BIOTECHNOLOGYRegenerate: Biotechnology and U.S. Industrial Policy
A revolution in biotechnology is dawning at the precise moment the world needs it most. Amid an ongoing climate crisis, fast-paced technological maturation, and a global pandemic, humans must find new ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve food security, develop new vaccines and therapeutics, recycle waste, synthesize new materials, and adapt to a changing world. The United States needs some form of industrial policy to promote its bioeconomy—one that is enshrined in democratic values and focused on improving access to four key drivers of bioeconomic growth: equipment, personnel, information, and capital.
Executive Summary
A revolution in biotechnology is dawning at the precise moment the world needs it most. Amid an ongoing climate crisis, fast-paced technological maturation, and a global pandemic, humans must find new ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve food security, develop new vaccines and therapeutics, recycle waste, synthesize new materials, and adapt to a changing world.But incentive structures in the U.S. private sector are generally biased against risk, and therefore constrain development in ways that do not have the same effect on firms in China and other U.S. competitors. This puts the United States at a relative disadvantage and risks ceding American leadership over one of the most powerful and transformative fields of technology in recent memory.
The United States needs some form of industrial policy to promote its bioeconomy—one that is enshrined in democratic values and focused on improving access to four key drivers of bioeconomic growth: equipment, personnel, information, and capital. This report attempts to measure the health and outlook of the U.S. synthetic biology industry and broader bioeconomy by examining U.S. access to each of these four resources. It concludes that the United States still possesses an advantage in each of these fields—but that, absent a proactive strategy to ensure resource access, and without a significant infusion of capital, the U.S. bioeconomy risks languishing behind competitors such as China in the decades ahead.
Summary of Recommendations
This report arrives at nearly two dozen policy recommendations for the United States to undertake in support of a more robust industrial policy. Each is focused on improving access to four resources at the heart of technological progress: equipment, personnel, information, and capital.
Equipment
A U.S. strategy to promote the bioeconomy should focus on improving access to equipment at the core of the bio revolution: computing and data sources used in genomics, and hard infrastructure used in DNA synthesis and fermentation.
Congress should pass the America COMPETES Act of 2022, which authorizes the creation of a National Engineering Biology Initiative. The initiative should pool and subsequently distribute access to data used in biotechnology discovery applications for investigators and biotechnology startups.
The National AI Research Resource Task Force should formalize a National Research Cloud for distributing access to cloud computing power for researchers and enterprises.
