
Biotech booms in China - diefunction
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00542-3
======
narrator
A couple of years back there was a paralyzed guy who went to China and got
stem cell injections and was able to walk again. He did an AMA on reddit and
the whole thing was full of people gaslighting him that he wasn't really
paralyzed, or it wasn't really permanent, or he wasn't really healed, etc.
Then we did it in the U.S a couple years later and claimed we're the first.
Gibson's observation that "The future is already here, it's just not evenly
distributed" applies here.

~~~
qiqing
Do you have the link by any chance? This doesn't surprise me at all since
there's a vicious cycle of China-bashing-gets-eyeballs leads to random-trolls-
enjoy-China-bashing.

Some of the worst trolls just love harassing founders (esp. female founders)
with 10-things-I-hate-about-China to derail conversations about their startup
or their product or their journey to product-market-fit.

~~~
justinjlynn
Unfortunately, some founders will then see any valid criticism of their
methods and/or business practices and frame it as China-bashing. It's bad for
everyone, including investors and the world at large, and I really wish the
racist nonsense would stop.

~~~
qiqing
One of the privileges of being a U.S.-based founder is internationally, no one
asks you to answer for the actions of Uber, Exxon, or pharma bro as though all
companies in the U.S. came from one homogenous mass.

I'm not talking about criticisms of a particular company when it's the one
being discussed. Should Theranos be criticized for their own failings? Yes.
Should every U.S. startup be suspected of being similar because of another
company's actions because in a population of 300M, someone else did a thing?
You tell me...

~~~
whatshisface
I wouldn't mind it if someone pressed me about those companies, Uber can
absolutely be managed on the local government level, and the other bad stuff
that these big companies do is within the range of activism. It's not 100% my
responsibility, but there's probably at least a 1 a few zeroes after the
decimal.

Secondly, when _one_ company gets away with something in the US, we have a
fairly good reason to believe that _other_ companies could get away with
something similar. So, if I were a person in any country (even the US), and I
needed to decide whether or not I could trust a US company not to do something
to me, legal precedent in the US would actually be very relevant.

To make this concrete, I bet Europeans have become rightfully wary by now
about the data privacy implications of banking/shopping or otherwise making an
account with US business.

~~~
qiqing
Thing is, the Chinese companies who do shady things absolutely get punished.
Not just slap-on-the-wrist fines, but jail time and sometimes death penalty.
Legal precedent is not why legit founders get harassed for being Chinese.

We're not talking about well-thought-out questions about legal precedence, but
random trolls calling their products 'cheap Chinese knock-offs' even when they
are original, and even in cases where it's a similar version to something, if
it's made in the U.S.A., we call that "private label" or "white label." Or
"generics."

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Bucephalus355
This does not seem good.

The world has never really reconciled the biological and chemical atrocities
that went on in Asia during WWII and since, like they have in Europe. The
Japanese used chemical gas attacks (munitions of unexploded gas are still
found in China today) and did live vivesections on prisoners, amputating their
appendages until there was nothing left. Hitler’s SS thought the atrocities so
bad in China they asked for permission to intervene at several points. I doubt
China has forgotten any of this, as they are expanding funding by several
orders of magnitude into research on Japanese WWII atrocities.

To the north, Russia supposedly developed a type of chemical weapon even more
powerful than nerve gas at one point in the 70’s. After the Cold War, while
everyone was worried about nuclear weapons, Soviet bio and chemical scientists
were easily available for hire and research. The Japanese cult that dumped
Sarin into the Tokyo subway in 1996 had gotten far towards procuring many
nerve agents as well as biological agents this way (developing powder to
spread live agents that survived for weeks proved too difficult though).

Everyone talks about nuclear weapons, but biological, and to a lesser degree
chemical, weapons have been under the radar for so long, governed by treaties
that intellectually are still in 1918, that this needs to be looked at very
seriously.

~~~
tpaschalis
Isn't it possible that less regulation can help propel research, for "good"
goals? I think that in 2018, novel medical applications would be _far_ more
profitable than a biological weapons, and in the end of the day, that's what
matters to companies.

For example, I'm not sure that in USA it would be possible for a terminally
ill patient can opt-in to a dangerous/risky/experimental new form of
treatment, while it could save thousands of others if successful.

~~~
sampo
Even if the patient themselves agrees to the experimental treatment, but then
dies, maybe even in a gruesome manner, is it still possible for the patient's
family to sue the biotech startup for large sums of money?

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joe_the_user
Well, it seems logical that biotech would boom in a country with less
regulation than the US.

At the same time, it seems like for biotech to have an explosion akin to the
last fifty years explosion of computer technology, one would have to find a
way to well and truly automate the processes involved. Last I looked, a vast
amount of research is very much by hand, injecting drug into animal by hand,
putting liquids in beakers by hand etc.

And part of it is living creatures are all different, and not just different
in the two rocks on a beach or two toys out of a cheap mold are different.
Living creatures, even two instance of the same creature, have functioning
subsystems that function differently. And this is a multi-dimensional thing
[1] . Custom tailored therapies attempt to take this into account but so far
seem to have generally failed. I would speculate this is because humans have
more than two or dimensions of difference between, even in subsystems like the
immune system.

Edit: using AI to combine information on these systems that seem intractable
in themselves also sounds promising - still many problem there also.

[1] Biochemical Individuality, Roger J. Williams

~~~
CandidlyFake
> Well, it seems logical that biotech would boom in a country with less
> regulation than the US.

