of them are just economic.
Yeah.
What the heck?
That's not how we treat missiles.
We don't like ask, hey, anybody, hey, the missile department's reporting in today.
No, we didn't shoot any, you know, right?
Like, it's like absurdity.
And so we should be monitoring with technology, not technology we control, and that's very easy to do.
Interesting.
Okay, so in a recent report, the Belfer Center said that, quote, among the technologies examined in this index, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, semiconductors, space, and quantum, China has the most immediate opportunity to overtake the United States in biotechnology.
The narrow U.S.-China gap suggests that the future developments could quickly shift the global balance of power.
So explain to us what is happening here.
You do like the net assessment of China, private sector to the extent it exists versus us.
Like, where are we in the, you know, is there a biotech gap?
Like there was a missile gap or not, rather, in the early Cold War.
There was a missile gap in our favor.
Yeah, so I'll tell you the like four alarm fire that I'm worried about.
And so, you know, I obviously have the chance to testify before your committee.
And I didn't talk about this then, actually.
I talked about a different thing because this problem I'm going to talk about today was not obvious back then.
So the top problem I talked about at that time was manufacturing, which I think is absolutely one of the gaps.
And you'll see that in the Belfort report.
They say China's actually ahead of us on the manufacturing of drugs.
And that's largely because of all the chemistry.
So what we did, we moved New Jersey to China.
Okay, so we do a lot of our chemical manufacturing that we used to be in the United States, we now do in China, and a chunk of those chemicals are things like antibiotics and your basic generic medicines.
These aren't the most recent stuff, but like the drugs we've been using for 70 years because they work great.
Okay, right?
Like a lot of that stuff we do not make in the United States anymore.
And so we talked about that and we talked about how even the more modern drugs, the things like insulin, the biologic drugs made like brewing, that's moving to China.
So we talked about that.
That's why I testified.
That problem actually, I think, is small relative to what the gap I see that has happened in the last year and a half.
Remember I mentioned drug discovery, that activity of like the innovation, like finding the new gene editor, figuring out how to treat all, figuring out this new human enhancement like the GLP ones, right?
So that activity is a little bit like, you know how everyone wants to copy Silicon Valley?
They're like, I want to build a Silicon Valley in Saudi Arabia.
You know, like, what do I want to do?
They just can't do it.
Like, you know, like, no matter how much money I spend, I can't seem to recreate Silicon Valley.
Okay.
Well, that's because it's this, oh my gosh, it's this like beautiful ecosystem of like brilliant people coming out of universities, venture capitalists who are like throwing money around like it's crazy at the early stage, and then growth guys and then executives who've been at every step of the way along some crazy startup riding a roller coaster.
And they all live like in Palo Alto, right?
Like so there's just this like real cluster there that means that we just keep winning on this stuff.
Like my God, we did it again.
Open AI.
It's like a miracle.
You know, it's like this is goose laying golden eggs.
Okay.
So biotech, again, thanks to us inventing genetic engineering through a similar machine back in 1978.
We did it in San Francisco, South San Francisco, and we did it in the Boston area in Cambridge.
Those were the two big hubs.
And then since then, expanded to San Diego and Research Triangle down in North Carolina.
Those are the big hubs.
Okay.
Those hubs, as of two, sorry, three years ago, two years ago, 95%.
Oh, by the way, sorry, just so you know what happens, a little company in Cambridge discovers a drug and they sell it to Big Brother Merck for $2 billion or $5 billion.
And all the people at the company do well, all the investors do well, and they turn around and fund another one of these little startups to try to do it again.
That's the machine of that ecosystem.
As of two years ago, 95% of those drugs were bought by 95% of the drugs that were bought were bought were US companies.
So like being acquired by US companies, but importantly, the actual startups, the drug assets, only 5% were coming from China.
Yeah, now I guess three years ago.
Last year, 30% from China.
Last quarter, 40% from China.
Okay, so what is going on?
So what's basically happening is the talent ecosystem, like the scientific talent.
in China is really good now at the biotech level.
And that's different from 10 or 15 years ago.
So there's plenty of really well-trained postdocs and good, okay, so people who can do that kind of drug discovery work are in China.
It's not as high-end as us, but it's good.
And so the strategy has basically been fast follow.
Watch what somebody in the U.S. is doing, have some people work on it in China.
And then here's the magic part.
Regulatory changes over the last five years or so in China FDA have meant that they're moving.
I have a friend who is actually doing her clinical trial in China for a U.S. asset, because in the U.S. it was 15 million to do the trial, 3 million in China.
