The twenty-mile drive from Hong Kong International Airport to the center of Shenzhen, in southern China, can take hours. There is customs to negotiate and a border to cross, but they aren’t the problem; the problem is the furious pace of commerce between the former British colony and one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. Trucks, cars, vans, and buses cram the roadways, ferrying laborers of all kinds at all times. Until the nineteen-eighties, when Deng Xiaoping designated the area as China’s first special economic zone, Shenzhen had been a tiny fishing village. Suddenly, eleven million people appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; factories sprang up, often housed in hastily constructed tower blocks.
Thirty years ago, there were a few guesthouses and little else. Today, a visitor can stay at the Four Seasons or the Ritz, shop for ten-thousand-dollar handbags at Hermès, and move around town in a chauffeured Bentley. Yet Shenzhen has remained a factory town. At various times, the city has served as China’s Detroit, its garment district, and its Silicon Valley. Now, as the world’s scientists focus with increasing intensity on transforming the genetic codes of every living creature into information that can be used to treat and ultimately prevent disease, Shenzhen is home to a different kind of factory: B.G.I., formerly called Beijing Genomics Institute, the world’s largest genetic-research center. With a hundred and seventy-eight machines to sequence the precise order of the billions of chemicals within a molecule of DNA, B.G.I. produces at least a quarter of the world’s genomic data—more than Harvard University, the National Institutes of Health, or any other scientific institution.
Much of modern molecular biology and microbiology has been based on the effort to decipher the basic code of life, which is made up of four nucleotides: adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. Specific strings of those molecules—there are three billion pairs in the human genome—are arranged together to make genes; genes, in turn, produce the proteins that we need to survive. Since 1995, when Craig Venter sequenced the first bacterium, biologists have been on a crusade to catalogue the DNA of nearly every species on earth. No group has been more aggressive in its attempt to produce those maps than B.G.I.: the company has already processed the genomes of fifty-seven thousand people. B.G.I. also has sequenced many strains of rice, the cucumber, the chickpea, the giant panda, the Arabian camel, the yak, a chicken, and forty types of silkworm. None of those endeavors are quite as odd as they may seem. Genomic research has shown that the human activity responsible for climate change has also caused a serious decline in the panda population. Silkworms have played a central role in the Chinese economy for thousands of years. B.G.I. has also sequenced the Tibetan antelope, the coronavirus responsible for SARS, and the DNA of a four-thousand-year-old man, known as Inuk, obtained from a tuft of his hair that was discovered in Greenland’s permafrost.
The company’s four thousand employees operate out of an eight-story former shoe factory on the eastern edge of Shenzhen, not far from the inlet to the South China Sea. Sequencing facilities are sterile places, and the B.G.I. operation looks more like a call center or the back office of a bank than like the home of China’s most important biotechnology company. There are no test tubes or vials of blood on display, no mice or rats, or even much traditional laboratory space. Instead, there are a series of advanced sequencing arrays, taller than refrigerators and stacked with hard drives, churning through the carefully packaged DNA samples that arrive every day from every part of the world. To preserve the chemicals needed to process that DNA, the machines are kept in frigid rooms that few people are permitted to enter. Racks of parkas line the corridors, where hundreds of determined young men and women—the average age of B.G.I. employees is twenty-six—occupy identical powder-blue cubicles, each bathed in the eerie glow of their computer monitors.
B.G.I., much like Shenzhen itself, seems to have been formed in a single instant: September 9, 1999, at nine seconds after 9:19 A.M. (In China, even dispassionate scientists crave auspicious beginnings.) The group got its start in Beijing, first as a nonprofit organization and then as an affiliate of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. But as Jian Wang, the company’s president, and one of its founders, told me recently, “We were too crazy for them’’—too independent. “We were kicked out.’’ At fifty-nine, Wang, with gently graying hair on a perfectly round head, and dressed in an olive-drab B.G.I. camping shirt and matching pants, looks like an avuncular Zhou Enlai. He considers B.G.I.’s expulsion from the academy to have been an essential component of the company’s success. The founders, Wang and sixty-one-year-old Huanming Yang, who is now the chairman, had both received advanced training in the West. They were eager for China to play a role in the Human Genome Project, the effort to create the blueprint needed to decode all our genes. They tried, and failed, to persuade the Chinese government to establish a sequencing center. So they created a company of their own, raising enough capital to hire nearly fifty researchers and buy a few basic machines. At first, the scientists worked out of a crowded apartment in Beijing. Their furniture consisted of the cardboard shipping boxes that had contained their new equipment. The group was responsible for only about one per cent of the research that went into the genome project. In 2000, however, when Bill Clinton announced that a rough draft of the genome had been completed, he made a point of thanking China. B.G.I. may well have been the first organization in the country’s history to participate in an international scientific collaboration.