If that was the case, biotech would be booming from the congo to nepal.

Biotech is booming in china because they have the resources ( money, people
and infrastructure ).

~~~
joe_the_user
Come on, any comment like mine above has an implicit "all else being equal" in
it. I didn't say that to describe some absolute formula but to contextualize
my later remarks.

~~~
CandidlyFake
And my point is that you are just offering simplification that has no merit.
It's a cheap ploy I expect from silly journalists, not on HN. Regulation isn't
why there is a biotech boom. As I stated, it's money, people and
infrastructure.

~~~
carlmr
Point 1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity)

Point 2: There's no country with more money and infrastructure than the US.
The only advantage would be more people. And I doubt China has more of the
people needed in Biotech research than the US which still attracts the
brightest of the world through it's academic system.

So there must be something else. And I think lack of regulation might be a
good enough reason. Kind of like how Hollywood boomed after they pirated all
the hardware whose patents could only be enforced on the east coast at that
time.

~~~
CandidlyFake
> Point 2: There's no country with more money and infrastructure than the US.

Except our money and infrastructure is going into other sectors. China has
chosen to direct their resources into this sector. Simple as that.

> Kind of like how Hollywood boomed after they pirated all the hardware whose
> patents could only be enforced on the east coast at that time.

Hollywood boomed when money, people and infrastructure was directed to it. It
was a conscious decision made by the elites. There are tons of regulation in
hollywood. It's still booming. Using your logic, hollywood should be a ghost
town. Ironically, your example proves you wrong.

~~~
carlmr
[http://www.history.com/news/the-renegade-roots-of-
hollywood-...](http://www.history.com/news/the-renegade-roots-of-hollywood-
studios)

Hollywood didn't start as elites, they started escaping them.

------
jostmey
Here's something to add to the discussion. China was the first nation to
approve a gene therapy for use in Humans. I don't know if it is effective or
not.

[https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt0104-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt0104-3)
(over a decade old)

~~~
adventured
The same reason they're the first to work with CRISPR in humans, despite the
US having a formerly vast R&D lead.

It's because they're fundamentally a lot less concerned about killing people
in the process. There's a reasonable debate to be had on whether the US is too
concerned with the risk aspect of making progress on biotech.

~~~
qiqing
> fundamentally a lot less concerned about killing people in the process

That's rather flippant, and I'd like to provide a counterpoint. Some
neuroscience researchers held a town hall discussion in a major US city and
also in a major Chinese city (on two different occasions) about bioethics, and
one of the topics discussed was whether it was morally right or wrong (in the
case of IVF) to screen for IQ, assuming we had reliable markers. So, same
parents, no edits, but out of N embryos, instead of randomly selecting one,
you choose one that's likely to be the smartest. Assuming it works reliably,
is that wrong?

The U.S. audience was split approx. 50/50, with most of the objections about
how it was going against God's will, or that it was "unnatural." The Chinese
audience was all for it, and expressed surprise that the U.S. audience was
split. Because if you could, and the technique was reliable, why wouldn't you?

Sometimes, it's useful to take a second look at our cultural biases.

~~~
stevenwoo
On the other hand, the accepted use of selective gender abortion (where the
problem made the male/female ratio out of wack especially in rural areas IIRC)
in China versus the controversialness of abortion being legal in the USA (re:
the persistence of attempts to limit access but observing the minimal literal
interpretation of Roe v. Wade) might explain a willingness to let people make
choices in China over the USA. Where else are you going to read that!?

~~~
ikeyany
It sounds like you're implying China is colder and less humane.

~~~
stevenwoo
You're reading that meaning, I'm only reciting the facts imperfectly as I may
recall them. I could add a bit about how religiosity
(Catholicism/evangelicalism) imposes rather arbitrary (to an outsider) limits
to medical care/research (stem cell funding research partially blocked by
NIH/abortion and sexual education eliminated in favor of useless abstinence
guidance to USA and the rest of the world under GOP) in the USA but that
seemed to add politics/religion judgement. The end result of those policies
seems less humane - though some people judge policy by the policy without
regard for outcome, and other people judge policy solely by outcome.

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aaavl2821
China has one big advantage vs the US when it comes to future innovation
potential in biotech: a large cohort of talented young professionals being
trained in drug discovery and development

Big pharma organizations in the US and Europe have been cutting r&d workforces
for years, and most small biotech startups that are filling the innovation gap
hire execs with 20+ years of experience to design and manage the research and
outsourcing the actual work to china. Wuxi, a large contract research org in
china, employs like 1-2,000 discovery chemists. I think Pfizer employs maybe
100

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bhewes
With the aging baby boomer populations of the UN Security Council it is going
to be an interesting next couple of decades. So much brain power will be
devoted to global health.