And timelines, like speed of the trial, three times faster in China.
Okay, so they now have this machine that's fast following.
And now you look three weeks ago, Pfizer just spent $1.2 billion on a new cancer drug from Shenzhen.
And that's a billion plus going into that venture ecosystem.
Yeah.
Okay.
So how long, you know, like if you choke out the Cambridge and San Francisco, those early stage companies for say, I don't know, I think it would take two years, maybe three.
That's it.
Because it's such a careful ecosystem to keep together.
Does that make sense?
Definitely.
And that is a new thing.
Like the manufacturing is just a replay.
It's the same store.
Oh, semiconductor, solar.
You know, like we love to push manufacturing out of the United States.
That was our game plan the last 30 years, right?
Yeah, we now see some of the repercussions we're trying to resurrect it, but it didn't really kill us.
But pushing innovation out of the United States?
Yeah.
Like, that's not our game.
So that's scary, right?
Like, so, so if the innovation engine moves out in biotech, then the first enhancement zone happened here, the great disease treatments, you know, like all we are now suddenly dependent on someone else to invent things, which I do not recommend.
Not when it is something strategic like this.
And yeah.
Well, I was even thinking a lot.
Does that make sense?
It totally makes sense.
And this is a new thing.
Like this is, this has been like the talk of biotech, but people are just buying these assets up, man.
It's like a real thing.
So much of the geopolitical game is like winning over, like convincing countries to Finlandize in our direction and not in the direction of our competitor.
Imagine if all the breakthroughs for disease remediation or curing or human enhancement happen in China.
There's also like a prestige and magnetism associated with that geopolitically that's also impossible to model or quantify.
Yes, yes, yes.
Could not agree more.
But if you assume we can't throw like tens of billions of dollars at this problem.
And you can challenge that assumption.
Yeah.
Or the number of state-directed resources or state-directed humans at the problem, how then do we prevent the innovation drain from happening?
So the good thing is, this isn't like chips.
It's not like, oh my God, how do you replace TSMC, right?
It's like 30 years of tacit knowledge and billions of infrastructure.
Crazy.
It's so hard to copy, right?
We own the innovation in biotech right now.
We're just, I'm watching it go.
Yeah.
So all the money, we actually aren't like the venture, everyone's still here.
Okay, I think it should be harder, frankly, for like the large pharmas to be buying Chinese assets if they're basically feeding off NIH discoveries here in the United States and then fast following them.
But the translational value is going to China instead of the United States when the basic research is being funded by the United States.
Also, by the way, the drug buying is also from the United States.
So it's the only part that we're basically outsourcing the innovation step.
A horrible decision.
Okay.
Right.
While paying for everything else.
Okay.
And so that I think you could solve with policy.
Okay.
And then on the red side, I do think you're seeing that, you know, new FDA, you are seeing motion towards solving this problem in the United States FDA.
I think that's coming.
And so that, but also the other way to solve it isn't necessarily to just make U.S. trials faster and stuff we should.
It's also just to make it easier to do it with Australia.
There's other countries that are allies that also have their trials moving faster.
And if we made that bridging into the U.S. super clean, that's also a great strategy, right?
Like it doesn't need to be that we have to run every trial.
There's a lot of people in the world.
One of the advantages the trials happen faster in China is there's more people in China.
Like that's just an intrinsic advantage.
There's more people showing up at the hospital.
Like any given disease, there's just more of it in China by definition, right?
So we need more of the world.
So we're not going to solve this one by just making US trials work better.
But boy, could we accept more trials from other countries?
Could we make that, up, up, up?
You know, like, yes.
Yes.
That would be awesome.
Right.
And it'll be less expensive.
Hold our standards.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hold our standards.
But like, by the way, the China's FDA standards at the moment are not bad as evidence by Pfizer's Pfizer doesn't spend a billion dollars for nothing.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's your proof in the pudding.
Because a lot of this, the narrative previously had been, yeah, yeah, it's faster, but it's trash.
Yeah.
Not anymore.
I would submit their ethical standards are much lower, the regimes.
Yeah, I think that there was a lot of corruption at a minimum in the FDA in China.
You might remember they executed the head of the FDA of China maybe like eight or 10 years ago.
That happened.
And so that changed things at the FDA.
Nothing so complicated to mind like an execution.
So I do think it has changed.
So I think a lot of those views are now dated compared to how it operates today.
Well, we have about 13 minutes left or 11, I guess, for audience QA, and I could ask you more.
But I want to open it up for questions on this fascinating, albeit somewhat troubling, discussion with Jason Kelly.