“It wasn’t a big role, but it got us started,’’ Wang told me when we met in Shenzhen, where the company established its headquarters in 2007. (It now operates sequencing centers throughout the world. It opened a facility in Shanghai on November 11, 2011: 11/11/11, at eleven seconds after 11:11 A.M.) Despite the company’s limited involvement, the Human Genome Project provided the two men access to the world’s most accomplished geneticists. Today, the list of scientists whom B.G.I. counts as advisers reads like a Double Helix Hall of Fame: James Watson, who, with Francis Crick, discovered the structure of DNA; Eric Lander, one of the genome project’s leaders, and the director of the Broad Institute, of M.I.T. and Harvard; and John Sulston, a Nobel Prize winner (as is Watson) and the founder of one of the world’s largest genomic-research centers, Britain’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. It took more than a decade, and three billion dollars, for a team of international experts to map the first human genome. Since then, the costs have decreased so rapidly that B.G.I., with its relatively cheap and plentiful labor force, can do that same work in a few days for about four thousand dollars. By the end of next year, Wang told me, the price of sequencing a genome will fall below a thousand dollars. Driven largely by those plummeting costs, B.G.I. intends to transform DNA into a common resource, a kind of universal reference library—freely accessible, wary scientists hope, to anyone who wants to use it.
The order of the four chemicals in each molecule of DNA determines the physical characteristics of every living organism, and sequencing those molecules has made it possible for scientists to begin to identify causal connections between diseases and genes. But a sequencing machine without software is about as useful as a laptop with no operating system. It works essentially like a molecular version of a paper shredder, cutting up immense strings of genetic information, then spitting them out in fragmented piles. Each string produced by a sequencing machine is referred to as a “read,” and thousands of overlapping reads are created for every genome. Researchers, relying on software that analyzes patterns, stitch those reads into comprehensible units. At B.G.I., when DNA samples arrive—usually on FedEx trucks—workers check to make sure they are packed properly in dry ice. Then they are taken to a quality-control area, where they are prepared for analysis. Most DNA samples sent to B.G.I. from labs around the world are processed in Hong Kong; Shenzhen focusses on submissions and research projects from within China.
The company has bet its future on laying out the genetic codes of as many life-forms as possible. While I was in Shenzhen, I saw a display that described B.G.I.’s plans, which include the Million Human Genomes Project, the Million Plant and Animal Genomes Project, and the Million Microecosystem Genomes Project. “It’s like fishing,’’ Wang said, explaining the philosophy behind it all. “You can stick a pole in the water and try to find the fish one at a time. But what we are doing is drying out the ocean. Then we can count all the fish at once.’’
The company says that the data will help explain the origins and the evolution of humanity, improve our average life span by five years, increase global food production by ten per cent, decode half of all genetic diseases, understand the origins of autism, and cut birth defects by fifty per cent. It’s an audacious list, but sequencing has become an industrial process, and, as an assembly line, B.G.I. has no peer. “In Chinese, we have a saying: Reach for the top of the sky,’’ Ming Qi, the health division’s chief scientist, told me when we met in a small café on the top floor of the headquarters. Qi, the founding director of the Center for Genetic and Genomic Medicine, at Zhejiang University, was a protégé of Tan Jiazhen, who is widely regarded as “the father of Chinese genetics.” Qi acknowledged the company’s outsized ambitions, but said, “We want to translate all these scientific findings into our daily lives, including our economy, industry, health, and environment.”
