There’s a quiet revolution underway in how we think about global power. In the 20th century, alliances were built on the movement of oil, steel, and troops. In the 21st century, they’re being rebuilt on the movement of cells, code, and biological knowledge. This isn’t a metaphorical shift. It’s literal. The materials that define power in the biotechnology century - genomic data, sequencing platforms, fermentation infrastructure, and standards for synthetic biology - are distributed across countries, and no single nation can advance or defend alone.
Chapter 6 of the NSCEB Final Report marks a turning point in this understanding. Titled Mobilize the Collective Strengths of Our Allies and Partners, it recognizes that while America remains the epicenter of biotech innovation, our edge is neither guaranteed nor self-sufficient. It must be reinforced by a global network, one rooted in shared values, technical interoperability, and collaborative industrial power.
We’ve spent the past few chapters focused on domestic imperatives: innovation infrastructure, talent, data, and security. But this chapter extends the lens outward. It’s not just about what we build. It’s about with whom we build it - and how.
The podcast audio was AI-generated using Google’s NotebookLM.
The Imperative of Shared Strength
The momentum behind biotechnology is global. That’s not a polite nod to internationalism; it’s a strategic reality. From London’s computational biology labs to Tokyo’s regenerative medicine platforms, from Seoul’s precision manufacturing facilities to Bengaluru’s vaccine ecosystems, the tools, capabilities, and breakthroughs of modern biotech are happening everywhere.
This is not a threat, it’s a gift, if we’re willing to engage with it. Chapter 6 doesn’t mince words: “The United States must renew its commitment to its closest allies and forge new partnerships with nations that have complementary goals, capabilities, and expertise” .
And the opportunities are vast. NATO has launched biotechnology initiatives under DIANA and the NATO Innovation Fund. Countries like Germany are producing breakthroughs in biomass fuels; Denmark in industrial biochemicals; South Korea in scale-up manufacturing; and India in low-cost vaccine production. We don’t need to own every node in the global biotech web. We need to connect to the right ones and build mutual resilience across them.
Promote: Diplomacy for a Distributed Future
(Section 6.1 – Recommendations 6.1A-E)
Section 6.1 outlines five clear recommendations under the banner of promote biotechnology with allies and partners. The language may sound bureaucratic, but what it’s proposing is nothing short of a foreign policy retooling for the biotechnology age.
1. Biotechnology as a Formal Pillar of Tech Diplomacy
In 2022, Congress created the ITSI Fund to support semiconductor and telecom diplomacy. The NSCEB recommends expanding this fund to include biotechnology, with its own dedicated budget and annual reporting requirements. This change alone would signal to the world that biology is not merely a scientific curiosity, but a matter of international strategic importance.
More importantly, it would allow the Department of State to fund real biotech R&D and industrial collaborations with partners abroad. That could mean co-developing fermentation infrastructure with Canada, or supporting sequencing hubs in Southeast Asia to strengthen early pathogen detection. Biotech becomes a tool of alignment and aid, not just export.
2. Commercial Diplomacy for Biology
We already deploy trade attachés to promote aircraft, software, and energy assets overseas. Chapter 6 argues that biotechnology must become part of that same commercial toolkit. U.S. embassies should include trained biotechnology officers who can help open markets, reduce regulatory friction, and support American companies seeking to operate abroad.
And this can’t be a side hustle. It requires real funding, training, and interagency coordination between State, Commerce, USDA, and USTR. One example: train Foreign Service Officers in the basics of genomics, fermentation, and regulatory science. If we expect them to advocate for U.S. biotech firms in Brussels or Jakarta, they need more than a talking point. They need fluency.
3. Regulatory Diplomacy - Because Safety Shouldn’t Stop at Borders
One of the biggest friction points in global biotech is regulatory divergence. Different countries approve genetically modified crops, cell therapies, or synthetic enzymes using completely different rulesets, timelines, and data standards.
That creates delays, market fragmentation, and real risk. If a country wants to import a U.S.-developed therapy but can’t process the underlying risk data, the product doesn’t move. Everyone loses.
NSCEB calls for the United States to lead efforts to converge global biotech regulatory standards, not by imposing them, but by aligning processes, synchronizing review timelines, and jointly developing scientific guidelines. Think of it as the internationalization of the FDA’s best practices.
This isn’t just trade facilitation. It’s strategic signaling. The countries that define the norms of biotech safety will shape the industry’s ethical and commercial future.
