Lines of Life
How Biotech Became the New National Service
My name’s Cameron Wells, and if you’d told me five years ago I’d be running a fermentation line in a biomanufacturing facility outside Bloomington, Indiana, I would’ve laughed you out of the barracks.
Back then, I was an Airman First Class in the 3rd Medical Support Squadron, stationed at Travis. Logistics. Paperwork. Syringe kits. One time we shipped out a thousand liters of cryopreserved stem cell cultures to a field hospital in Djibouti, and I didn’t even know what they were. I just printed the manifests.
Now I walk past twenty thousand liters of engineered algae every morning on my way to the cleanroom floor, and I know the name of every single strain.
Because now? This country finally gives a damn about biotechnology.
And we built a place for people like me.
This is a science fiction story inspired by Chapter 5 of the final report from the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. This may be fiction, but it’s my way of exploring the world around me. Let’s make this happen.
It started my last year in uniform. I was twenty-three, and I knew I didn’t want to re-up. My CO sat me down and said, “Cam, you’ve got a sharp mind and steady hands. The country needs both, but not necessarily in uniform.”
He slid me a flyer for something called BioBridge, a new veteran transition program funded by the Department of Defense and the Department of Commerce. It had three logos across the top: NIIMBL, BioMADE, and VA Biotech Pathways. Underneath:
“Biotechnology is National Security. Let’s build it together.”
I didn’t even know what NIIMBL stood for.
But I applied.
Six weeks later, I was in a community college classroom in Terre Haute, learning the fundamentals of gene editing from a professor who used to run QC at Pfizer. We had veterans, laid-off auto workers, a few farm kids, and one single mom who commuted two hours from Evansville every day just to sit in the front row.
They called us the New Workforce.
I didn’t know what that meant at the time.
But now I do.
The facility I work at is a public-private manufacturing hub built on the bones of a decommissioned GM plant. It used to make diesel engines. Now we make bioscaffolds, programmable protein gels that hospitals use to regenerate tissue. And some of our lines are pivoting to synthesize bioplastic precursors for packaging companies trying to meet the new federal biodegradability mandates.
The federal government co-funded the buildout, but it’s locally operated. And it doesn’t look like what you think.
Forget the old image of scientists in white coats behind glass. Our shift leads wear steel-toed boots and know how to swap out a membrane column in under ten minutes. We train for spills like firefighters and treat biosecurity protocols like weapons handling.
My role? I’m a Process Technician Tier II. I monitor three modules: Fermentation Alpha, Downstream Beta, and Utility Support. That means I keep the algae alive, I make sure we extract the product efficiently, and I make damn sure nobody contaminates the line with a dirty gasket.
But here’s the wild part.
I didn’t learn most of this in a classroom.
I learned it through a skills passport.
See, one of the biggest breakthroughs in the past five years wasn’t some shiny new gene therapy or lab-grown meat. It was paperwork.
Specifically, the National Biotechnology Workforce Framework.
Before that, nobody agreed on what a “biotech job” actually was. One company would call you a technician. Another would call you an operator. Some didn’t even list biology as a required skill.
But the framework changed all that.
Now, every role in the sector—whether you’re sequencing DNA or calibrating a pH sensor—maps to a competency matrix that’s shared across industry, government, and training programs. When I finished my BioBridge track, I had a digital badge that told employers exactly what I could do. Not just “general lab skills.” I’m talking:
Maintain aseptic technique under GMP.
Operate and troubleshoot bioreactor systems up to 10k liters.
Interpret spectrophotometer output for real-time biomass analysis.
Each skill had a timestamp, a credential, and a reviewer. The same way we tracked rifle quals in the Air Force.
The private sector loved it.
The hiring manager at my facility said it was like finally being able to read a resume in their own language.
My first shift was terrifying.
There’s a smell in fermentation bays that never quite leaves you—sweet, acidic, alive. The tanks breathe. Not metaphorically. They actually exhale CO₂ through pressure valves when the algae hit exponential growth phase.
My job was to make sure they kept breathing, but not too much. Feedstock ratios. Temperature control. Antifoam agents. It felt like babysitting a dragon made of soup.
I made mistakes.
I almost crashed a batch once by misreading the dissolved oxygen levels. Would’ve lost $200k in product if my supervisor hadn’t caught it. He didn’t yell. He pulled me aside and said “Biotech isn’t about being perfect. It’s about catching the deviation before it becomes a disaster. And learning fast.”
That’s when I realized: this work isn’t just technical.
It’s human.
Because every error has consequences. Maybe it delays a shipment of skin grafts for burn victims. Maybe it knocks out a contract that supports twenty families. Maybe it sets us back on climate goals.
Biotech isn’t theoretical anymore.
It’s the supply chain.
And we’re not alone.
I’ve got friends from training who now run cell therapy batches in Colorado Springs. One guy’s a QA specialist at a vertical farm in Baltimore. A woman I knew from the service is now designing automated lab equipment at a startup spun out of DARPA. She calls it “biology’s moonshot moment.”
And the thing is, it’s working.
The bioeconomy added more jobs last year than aerospace and automotive combined. And for the first time, it’s not just PhDs in Boston. It’s technicians in Tulsa. Operators in Montgomery. Line workers in Fort Wayne who used to build car engines and now run mRNA encapsulation rigs.
America didn’t just scale biotech.
We scaled the people who make it real.
Last week, I got to lead a training session for the next cohort of BioBridge vets. Twelve of them, fresh out of active duty. All nervous. All skeptical.
I told them my story. How I went from manifests to molecules. How this work gave me a mission after the uniform came off. How biotechnology isn’t just labs and lingo.
It’s infrastructure.
Like roads. Like power grids. Like the damn internet.
And the infrastructure only works if people know how to run it.
People like them.
One of the new guys asked me what it feels like to be part of something so big.
I said “It feels like I’m not just clocking in. I’m shaping the future. With a wrench in one hand and a bioassay in the other.”
And for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t just saying it.
I believed it.
"A dragon made of soup" is my new favorite way to describe biomanufacturing!