A new front is opening in the intensifying economic and diplomatic competition between the United States and China: human DNA.
“I think we're just seeing the leading edge of it,” retired Lt. Gen. Thomas Spoehr, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, told the Washington Examiner. "Everybody knows that we ought not to be sharing technical data on hypersonics, directed energy, things like that. This is one of those things that people haven't thought of.”
They’re thinking about it now. FBI officials are wary of letting scientists with ties to the Chinese government study the DNA data that American researchers use to develop cutting-edge medicines. Their skepticism has prompted a pair of top Republican senators to probe whether the Department of Health and Human Services is giving an unintentional boost to China’s genetic research industry at the expense of U.S. economic and national security.
“China can already compel the genetic information of over a billion of its own people,” Sen. Marco Rubio told the Washington Examiner. “And if it can acquire — through companies it controls or through cyber theft — genetic information on millions more, [the risk] can range from unfair advantage in the development of life-altering cures to ... the creation of biological agents that only harm people of a certain genetic makeup.”