B.G.I.’s finances are murky, but it makes its money in several ways. The company provides data analysis to pharmaceutical firms, sequences genomes of individuals for researchers, and has been hired by the American advocacy group Autism Speaks to sequence the DNA of ten thousand people from families with children who have some form of autism-spectrum disorder. For scientists in Denmark who are studying the genetics of obesity and diabetes, B.G.I. has decoded the genomes of a thousand obese people and a thousand healthy people. The company also had a central part in the duck-genome consortium, along with colleagues from Britain and from other Chinese institutes. (Ducks are a common host of influenza viruses, and a better understanding of their genetics could greatly increase the pace of vaccine development.) B.G.I. offers a popular, noninvasive test for Down syndrome that analyzes fetal DNA circulating in the mother’s blood. The test can be performed in the tenth week of pregnancy. (Amniocentesis, the standard diagnostic, is an invasive procedure that cannot be carried out until at least the fifteenth week; in rare cases, the needle required to remove DNA for examination causes infection or miscarriage.)
The goals of such projects have not been challenged. But the company has also embarked upon studies that Western scientists have trouble even discussing. Foremost among them is the Cognitive Genomics project, an attempt to explore, in more complex ways than ever before, the genetic basis for human intelligence. Wang understands the ethical concerns raised by this kind of research and knows that discussing the subject makes many people uncomfortable. But he believes the worries are misguided. “Some words are too sensitive to say, but there has to be at least some genetic component behind the differences people show,’’ he told me. Wang is a mountain climber and a serious amateur photographer, and large prints of his Himalayan landscapes are scattered throughout B.G.I.’s offices. “In the United States and in the West, you have a certain way,’’ he continued, smiling and waving his arms merrily. “You feel you are advanced and you are the best. Blah, blah, blah. You follow all these rules and have all these protocols and laws and regulations. You need somebody to change it. To blow it up. For the last five hundred years, you have been leading the way with innovation. We are no longer interested in following.”
I arrived in Shenzhen the day after Typhoon Usagi had shut down much of Southeast Asia. Shops were closed, and cars inched along the sodden roads, but B.G.I. never missed a moment’s activity, in part because many of its staff live in dormitories not far from the main building. The company is arranged like a campus, though not one on which people seem to roam freely. Unlike Western research facilities, such as the National Institutes of Health, B.G.I.’s headquarters has no easily identified guards, no place to sign in, and no noticeable security cameras. While I was there, trying to find my way through the maze of identical cubicles that fill the cavernous first floor, I met Gengyun Zhang, an agricultural expert who is in charge of the company’s growing life-sciences division; he was dressed casually in a zippered yellow sport shirt. In 2011, Zhang led a team that sequenced foxtail millet, and B.G.I. has big plans for the esoteric grain. “You know what Chairman Mao said about millet,’’ Zhang said. I didn’t. “‘With millet plus rifles we will emerge victorious.’ ” (I learned later that he was referring to a speech that Mao delivered in 1955, aimed at the U.S., called “The Chinese People Cannot Be Cowed by the Atom Bomb.”)
Like many of the company’s leaders, Zhang, a reserved man with thin hair and deep black eyes, was educated in the United States, earning his doctorate from the department of plant biology and pathology at Rutgers University. He invited me to lunch, and we ate in a small room adjacent to the main dining area. It might have been the cafeteria at Stuyvesant High School, given the age of the workers. Except for the sounds of hundreds of people eating, however, the room was nearly silent. At B.G.I., there are none of the frills so common to technology firms in the West; I saw no lava lamps, nobody wore headphones or Crocs or moved through the building on a skateboard, a pogo stick, or a unicycle. When the workday ends, the employees stand up and, many hand in hand, walk out toward the giant dormitory next door. “It’s like ‘Friends,’ for thousands of people,’’ Wang Aizhu, a B.G.I. press official, said. She explained that “Friends” is popular in China. (While the living conditions are hardly extravagant, they are nowhere near as austere as those which have been found at Foxconn, the company nearby that makes iPhones for Apple—where, owing to many recent suicides, management has installed protective netting around several of the buildings.)
At lunch, Zhang pushed a small pot of yogurt toward me. Until recently, the Chinese seemed to show little interest in yogurt, or in dairy foods in general. As the middle class grows, that situation is changing. “It’s specially developed here,’’ he said, explaining that the millions of strains of beneficial bacteria contained in yogurt included a combination of new probiotics. B.G.I. has several teams trying to sequence the human microbiome, as well as those of other animals. Understanding bacterial genomes may be as valuable to maintaining good health as learning about the DNA we inherit from our parents.
