Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz _ December 24, 2020
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this month, John Lee Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence in the Trump administration, wrote that “the People’s Republic of China poses the greatest threat to America today and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II. The intelligence is clear: Beijing intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily, and technologically.”
“There are no ethical boundaries to Beijing’s pursuit of power,” Ratcliffe wrote, adding that China is working to develop “soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities” as part of a scheme to take over “the planet economically, militarily and technologically.”
Last year, Elsa Kania and Wilson VornDick a brief in the Jamestown Foundation claiming that Chinese scientists have been exploring “the potential of biotechnology on the future battlefield”. Some applications could include “brain-machine interfaces”. Since the potential for these technologies is still being explored, many of the possible applications go beyond what people can currently imagine.
One of the avenues of exploration includes the use of CRISPR (an acronym for “clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats”), a new technique for gene editing that has demonstrated unique potential. Chinese scientists are at the forefront of CRISPR technology, unencumbered by the moral and ethical limitations imposed on western scientists. For example, developing the use of gene-edited animals to grow human-like organs. A doctoral dissertation titled “Evaluation and Research on Human Performance Enhancement Technology,” published in 2016 and supported by the Central Military Commission (CMC) Science and Technology Commission envisioned CRISPR as one of three primary “human performance enhancement technologies” that can be utilized to boost personnel combat effectiveness.
Another ethical obstacle is the use of gene modification to enhance healthy subjects. Western scientists currently refrain from this type of research however Ratcliffe’s article implied that China is actively researching the possibility.