LOL. China is so far ahead of America in biotech it’s not even a fair race. First CRISPR in living humans. BGI, the world’s largest DNA sequencing center. A facility in Yunnan that has created transgenic monkeys with every human gene. I could go on... npr.org/2020/05/11/853…
In case you think I'm making up the last one (Bing Su used to work with our Chinese Genographic team): technologyreview.com/2019/04/10/136…
I had a conversation with a senior Illumina executive a decade ago who had brokered the sale of the initial, massive number of DNA sequencers to BGI. He told me he had approached the US government before they closed the deal in a desperate effort...
...to get them to build a similar facility in the US, knowing that it would give the Chinese an unassailable lead in genomics. There was no interest on the part of the US government, so the deal went through and 'the rest is history,' as they say...
And while some of the brightest minds in Western genomics have wasted years looking for variants with tiny effects in massive, multi-million dollar GWAS's (when we already know that environmental effects are many, many times more important for those diseases)...
...the Chinese have focused on far more applied, and relevant, research - like Coronavirus genomics, for instance...
Ever wondered why 23andMe, for instance, has focused so much effort on the genetics of Parkinson's Disease? It's not because it's a major killer. In 2017, for instance, around 32,000 people died from it in the US - around 1/3 the number of deaths so far from COVID-19. No...
...it's because Sergey Brin's mother Eugenia has it, and Sergey was dating Anne Wojicki when she and Linda Avey founded 23andMe. Sergey (via Google) provided the seed funding for 23andMe, so it was a foregone conclusion that Parkinson's would be a major focus. Of course...
...that was before Sergey was caught boffing a British intern from behind on his desk at Google HQ, and he and Anne got a divorce. She is rumored to have gotten $3 billion in the settlement, though, so don't feel too sorry for her...😉
And don't get me started on Yuri Milner, the sketchy Russian tech investor back by Kremlin money who is 23andMe's largest individual investor...that will have to wait for the book...
BTW, Milner is also a major investor in Facebook, in case you've wondered why Russia has found it so easy to manipulate your social media data...