During lunch, Zhang talked about millet. China’s one-child policy has prevented the rapid population growth that has threatened the economic future of many of the world’s developing countries. But cultivated land is in short supply, and in the coming decades feeding the nation will require sophisticated agricultural techniques. Archeologists believe that people began cultivating foxtail millet more than seven thousand years ago, and that for millennia it was more common than rice in China’s arid north. But rice, with its high yield of grain, gradually won out. Millet is actually a grass, with thin, leafy stems that can reach six feet, higher than a stalk of wheat. Zhang is convinced that a properly bred crop could provide an additional source of food for humans and for livestock.
Researchers at B.G.I. recently planted a test crop not far from their headquarters. “It’s very drought-tolerant,” Zhang told me. “This plant could be valuable in Africa, where it will be needed even more than in China, especially with conditions of global climate change.” The B.G.I. team mapped the location of DNA responsible for specific traits in the plant; then the researchers bred the plants to create seeds with the exact mixture of traits they sought. Technically, this millet is not genetically engineered; no genes were moved around in a laboratory to breed it. Although the company does work with engineered crops, Zhang says that B.G.I. has attempted to avoid the controversy that comes with producing G.M.O.s. “Yes, even in China they are out there,’’ he said, shaking his head mournfully. “It doesn’t make sense, but there are other ways to breed crops, too.”
Another of Zhang’s projects focusses on cassava, a starchy root that is grown principally in Asia and Africa. Five hundred million people rely on cassava as a source of carbohydrates, but it contains few essential micronutrients. Climate change will make cassava harder to grow, but where it does flourish it will become more important than ever. B.G.I. has undertaken an effort to engineer nutrients into the vegetable; that would make it an edible, healthy source of protein that can be eaten throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The company is also working with the Gates Foundation and the International Rice Research Institute to sequence thousands of strains of rice. Farmers could then create crops that might withstand local challenges, like flooding, drought, or particular pests. The United Nations predicts that, by 2100, there will be as many as ten billion people living on the planet, and half of them will rely on rice as a central source of nourishment. There are twenty-four species and up to a hundred thousand varieties within those species—enough to find plenty of useful traits. Until recently, “this research would have been impossible,” Zhang said. “But with today’s technology I have no doubt that we can feed the world.”
In November of 2002, a mysterious disease sickened thousands of people and killed scores in Guangdong, China’s largest province, which includes Shenzhen and has a population of more than a hundred million. Pandemics often originate in the crowded provinces of southern China, pass through Hong Kong, and then spread to the rest of the world. For weeks, the Chinese government, preoccupied with its image abroad, its agricultural exports, and its tourist industry, said nothing. By the time the disease—severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS—was widely recognized, it had infected thousands of people, from Shanghai to San Francisco, and hundreds had died. SARS was an international public-relations disaster for China; if the virus had been more contagious, it would have created the new millennium’s first grave public-health crisis. The Chinese government was humiliated; both the health minister and the mayor of Beijing were dismissed for mishandling the epidemic.
Nearly a decade later, in May, 2011, a rare and deadly strain of E. coli bacteria appeared in Germany. It quickly spread to Sweden, Denmark, and other European countries, and eventually to the United States. More than fifty people died, and thousands got sick. China’s reaction—B.G.I.’s, really—could not have differed more sharply from the country’s response to SARS. The company deployed its genomic technology to determine the infectious strain and reveal the mechanisms of infection. Once a sample of the bacteria had been deposited at a B.G.I. research laboratory in Hong Kong, it took just three days for the team there to sequence the bacterial genome; as the work progressed, company researchers posted details on Twitter. The data were made public under an open license, which meant that any research team could use the information at no cost. Many did. The episode underscored the weaknesses of hewing to the usual scientific approach to such medical issues: produce data, analyze it, publish it in a scientific journal, then eventually release the information to the public. In a 2012 report on the future of scientific collaboration, the Royal Society of Britain credited B.G.I. with an openness that saved lives. “Within a week, two dozen reports had been filed on an open-source site dedicated to the analysis of the strain,’’ the society wrote. “These analyses provided crucial information about the strain’s virulence and resistance genes—how it spreads and which antibiotics are effective against it. They produced results in time to help contain the outbreak.”