Anybody?
Yes, ma'am.
So can you talk a little bit more about the recent changes, like whether that be cancellation of grants at the NIH or the caps on indirect costs and how maybe more specific concrete examples of how that's affecting the biotech.
Yeah.
I'm good.
I'll repeat it.
So the question was like cuts at NIH and indirect rates and the kind of university funding ecosystem.
That is a really good question and how it's affecting biotech.
So, I mean, it is like a bomb going off in this ecosystem.
The question is, like, what does it turn into, I think.
So, like, I would say if you ask the average academic researcher, they have all kinds of complaints about how the system works.
They have complaints about university administrators, probably as much as the White House has complaints about university administrators if you're a professor at a school.
They don't like the publishing system.
Okay, the amount of money we pay.
I don't know if you know how publishing works, but scientists review papers for for-profit journals for free and then pay to buy those journals back into their libraries.
It's incredibly expensive, big drag on the system.
So some of the changes, like, hey, you should publish all this openly so that people can see it.
I think that could really help as an example.
That was another thing scientists could get behind.
So I think if the money flowing stayed the same, but you were going to do it a different way, I think that could be a net good.
If you have the money going into basic research, it's going to gum up our system.
So I don't know where that's going to land.
Like there's budgets floating, but there's not budgets passed.
So I don't know what that's going to end up looking like.
But my recommendation would be: yeah, we get a lot per dollar out of the NSF.
We get a lot per dollar out of basic research funding, you know, through the NIH, DARPA, and all these places.
I like that.
How we do it?
Yeah, sure.
Let's talk about it.
Like, I think, you know, it is a good system.
You know, like we stood it up with Vannevar Bush in the 40s.
Like, is there some fundamental changes we could make?
Maybe.
Yeah.
But I don't like the idea of having it.
I think you have it.
And that's some of the best money the United States spends.
No question about it.
Like, just dollar for dollar, the reason we get Silicon Valley, the reason we get Cambridge and San Francisco and these places.
The reason we got the ag companies in St. Louis.
Like the reason we win is because we fund the basic research for the world and we shouldn't stop doing that.
John?
Yeah, I wouldn't ask you on the ecosystem discussion you just had.
On the one hand, you're talking about kind of independent innovation, investment, entrepreneurship, and science coming together.
But on the other hand, when China takes this over, it seems to be more command and control of these kinds of economic assets, especially.
Some people would argue that in all these things, China is at a disadvantage because that central control stifles creativity.
They don't have a Silicon Valley kind of environment.
You're saying, no, there's a danger they're actually going to create maybe some kind of substitute for this.
How do you think about this contradiction?
Yeah, this is a good topic.
So certain things that they like pushing solar early and things like that, clearly that worked out for them, right?
And then other central things obviously are moronic and there's a long history of centralized decisions being bad choices.
I think one of the advantages in this is true basic research.
In other words, like just doing exploratory, the combination of exploratory research plus the human beings getting trained in the process of doing this.
And this is a thing I grew up in Florida.
My parents were pharmacists.
I went to MIT to be an engineer and then I went to grad school.
And doing a PhD is a very unique experience.
It's like the last apprenticeship to me, one of the last apprenticeship style trainings that we still do.
And you basically are learning how to push against what the current boundaries are of human knowledge.
And in addition to whatever your project is.
So you have your project and it's some nonsense.
I'm going to have like a mouse run on a treadmill or whatever bullshit.
But you yourself are learning to push the boundaries of human knowledge.
And then you come out of the PhD as a human being, a United States citizen who knows how to do that.
Okay.
That pays for us.
That pays off.
That investment pays off for the United States.
How are we so innovative?
Why does the U.S. economy always crank?
How do they do it?
How do they do it?
That's one of the ways we do it.
There's others.
We're risk takers.
We, you know, there's other fundamental things.
You know, we're frontier, right?
But like, we are actually teaching people to do that more than anybody else until China.
So there is a huge, and that is state investment.
Because like, who the heck pays to go off in the wilderness and try to come up with something at the limits of knowledge?
It's too far from commercial, right?
So it isn't a thing really that is fundamentally comes out of like the like only the greatest of monopolies like Bell Labs and Google Transformers.
Like you got to really, really win on the commercial side to own the right to run a basic research lab.
We have almost none of them.
Overwhelmingly, the government does it.
And that is a disadvantage versus China because if they're willing to, their government will throw their back into things.
And if they throw it into basic research and we don't, or we pull back on that, we could lose that.
And that is a human talent topic, my opinion.
