All Episodes
Previous Next
June 15, 2025 19:01-19:28 - CSPAN
26:42
Conversation on Possibilities of Biotechnology
|

Speaker Time Text
unidentified
Program.
We joined it in progress.
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 be able to.
So I personally don't think so.
But just could I say, I think one thing COVID revealed is the insufficiency of the future.
That was exactly what I was doing.
Yeah.
That's things like this.
Yeah.
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.
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 have a, 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 Belford 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.
So what 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 whatever 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 bent 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, OpenAI.
It's like a miracle.
You know, it's like it's just 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 San Diego and Research Triangle down North Carolina.
Those are the big hubs.
Okay.
Those hubs, as of two, or 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 US 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 US asset, because in the US 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.
But if you.
So that's scary, right?
Like, like, so, so, if, if the innovation engine moves out in biotech, then the first enhancements don't happen here, the great disease treatments, you know, like, 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 like.
Does that make sense?
It totally makes sense.
And this is a new thing.
Like, 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.
Like, 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.
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 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 US 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 US 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.
Yeah.
Like that's just an intrinsic advantage.
There's more people showing up at the hospital, you know, 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 U.S. trials work better.
But boy, could we accept more trials from other countries?
Could we make that bub, up, up, up?
You know, like, yes.
Yes.
That would be awesome.
Right.
And it'll be less expensive.
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 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 specifically 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.
So, 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 through the NIH and DARPA and all these places.
I like that.
How we do it?
Yeah, sure.
Let's talk about it.
I think that it is a good system.
But we stood it up with Van Ever Bush in the 40s.
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 is 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, like clearly, like 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 research, 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 you know 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 that the overwhelmingly the government does it and that is a disadvantage versus China because if they're willing to they'll they will throw their government will lean 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, in 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.
Where, 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 like, well, if 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.
God.
There you go.
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.
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 I, you know, I assumed all of like 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 the, 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 like people, like people get in the bow tie.
Like you'd be surprised.
Like people feel they have like 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.
It was like 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.
Okay.
In biotech, the most valuable companies have always been the product companies.
So 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, all 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 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.
You're committed, the rest of your life.
Do you drink coffee every day?
I do, too.
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.
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.
We use it.
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 this 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?
Okay.
So one of the things it does is it locks in that biology is truly like it is majestic and a big deal.
And then second, life finds a way.
Right.
So it is a call for humility in the face of that.
Okay.
So it is majestic.
And by the way, we could program it because it runs on code.
And look at all the incredible things it could do.
Could you imagine if we could harness it for good things, for our values?
And then at the same time, we didn't invent this stuff.
Life finds a way.
Respect it.
And that, to me, is the best fiction on biotechnology.
Don't interrupt.
That's a perfect ending.
Let's just clap it out.
He's the boss.
He can do whatever he wants.
Whatever he wants.
Look, we talked about threats.
Okay.
The threats.
What about Brave New World?
Yeah.
You create so much.
Yeah.
So Brave New World is the other side.
Desire is producing.
I know, I know.
I know.
There's an alien movie called Life that's actually pretty good.
What is it?
I think it's called Life.
It's with Jake Chillenhall.
Oh, I've been saying that.
It's underrated.
Yeah.
Sorry, go ahead.
Oh, thank you.
But Brave New World.
No, no, no.
Brave New World is a classic.
I mean, so this is where all the human editing and this whole line of stuff and how much do we focus on.
It's even a bigger commentary about, you know, what's important in life, right?
Like, you know, should we just be focused on making ourselves happy?
You know, right?
But I do think it highlights that point I was making earlier about like germline, humid editing, that whole thing.
Like, I think that is a unique conversation.
In all of the genetic engineering conversations, inclusive of enhancement, inclusive of da-da-da, there's a whole separate conversation about our kids.
Yeah.
And that one is special.
Yeah.
And you got to bring in a different, you don't bring in technologists for that conversation.
You bring in our moral spiritual leaders.
It's different.
Yeah, there's all sorts of things in between like curing Alzheimer's, like making me more jacked, which is important.
I don't want to directly enhance the list of America.
I was going to ask if you're working.
And like CCP Super Soldiers destroying us.
That's a great conversation.
But as for the beginning of this conversation, we are lucky to have one of the best people, if not the best person on earth, to start it.
And I have no doubt that we will be discussing many more aspects of the biotechnology competition with China and ourselves and other countries.
So, please join me in thanking Jason for his time and his expertise.
▲
Export Selection