In public appearances, B.G.I.’s chairman, Huanming Yang, never fails to stress the collaborative nature of genetics, and American researchers praise the company for its willingness to work with them. Indeed, many of B.G.I.’s projects are led by Western scientists. The company routinely offers to sequence data at reduced prices, or even for free, if researchers share the results of their work. That has helped B.G.I. churn out many articles for prestigious journals, an important measure of success for a relatively new company. (As sequencing becomes cheaper, however, the top scientific publications have begun to regard such research as less worthy of special recognition.) Nationalism, at least in a rapidly advancing field like genomics, is increasingly regarded as a vestige of an era before Twitter and the Internet. “If by nationalism you mean hoarding data, that just isn’t happening,’’ George Church told me. Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, is an adviser to B.G.I. and one of the company’s most visible proponents. “I am just glad that there is somebody in the world who has the priorities and the money to do this—to hold this in place while the rest of us are getting our act together.’’
B.G.I.’s sequencing data have already produced unexpected insights into human evolution. In 2010, the company, along with a team of evolutionary biologists at the University of California at Berkeley, compared the genomes of fifty Tibetans, all of whom lived in villages at elevations of fourteen thousand feet or higher, with those of forty Han Chinese who lived in Beijing. Each subject had ancestors who had lived in the same region for at least three generations. Researchers found significant genetic differences between the two groups. Ethnic Tibetans appear to have split off from the Han people about three thousand years ago—an instant, in evolutionary terms. The Tibetans’ rapid adaptation enabled them to thrive with low oxygen levels at high altitudes. The research team discovered at least thirty genes with mutations that had become more prevalent in Tibetans than in Han Chinese. Nearly half of those genes turned out to be related to the ways in which the body metabolizes oxygen. One particular variant was discovered in fewer than ten per cent of the Han but in nearly ninety per cent of the Tibetans. “This is the fastest genetic change ever observed in humans,” Rasmus Nielsen, a professor of integrative biology at U.C. Berkeley, said at the time. Nielsen led the statistical analysis. “For such a very strong change, a lot of people would have had to die simply due to the fact that they had the wrong version of a gene.”
The influence of heredity on intelligence is complex, involving thousands of genes interacting in such intricate ways that researchers have not yet managed to draw genetic patterns. It’s possible that they never will. But B.G.I. has begun to try, and while scientists at the company take exceptional pains to say there is nothing secretive or threatening about its Cognitive Genomics project, the work has already raised questions in the West. “In twenty to forty years, at least in the developed world, most babies could be conceived through in-vitro fertilization, so that their parents can choose among embryos,’’ Hank Greely, a professor at Stanford Law School and the director of the university’s Center for Law and the Biosciences, told me. Greely’s book on the ethical implications of genomics and human reproduction, “The End of Sex,’’ will be published next year. “That way, the parents or someone else can select among a limited number of embryos with the combination of genes they most want to see in their offspring. It’s going to happen. And China will have fewer cultural and legal barriers to it than we will see in the United States.’’
Genetic screening for some conditions, such as Tay-Sachs disease and Huntington’s disease, has become routine. Both conditions are caused by a single DNA mutation, which makes them relatively easy to detect. Soon, much more will be possible. Already, the entire genome of an embryo can be sequenced; although that information has limited value today, it raises the prospect of a real-world Gattaca, where potential fetuses could be selected through genetic diagnosis and implanted with traits that are considered desirable. “My guess is that we will at some point be able to say that this embryo has a sixty-five-per-cent chance of scoring in the top half on S.A.T.s, or is likely to have unusual musical or creative ability,’’ Greely said. He emphasized that that day is still far off, and that he was talking not about creating “monsters under the bed” but about selecting the most attractive embryos based on the characteristics of their DNA. “In the United States, parents will make those choices, but in China there is more acceptance of government intervention in personal and family decisions.”
Nearly every person I spoke with at B.G.I. assured me, whether I asked or not, that cognitive genomics is simply one small project, an arrow in the company’s mammoth quiver. They described the research mostly as an effort to tease out the genetic architecture of how the brain works. But it’s a touchy subject; a company press representative, who sat in on one of my interviews, interrupted several times. At each point, she repeated that B.G.I. would never engage in eugenics—a term I had not introduced, but one so freighted with unpleasant connotations that it would be hard to imagine any company embracing it. Yet complete access to DNA means complete access to the genetic building blocks of life. Eventually, that information will almost certainly be free; and the more of it that is gathered and analyzed the closer we come to a day when it might be possible to select a variety of specific traits in embryos. What might a company connected even tenuously to the Chinese government do with this information? B.G.I. has often said that all such data will be shared. There is no reason to believe that anyone there has any other goal. It is possible, though, that the government won’t leave the choice in the company’s hands.
