U.S. Research Scientists Are Blind to China’s Threat
Eager for collaboration, the NIH and NIAID won’t acknowledge concerns about national security.
By Paul M. Dabbar
April 3, 2023 2:12 pm ET
U.S. public-health agencies jumped to an unwarranted conclusion in 2020 that Chinese scientists had done nothing deliberate or accidental to cause the Covid pandemic. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases continued to defend engagement with China on pathogen research even as other parts of the U.S. government identified serious biosecurity risks from collaboration with Chinese labs.
All government research agencies have different cultures. U.S. public-health agencies have historically been rooted in “open science”—the view that scientific collaborations should be encouraged globally, and that geopolitics shouldn’t constrain cooperation between well-meaning researchers. Little thought is typically given to the national-security implications of joint research. Even when confronted with credible information about the risks of their research partnerships, the public-health agencies often ignore them. Some in the open-science agencies refuse even to acknowledge that research can have national-security implications. But the issue can’t be wished away.
Some federal agencies do weigh the national-security implications of scientific research. The Energy Department’s national laboratories conduct both highly classified and open-science work. Constantly managing that balance takes experience. Plasma science can be applied to electricity production via nuclear fusion or it can be used to make thermonuclear weapons. Gene editing can cure debilitating genetic diseases or it can be used to create bioweapons.
Around 2017, the Energy Department’s national laboratories started having significant concerns about biosecurity with regard to China. A Chinese general who was head of the National Defense University in Beijing publicly declared an interest in using gene sequencing and editing to develop pathogenic bioweapons that would target specific ethnic groups, which may be the most evil idea I have ever encountered. Taking note, the Commerce Department ordered export restrictions of potentially dangerous biotechnology to China. But the NIH and NIAID refused to believe that there was any risk involved in collaborating with Chinese labs. Their indiscriminate commitment to open science blinds them to threats, even when a country like China is open about its intentions.
So while the public-health agencies increased funding and cooperation with China after 2017, the Energy Department asked Congress to restart a biosecurity effort at the national laboratories. The funding started flowing in December 2019, right before Covid began spreading across the U.S. As a result, the Energy Department, with its leadership in the human genome project and gene editing, was quickly able to help evaluate the novel coronavirus with computational biology and imaging. This work informed the rapid development of the Covid vaccines.
Compare the capabilities of the Energy Department’s national laboratories with the culture at the NIH. The latter was unwilling to acknowledge that China had admitted its interest in pathogenic bioweapons. After Covid hit, the agency instinctively jumped to defend China, rather than objectively analyzing the circumstances. The Energy Department investigated the facts without bias.
The public-health bureaucracy also needs better awareness of how much easier it is for bad actors to make bioweapons than to produce other weapons of mass destruction. It takes a national effort to make a nuclear weapon. A small group of biologists in a provincial laboratory could develop easily transmissible pathogens that can kill millions.
While it isn’t clear whether the Wuhan Institute of Virology was working directly with China’s military biology programs, both were definitely using the same U.S. gene-editing technology. And all the agencies were frequently briefed in 2020 that China was lying to the public about Covid. This should have spurred NIH scientists to ask whether China was telling the truth about its research.
The Chinese Communist Party has been known to steal intellectual property and lie about it doing so. Beijing doesn’t recognize the concept of independent scientific research conducted for the good of the world. The public-health bureaucracy and research scientists at the NIH and NIAID, enthralled as they are by the open-science concept, can’t be trusted to manage U.S. biosecurity. An issue of such magnitude should be in the hands of a government agency with a much more realistic view of China and the world.
Mr. Dabbar served as undersecretary of energy for science, 2017-21.