And that's before you talk about us stealing other people's smart people, which we also do very well through that system.
I mean, besides China, where are you seeing a lot of the talent emerge from globally?
I mean, our graph, that's a good question.
India.
So, yeah, on the biotech side, India.
Yeah, that is coming up real fast because there's a wind in the sales on the manufacturing side.
People are like, well, I can't make it in China.
And India also historically has done a lot of the generics.
So they can kind of play the exact, they can just reap, I mean, in many ways, India is going to try to replay what China did the last 25 years, right?
But biotech is just absolutely another one of those for sure.
Other questions?
If not, I have rapid fire.
Okay.
Anyway.
Hi.
So how do you weigh risk when the strategic implications can be so massive for something like a biological enhancement?
So you talk about generational effects.
But how do you go forward with changing things from a surgical approach if the human is so largely misunderstood right now?
Yeah.
Go forward with that kind of thing.
Yeah, I think this is a key question, right?
So this is why I brought up the germline thing.
So I think if you leave it out of the germline, then at least it's just about you.
Then I think it comes down to our FDA.
This is basically what drugs are.
They are things that are perturbing a human being in a way that's meant to change something.
Usually it's to treat a disease.
But I think you're starting to enter this era, the GLP-1 drugs.
By the way, to give you a sense of the commercial on GLP-1 drugs between Eli Lilly, who's the category leader, and Nova Nordisk in Denmark, it's close to a trillion dollars of market cap added for one product.
One product.
That's crazy.
Okay, so that's like an iPhone, right?
Like that, that like one enhancement.
So I think you're going to just see this pull.
And I've been surprised.
Like, you know, I assumed all of the boundary pushing on JIG engineering and all these types of technologies would happen outside of people, right?
Like in plants and all this stuff, right?
But actually, like, these guys are going to Honduras to get an off-label gene therapy.
It's crazy, right?
Like, so I think also there's just people get in the bow tie.
You'd be surprised.
Like, people feel they have autonomy over themselves.
And they're like, well, I'll decide what risks I take.
And we need to have bounds on that.
Like, you don't want the snake oils.
That's why we have an FDA.
It's like literally why we invented the FDA.
That stuff had gotten out of control before the FDA, right?
So there's going to be a real balance, but I think it's ultimately having good regulations and then people having personal choice, right?
But I do think it's a key topic.
Okay, rapid fire.
Should we think of Ginkgo as our national champion?
Are there other companies like you that are emerging?
There are others, yeah.
I mean, in our corner, so what makes us special is we're horizontal.
Yeah.
So for the most part, just to flag it, in the tech industry, all the most valuable companies were the horizontal companies.
Operating systems, chip makers like Intel, now Nvidia, the thing that is applied to every piece of software, OpenAI, the AI models are the most recent ones.
In biotech, the most valuable companies have always been the product companies.
So, like, overwhelmingly, people are making a drug or they're making this.
And so, we're this sort of horizontal platform.
There's companies like Twist that are printing DNA, also, their horizontal platform.
Companies like Illumina doing the DNA sequencing, they're horizontal.
We're sort of horizontal at the layer of automating and scaling the laboratory work to do all this genetic engineering.
But, like, there's not a lot of us that are really horizontal.
So, I think that's what makes it a little more strategic than the applications.
What happens when you get off GLP once?
Oh, you don't.
The rest of you're committed, the rest of your life.
Do you drink coffee every day?
I do.
You think you'll do it for the rest of your life?
It would be hard for me to envision a life in which I did not start my day with prayer and then coffee.
Yeah, so then what's wrong with that?
Interesting.
Yeah, okay.
And by the way, it's only once a week.
It lasts all week.
It's awful.
Has this subject ever been dealt with in a serious way in fiction, either or TV, movie, or in fiction?
Jurassic Park.
Jurassic Park.
The greatest.
Okay, so the key to understanding Jurassic Park is it teaches you the two most important things about genetic engineering.
Okay.
One, it gives you respect for the majesty and scale of biology.
Yeah.
Okay, so we have this blind spot that because we are made of biology, we've been around it, we don't actually think of it like we think of our other technologies.
Right?
Like, let me tell you a little secret: you plant a seed in the ground, you add air, water, and sunlight, and this is the actual truth.
This thing emerges from the ground, it collects carbon atoms out of the air, it assembles them molecularly, it builds solar panels to collect energy, and then it starts doing molecular-scale manufacturing of all kinds of things out of the air.
Imagine if we had invented something like that.
Like, what a backpack we would be doing on our just unbelievable, right?
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