Eugenics, the idea that one can breed humans for characteristics like intelligence the way a farmer would breed chickens for tastier meat or more nutritious eggs, is widely reviled today, but it was once endorsed not only by totalitarian leaders but by American liberals. China’s recent history of controlling reproduction provides the clearest example of where such programs can lead. After three decades, the country has begun to ease its one-child rule. While the policy succeeded in limiting population growth, it also encouraged families to abort girls. By 2020, thirty million more Chinese men than women will have reached adulthood; for many young men, in a society where marriage still matters greatly, the odds of finding a wife have become prohibitive. Chinese leaders now worry that such a disparity could lead to instability and political unrest.
Many Western scientists are concerned that in China, where the needs of the state come before those of the individual, genomic data could play a central role in reproductive policy. “Who is the emperor?” Jian Wang, B.G.I.’s president, said when I asked him to describe his attitudes toward privacy. “I don’t care. George Bush? Bill Clinton? Or the Communist Party of China? It isn’t my business. Emperors have been ruling us for thousands of years. I know the government is watching us at all times. So what? I don’t care about my personal privacy. It just doesn’t matter.”
B.G.I.’s Cognitive Genomics project has been designed like a typical medical study. The group will sequence and compare the DNA of two thousand people and hopes to recruit up to twenty thousand new subjects. Most of the samples came from people with I.Q.s higher than a hundred and fifty, few of whom are Chinese. So far, the data have been provided predominantly by Robert Plomin, a professor of behavioral genetics at King’s College London, who for years has conducted research on the genetic similarities of twins. Because identical twins share so much of their DNA, differences between them are more likely to be environmental than inherited. Through a project called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, Plomin collected DNA samples from two thousand individuals with high I.Q.s.
When the study began, in the nineteen-seventies, researchers simply hoped to understand the lives of intellectually gifted people. Now B.G.I. is sifting through the DNA in a hunt for biological clues to what makes them so smart. The team has travelled to places like Google and Harvard, seeking subjects who score far above the norm on standard tests. Most genetic studies require tens of thousands of participants to carry enough statistical power to be considered meaningful. The B.G.I. team argues that in some cases so many subjects may not be necessary.
“We are getting to the point where we are going to be able to make statistical predictions based on the genomic information about complex traits,’’ Stephen Hsu told me. Hsu, a theoretical physicist and mathematician, is a vice-president for research and graduate studies at Michigan State University. He is also one of the project’s principal scientists. “Those minute differences in our genetic makeup are probably what determines the difference between whether you are Albert Einstein or not getting into college,’’ he said. “Everyone is coming around to believe that things are controlled by many genes, and there has been a tendency in the field to just throw up your hands and say, Well, this is going to lead nowhere, or this is all a boondoggle. But I actually think that, at this point, it’s in the hands of people who are mathematically inclined.’’
Hsu points to predictions about height. More than one study has demonstrated a genetic correlation between I.Q. and height, though the research is controversial and constantly disputed. Scientists can now examine a person’s genome, and, assuming that he or she has been fed reasonably well, determine height within a couple of inches. (In most cases, though, the best way to predict a person’s height is to look at the height of his or her parents.) Hsu suggested that one only has to consider the revolution in breeding cattle to understand how this approach to heredity might eventually be deployed with humans. Traditionally, breeders who wanted to buy a bull to inseminate their herds would study the animal’s pedigree. Now they are likely to receive a genomic chart that shows whether an animal is genetically predisposed to produce milk, or live long, or gain weight more quickly (and therefore require less food) than other cattle. In the past forty years, according to a study carried out by a group of scientists from the United States Department of Agriculture and the University of Minnesota, nearly a quarter of the DNA of America’s Holstein cattle had been altered through human selection.
Cattle genetics is not human genetics. Cows are heavily inbred, which has made their genomes easier to decipher. But the implications are not hard to envisage, and neither are the possible consequences. Will it become possible to build a child, as some critics of this research have contended? Not soon, and maybe never.
