Biotech Matters: Public-Private Coordination of Biotechnology

Governments also have trouble sustaining long-term interest. The United States’ best program, Operation Warp Speed, ended abruptly, as did funding for manufacturing Ebola vaccines before it.⁸ Both should have benefited more from the infrastructure and experience gained from developing and stockpiling a new smallpox vaccine after 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks, but those efforts were largely dismantled when the emergencies ebbed. Government priorities are commonly seasonal, rarely perennial.

Third, seeking to better align the U.S. private and public sectors is attempting to conjoin, or at least coordinate, organisms of two very different species. Companies and governments have different metabolisms fueled by different priorities. Companies have narrow near-term interests and respond rapidly to price signals. Two-thirds of new companies fail, and those that survive must constantly innovate to sustain their positions. By contrast, governments respond slowly to a complex web of interconnected, ambiguous political signals as well as to real-world imperatives. They are inherently conservative because their incentives punish failure more than they reward success.

This mismatch between the public and private sectors is amplified by great distance, suspicion, and misunderstanding. Government’s commercial expertise is limited. When biologists are recruited from outside of government for senior positions in the executive branch, it is usually from academia. Private sector experts are discouraged from government service by barriers intended to prevent conflicts of interest and “revolving doors.” Data, intellectual property, and business plans are kept from government for fear of regulation, discovery by competitors, or political misuse (for example, by politically popular attacks on companies for “profit gouging”). Even when the two sectors agree on a common program, they are challenged by conflicting decision cycles, accounting systems, cultures, and even vocabularies.

These difficulties suggest that wise policymakers should aim to moderate the problems rather than comprehensively resolve them. The focus should be not so much on ambitions as on capabilities, not on what is wanted but instead on the more realistic appraisal of what government can do. This focus counsels avoiding complex programs dependent on necessarily uncertain predictions about the directions of new technology and argues for investment in public goods that markets typically fail to value.

Applying these principles, I urge three priorities for public effort to complement private sector work on biotechnology: priming the pump of creativity, developing domestic regulations and international norms, and better sharing expertise between the public and private sectors.

The pump of creativity is primed by investing in human capital and infrastructure. Because biotechnology is on a trajectory of rapid expansion, the sector will require far more talent. The requirement will be not only for biologists as this branch of science has been traditionally understood, but also for mathematicians, those skilled in applying artificial intelligence to biological problems, biomanufacturers, and others. The U.S. government has the power and the mandate to develop this talent pool and encourage its application to cross-disciplinary work in biology. To accomplish this, it should make investments in education and widen opportunities for skilled immigrants. Concomitantly, it should use tax incentives and a limited number of direct investments to encourage developments that the market is unlikely to provide, for example, in tangible infrastructure such as shared fabrication facilities and in intangible infrastructure such as data banks.

Second, government must more effectively regulate this fast-growing sector. As with other new technologies, biotechnology will be dangerous. Recent debates about gain-of-function research, modification of heritable human genomes, the use of artificial intelligence to develop biological weapons, the actual safety of biosafety level laboratories, and other subjects, are early markers of challenges to come.⁹ Companies need to recognize—as software companies, cryptocurrencies, the creators of artificial intelligence, and others came to recognize—that if they endanger the broader society, they endanger themselves. Accordingly, they need government to establish norms and regulations both domestically and through multilateral agreements abroad.

Third, good government decisions—from individual product approvals to sector-wide regulations—require better human capital in the public sector. To this end, the government should relax restraints on movement of expertise between the government and the private sector, establish mechanisms for sharing data and plans in fora that preserve confidentiality, expand the budgets of relevant agencies, and better reward, celebrate, and protect civil servants.

Many of the predictions for biotechnology will be unreliable. However, several assumptions seem indisputable: the private sector will have much success using the new techniques of biotechnology; there will be times of emergency and failure in which this sector will be a part of both the solution and the problem; and resolving these problems will require government and the private sector to work together. To prepare for this future, capabilities in both sectors and the ability to communicate between them must expand.

While there are great challenges ahead for public-private alignment around biotechnology, they can be overcome by accurately appraising the obstacles to public-private collaboration, and in doing so, unlocking the vast promise of biotechnology for America.

About the Author

Dr. Richard J. Danzig has served as a consultant to U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense on national security issues. He is chair of the U.S. Navy Advisory Board on Science and Technology, a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and a trustee of the RAND Corporation.

Previously Dr. Danzig served as director of National Semiconductor Corporation (N.Y. Stock Exchange) and Human Genome Sciences Corporation (NASDAQ). He has served as chairman of the board at CNAS and at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, and as chair of the advisory panel for Idaho National Laboratories’ Innovation Center. Additionally, Dr. Danzig has been a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board; the secretary of defense’s Defense Policy Board; the homeland security secretary’s Advisory Council; the Aspen Strategy Group; the Toyota Research Institute Advisory Board; the Cyber Resilience Forum of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; and the Reed College Board of Trustees.

He served as the 71st secretary of the Navy from November 1998 to January 2001, and from 1993 to 1997 as under secretary of the Navy. From spring 2007 through the presidential election of 2008, Dr. Danzig was a senior advisor to Senator Barack Obama on national security issues.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Michael Callahan, MD (diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene, master of science in public health); Dr. Monique K. Mansoura; Vivek Chilukuri; Hannah Kelley; and Maura McCarthy for their valuable feedback and suggestions on earlier drafts of this commentary, as well as to Melody Cook and Rin Rothback for their design support.

This commentary series was made possible with general support to CNAS.

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