What's At Stake With American Genomics
We should be focused more on exploitation and national security than on privacy
From left to right: Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, Anne Wojcicki, Diane von Furstenberg, Sergey Brin, Weng Deng, Linda Avey, and Harvey Weinstein attend the 23 & Me Spit party at the IAC Building on September 9, 2008 in New York City. Jeffrey Epstein was not pictured.
There are a pair of stories which ought to make us think more seriously about our country’s approach to the booming field of genomics: China’s surreptitious collection of DNA, including American, and the 23andMe hack.
We’ve been on these subjects for quite awhile over here at Thoughts and Adventures and I must say, having left a genomics conference in Boston last week after I returned from Turkiye, it’s difficult to see America as up to the task. With all due respect to George Church, whose patron included Israeli spy Jeffrey Epstein, cool though pretending to sequence a wooly mammoth is, what we really need is more industrial lab space. Maybe we should be doing as the Chinese are—turning covid labs into genomic sequencing facilities.
If you were expecting that 23andMe — backed as it was by Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein — and run by Theranos supporter Anne Wojcicki would be up on the latest security you had another thing coming.
The first story is in the Washington Post — “China’s quest for human genetic data spurs fears of a DNA arms race” — and the authors detail efforts by the Chinese government to surreptitiously collect genetic material around the world. If you think that such efforts aren’t already occurring in the United States, well you haven’t really been paying much attention. Oh, you thought all those covid tests you were obliged to take was about covid exclusively? How silly of you.
The parameters of the debate should be moving away from privacy. The Chinese likely already have your DNA. They certainly have your voice and face prints.
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We don’t really know how much it cost to build China’s genomics program.
Nor do we know, really, how operational it is or how merely aspirational. Is it civilian in nature? Military? Both? That’s hard to say.
What is clear is that the Chinese state has placed an emphasis upon it.
We do know that some estimates place it at about $10B. For what it’s worth I suspect it may well be much higher especially when we consider the compromised companies like Illumina — forced by the European Union to leave Grail — and institutions like Harvard and The Broad Institute of MIT, whose former head Eric Lander had an Jeffrey Epstein and Israeli intelligence problem that ultimately precluded him from being President Biden’s science advisor.
From antiquity the Chinese have been obsessed with genealogy. Pro-Chinese Michigan State professor (and BGI advisor) Steve Hsu mentions how every elite Chinese has a zupu or jiapu in their homes. You can think of Ancestry.com, backed by it is by Chinese capital, as an effort to extend this concept over the whole world. Anyone who has watched Mulan knows the importance of ancestry worship.
The purpose of this DNA collection and mapping of who is related to who is to decide who can be China’s proxies abroad and help pay tribute to the Middle Kingdom through domestic resources.
We may ultimately need state action to turn the ownership and focus of these platforms, especially 23andMe and Ancestry which remain the largest genomic databases. In the case of 23andMe that seems possible. Could the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia or Qatar swoop in to buy 23andMe and clean it up? It’s possible. In February 2021 23andMe was trading at $16 a share. Now it’s at 80 cents. How low does it have to go before a Palantir buys it outright and pries it from Sequoia’s Roelof Botha?
Still it’s awfully strange for a rival power to understand considerably more about another state’s population than the state itself but that’s precisely the world we are entering with mass genomic sequencing, facial recognition, and voice training. Far from addressing America’s deficit here, a lot of effort is seemingly going into restricting American data collection.
Worse yet whatever hope we might have had that the British would come along and save us hasn’t materialized. The Financial Times’s Camilla Cavendish accused Britain’s doctors of refusing to turn over necessary and consented health records to match with genetics.
In America there’s also a staggering amount of slowness on the part of the All of Us Research Program to make data available — as if we had all the time in the world. At a Boston conference one of the participants said they would control who had access to the data based upon an “ickiness” factor. I suppose ickiness is like pornography — you know it when you see it. Of course a real process would include taking account of the national security risks and potential for exploitation by hostile actors, not the “ickiness” standard of academics or bureaucrats.
I suspect that the real reason that American and British efforts are mixed is that there hasn’t been anything near the political will. We could strongly encourage (or even require) people to get genomically sequenced, for example, in much the same way that we encouraged the public to get vaccinated from the coronavirus. (You could even make the case — rightly — that genomic sequencing is less invasive.) At the very least we could encourage the deceased to give up their health records alongside their DNA upon their passing.
Meanwhile the FBI is requesting still more money for CODIS. The problem, of course, is that CODIS is far from foolproof and CODIS takes too little, not too much, information.
Unfortunately CODIS doesn’t do much to turn the migrants into our country from a liability into an asset — which is precisely what China has been doing throughout the world.
While I’m no fan of the Electronic Front — which defended the “right” of Backpage to facilitate child trafficking — they do have a point about how silly it is to give the FBI access to a giant genomics database built with the minimum amount of DNA.
I have a few suggestions:
Seize the human traffickers’ money to pay for sequencing their victims. They can’t move people as easily if everyone knows who they are.
Back American founders who want to quickly sequence the U.S. and allied populations in a secure manner. My company Traitwell is ready willing and able to develop a state of the art lab. Washington messed up when it directed cash to Elon and other dubious foreign backed players. It needn’t make the same mistake now.
Require insurers to sequence every one of their charges to crack down on misprescribing drugs. That, too, will lower the deficit, Mr. President.