After all, genes play only a partial role in the prevalence of most diseases. Women with the BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation, for example, have a greatly increased risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer. But no more than ten per cent of women with breast cancer have a mutated BRCA gene. Nonetheless, Hsu believes that altering certain genomic characteristics of an unborn child will become highly desired, and eventually common. “Wouldn’t it be amazing if there were certain tweaks you could make in utero that would enhance the performance of our brain?’’ he said. “Probably by tweaking a certain number of variants in a positive way, you could rev up human intelligence quite a bit. Or you can explain the difference between Stephen Hawking and the average person.’ ”
In 2009, CNN reported on a summer camp in Chongqing where children were given DNA tests to try to identify their natural talents so that they could be steered toward suitable careers. Most scientists in the field, including those at B.G.I., dismiss the notion that such predictive tests have any credibility. Hsu and many others believe, however, that genomics will eventually do for humans what it already does for animals, and then those choices will become political as well as medical.
“We will at some point get there with humans,” Hsu said. “Then some countries will make it legal or will regulate it loosely, if at all. And other countries will go nuts and make it illegal. And rich people will still be able to do it. If it turns out Singapore is the place where it is legal, rich people can have their babies in Singapore. The idea that only rich people would be able to access this technology is terrible.’’ But, he continued, “who will make those decisions? There are going to be countries that say this is part of our national health-care service and everyone is doing it. And eventually it would become unstoppable, because the countries that initially outlawed it would have to come around. How could they not?”
Late in October, during the frigid first week of the World Series, seven thousand members of the American Society of Human Genetics gathered in Boston to present papers, look for jobs, and attend workshops on the latest developments in their rapidly evolving field. The ground floor of the city’s Convention and Exhibition Center, on the waterfront near the Inner Harbor, was filled with booths from what seemed like every genomics company in the world; it was a carnival of high-tech medical paraphernalia. The B.G.I. booth was among the busiest. Visitors crowded around to see what jobs were available and what projects were under way. Chinese was not the official language, but more than one American researcher pointed out, a bit defensively, how often it was spoken in hallways and lunchrooms throughout the meeting.
Many scientists in America have become anxious at the prospect of losing prominence in a discipline that the West has dominated since Watson and Crick discovered the helical structure of DNA. Those fears were made palpable late last year when B.G.I. became more than simply the world’s biggest consumer of sequencing technology; it also became one of the principal providers. Two major companies offer that service to places like the Broad Institute and B.G.I. The leader is Illumina, which is based in San Diego, and has sold some hundred and thirty of its machines to B.G.I., for more than half a million dollars each. (Until recently, B.G.I. was Illumina’s biggest customer, and the company maintains a contract to supply the chemical reagents needed to make the machines work properly.) Last year, to the outrage of many in the United States, B.G.I. bought Illumina’s main competitor, Complete Genomics, for a hundred and eighteen million dollars. Jay Flatley, Illumina’s chief executive, attempted to prevent the merger, appealing to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which monitors the sale of technology that might pose a threat to national security. Flatley argued that selling such equipment would put powerful industrial secrets into Chinese hands. In December, the CFIUS board rejected Flatley’s argument and approved B.G.I.’s purchase. It has been easy to read too much into the decision; at a time when the N.I.H. is cutting back on funding scientific research, China is not. Recently, the Chinese government published an ambitious fifty-year plan to advance its technical and scientific position in the world. Few scientists would claim that they can predict that far into the future. But the fact that China would even try demonstrates how serious the country is about its technological place in the world.
While I was in Boston, I met with Flatley, a trim, cheerful man, who had just announced that a new version of Illumina’s sequencing technology would enable customers to double the speed with which they can decode genomes. Illumina led the industry, even before the announcement, so I asked why B.G.I.’s acquisition of a rival should cause particular concern in the United States. In a field where coming in second will never be good enough, Complete Genomics poses no great competitive threat. Flatley said that, with enough help from the Chinese leadership, the situation could change. “They have direct reaches into the government,’’ he told me, referring to B.G.I. “We think they are working hard to establish Chinese dominance in this market, which for the United States would be bad news.’’ For Flatley and his company, of course, it would be even worse news.