4. The Biological Data Commons, Built on Reciprocity
Perhaps the most ambitious proposal is for the U.S. to begin creating bilateral and multilateral agreements around biological data sharing. Why? Because no single country, not even ours, can generate the volume and diversity of biological data required for AI-powered biotech at scale.
Australia, for instance, has invested deeply in RNA profiling. The UK has vast clinical datasets. Japan has genomic libraries of unique island biomes. We should be entering into reciprocal data sharing agreements, with AI-readiness standards enforced, so we can collectively build the Web of Biological Data that Chapter 4 introduced.
This isn’t altruism. It’s strategic necessity. China is aggressively stockpiling global biodata, sometimes through coercion, often without consent. If democratic nations don’t build ethical and secure data-sharing frameworks, we risk falling behind in the very datasets that will train the next generation of biological AI.
5. A NATO Biotech Buyers Club
This is the sleeper hit of the chapter. The NSCEB recommends that NATO begin pooling demand for biotechnology products, especially those with defense applications. Think synthetic blood, next-gen MREs, pathogen detection platforms.
The combined defense budget of NATO nations exceeds $1.3 trillion. If even a small fraction were committed to joint biotechnology procurement, it would create a demand signal powerful enough to reshape markets overnight. That would allow early-stage biotech firms to scale faster, attract more capital, and serve transatlantic resilience from day one.
Protect: Standards, Export Controls, and Strategic Guardrails
(Section 6.2 – Recommendations 6.2A-B)
Chapter 6.2 turns to the flip side of partnership: protection. The very act of creating shared platforms, open data agreements, and harmonized regulation introduces risk. If the wrong actors gain access, whether through theft, regulatory arbitrage, or exploitation, the whole system becomes vulnerable.
This section makes two core recommendations.
1. Define the Rules Before Others Do
The ISO and other international standards bodies are where the world decides how technologies will be defined, measured, and certified. They’re wonky, underfunded, and slow-moving. But they’re crucial.
Right now, China is dominating these forums, participating in 200 more ISO biotech standard committees than the U.S. If that doesn’t change, we’ll be forced to build our systems around someone else’s definitions of safety, security, and ethics.
NSCEB recommends a major reinvestment in American participation in standards bodies, coordinated by State and NIST, and executed in close collaboration with industry and academia. It’s time to stop ceding the playing field to nations that do not share our democratic or human rights values.
2. Fix Export Controls for the Biological Age
Export controls have always been a tool of national security, but they’re notoriously blunt and outdated, especially for biotech. Current multilateral regimes like the Wassenaar Arrangement include countries like Russia and require consensus for action, meaning updates lag years behind the pace of science.
Biotech can’t afford that delay.
NSCEB calls for a new export control strategy, one that harmonizes rules among allied nations and creates a dynamic update mechanism based on technological shifts and geopolitical risk. It’s a sophisticated approach, targeted, flexible, and fast-moving .
Without it, we risk letting adversaries buy American-origin biotechnology components from countries with weaker rules. The U.S. must lead a values-aligned coalition to fix the broken controls system before it becomes irrelevant.
The Alliance as Platform
Taken together, these recommendations present a radical but necessary reframing: alliances are not just military coalitions. They are platforms for innovation, standardization, economic development, and governance.
The question is no longer just whether our allies will come to our defense in war. It’s whether they will align their data regulations, industrial investments, and procurement strategies in peace. Because in biotechnology, peace and power are produced not in battles, but in bioreactors.
This is a fundamentally different kind of diplomacy. It’s not about secrecy and statecraft. It’s about openness, coordination, and shared systems. The playbook of the past was built on scarcity. This one is built on trust.
My Three Takeaways
The era of biotech nationalism is over: The countries that try to go it alone will be slower, less efficient, and more vulnerable. The future belongs to those who integrate, not isolate.
We need a Department of Biological Statecraft: That’s a half-joke, but only half. Biotechnology now touches every aspect of diplomacy, from trade to security to development. It’s time to resource and staff accordingly.
NATO is no longer just a security alliance, it’s an innovation accelerator: If NATO becomes a buyer of biotech, it changes everything: incentives, timelines, even public acceptance. It’s a move with enormous catalytic potential.
What Comes Next
Chapter 6 tells us how to work with the world, and its the final chapter of the report for a reason. Now that we’ve gone through the whole report, next week we’ll recap and see where we go from here.
Until then, remember:
We don’t win the biotech century by standing alone.
We win it by standing together, and building systems worth standing for.
Cheers,
-Titus
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