I asked why, if he was so worried about the threat of Chinese scientific dominance, he had sold millions of dollars’ worth of technology to B.G.I. “It’s one thing to sell Coke and another to sell the formula for Coke,’’ he said. “And when they bought Complete Genomics what they were allowed to do is buy the formula.’’ We were sitting at the open bar in the atrium of the Waterfront Westin—a sort of grand concourse for people attending the genetics meeting. As Flatley spoke, Jun Wang, B.G.I.’s chief executive officer, strolled by. Wang, who is thirty-seven, was wearing a black trench coat that was cinched at the waist, and he looked like a movie star. He started the company’s bioinformatics department more than a decade ago, and Fortune recently named him one of the world’s most influential people under the age of forty. Several years ago, in an interview with Nature, he described B.G.I. as the “muscle” in the world of genomic research and was quoted as saying, “We have no brain.” The first thing he said to me when we met was that he hoped I understood the remark was meant as a joke.
The two men nodded but maintained a physical distance, like rival gang leaders running into each other at a night club. Flatley told me that he regards B.G.I.’s emergence as a sign of America’s waning investment in science. “We think it is critically important, as does B.G.I., to get a million genomes into a database as fast as we can,’’ he said. “But that database needs to be open and universally accessible to researchers around the world. B.G.I.’s goal, I believe, is to have a million people in a database that they control.’’ While nothing I saw at B.G.I. or heard from either company officials or any American scientist suggested that that was true, B.G.I. does have a $1.58-billion loan from the China Development Bank. Jian Wang says that the company has no official ties to the government, but it is not always easy to know what constitutes such a tie. As one prominent American scientist told me after he visited Shenzhen, “I asked, Are you a nonprofit, are you a government entity, or are you a private company? The answer was yes. In China, these are not meaningful distinctions.’’
While B.G.I.’s ambitions are as great as those of any Western institution, it is not yet clear where they will lead. Many scientists in the field consider the company little more than a high-end version of the nearby Foxconn factory, often referred to as “iPod City,” where three hundred and fifty thousand employees turn out millions of Apple products each year. No sequencing project seems too small for B.G.I. to bother with or too big to handle. But sequencing is merely a first step. It leaves the company with a list of the chemicals found in a given stretch of DNA; those lists have often been compared to the letters of a book. Letters alone don’t produce “Hamlet” or “War and Peace.’’ Shakespeare and Tolstoy had to put that “code” together in meaningful ways. That has not been B.G.I.’s primary goal, and it is uncertain whether the company can turn the data from billions of DNA sequences into the kind of scientific insight more frequently associated with places like the Broad Institute and the National Institutes of Health.
B.G.I.’s leaders are aware of the perception that the company is little more than a biological data mill. The next afternoon, before leaving Boston, I attended a luncheon hosted by the company. Three hundred people filled a lecture hall that usually holds far fewer. Most had come to hear Huanming Yang, the B.G.I. chairman, deliver a long, emotional presentation that included a PowerPoint display with ninety-one slides. Yang is warm and self-effacing, and he thanked a roster of American biologists for their help and “collaboration.’’ In talking about the promise of genomics, he invoked Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the Declaration of Independence. It was a “Kumbaya” moment in a field where the soul is rarely mentioned. Yang referred to his company as “an unruly adolescent,’’ and ended his talk by saying, “Please do me a favor: Take the young B.G.I.’ers as your friends, as your students. To treat them as you treated me, to teach them as you taught me. I assure you it is very rewarding. It is not only for a successful project; it is also for the brilliant future of mankind.”
Two weeks earlier, in Hong Kong, I had met with Chris Chang, a visiting scholar at B.G.I., who expressed similar sentiments, saying that these were early days for Chinese biotechnology. Chang, an American with a Chinese heritage, works on the Cognitive Genomics project. He is eager to see B.G.I. grow beyond its genetic-assembly-line phase, and he thinks the intelligence research can help the company to do it. “There are ethical concerns about this research in China, too,’’ he told me. “But it’s just not the career-killing type of project that it would be in the United States.”
We were sitting in a noisy café in Wan Chai. He shook his head and smiled. “I do get bewildered,” he said. “Embryo selection is one aspect of this kind of research, but there are so many others. Do you want to figure out Alzheimer’s disease, or schizophrenia? Because to do that we need to understand the brain, but right now we are taking little stabs in the dark. That won’t stop until we map the brain. We will have to make difficult ethical choices. But don’t ignore the enormous potential of this research. At some point, though I don’t know when, people will look back and wonder what all the fuss was about.” ♦
