The need to quash outbreaks, quickly create medicines, stress-proof crops and fend off other 21st century threats is providing a lucrative arena for biotech companies to sell their services.

Why it matters: But the infrastructure to support such ambitions is increasingly recognized by the U.S., China and other countries as a linchpin of national security and economic strategy, putting it squarely at the center of geopolitics.

• There is "tremendous competition for generating that ability and capturing that ability from the great powers," say Raj Panjabi, former National Security Council senior director for global health security and biodefense.
• The market for biologically engineered and produced materials, medicines, fuel and food could be worth between $4 trillion and nearly $30 trillion globally each year by 2030.
• Biology is the "last domain of engineerable science" and will be one of the greatest creators of economic value in the 21st century, says Matt McKnight, general manager of biosecurity at the synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks.

Driving the news: Beijing's biotech ambitions are getting attention on Capitol Hill with new proposed legislation that could derail China's biggest biotech company's operations in the U.S.

• The House Select Committee on China last week introduced a bill to ban groups that receive federal funds from buying equipment and services from "foreign adversary biotech companies," Peter Sullivan and Adriel Bettelheim report for Axios Pro. Companion legislation is due to be marked up in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
• A target of the new bill is Chinese genomic sequencing behemoth BGI Group — which appears on the U.S. Department of Defense blacklist of Chinese military-linked companies that operate in the U.S. — and its affiliates.
• The bill points to BGI's global genomic data collection efforts, its obligation under Chinese law to transfer data to the country's government if requested and its alleged links to the Chinese military as national security threats.
• BGI didn't respond to a request for comment but told GenomeWeb this week that it doesn't have access to American patients' personal genomic data and denied allegations it supported surveillance of ethnic minorities in China through the collection of genomic data.

Between the lines: The new attention on biotech exposes a bigger concern about the global playing field.

• "All nations realize they need to invest in biosecurity and biotech, but most need to buy it from somewhere or partner with someone," McKnight says, adding their options boil down to Western or Chinese companies.
• BGI and its affiliates offer an array of integrated products and services, including DNA sequencing machines, mass spectroscopy analysis of proteins, diagnostic tests, reagents, and data storage and management.
• That kind of one-stop shopping isn't available from Western companies, leaving their customers to figure out how to integrate those systems by themselves. They also haven't been able to compete with BGI on costs.

"The U.S. doesn't have anything akin to BGI," says Anna Puglisi, a senior fellow at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, adding that China's industrial policies and subsidizing of companies "basically create an unequal playing field."

• What they're saying: BGI Group has said it is a private company and is not state-owned or state-controlled, and it argues the new legislation would drive it from the U.S. market and "restrict competition."

BGI has nearly 400 subsidiaries and affiliates globally, with most of them in China, says Puglisi, who is the author of a forthcoming report about the firm.

• Looking at public filings and financial documents CSET researchers found "the majorities of stakeholders are government-related or government associated, or funding comes from guidance funds," she says. "So this is really not like a private company."

How it works: Biocompetition falls into two buckets: the collection of data required to drive understanding of what genes do and all the potential power that comes from that in the form of medicines, crops and materials — and the supply chains to do it.

• Through the COVID pandemic, BGI has helped to set up genetic-testing sites in more than 20 countries, which have raised concerns about collecting and sharing genomic data.
• Western companies, some of which are also working with countries to establish biosurveillance infrastructure, say they respect human rights and data privacy but struggle to compete on what they view as an unequal playing field.
• Ginkgo's "bioradar" to monitor pathogens is being used in about a dozen countries around the world. The company is now partnering with Illumina, which dominates the U.S. sequencing market, "on expanding biosecurity capabilities globally" by using Illumina products in network.

The big picture: Global economic and tech competition has evolved from being centered on engines, steel and other legacy technologies to 5G equipment, semiconductor chips and biotech.

• "The issue is the same" for these emerging and disruptive technologies, Puglisi says. "How do you deal with China's national champions that ... compete across a wide range of technology areas?"

What to watch: Countries are choosing whom they partner with in building their biotech and biosecurity infrastructure — BGI, Western companies or a combination of both.

• Serbia, which worked with BGI to establish a precision medicine institute, has since announced a planned partnership with Ginkgo.
• There are also questions about how aggressively the U.S. will respond — domestically and abroad. The U.S. State Department raised the alarm globally about 5G.
• "The biotech space is heating up on the Hill," says one congressional staffer. "There is so much room to shake it up."
• Moving too fast to lock out Chinese biotech tools risks disrupting U.S. research efforts and bioproduction because BGI and its affiliates are so deeply embedded in National Institutes of Health-funded clinical trials and approved therapies, TD Cowen analysts wrote in a research note this week.

The bottom line: "The way in which computer science transformed the 20th century, biosciences will transform the 21st," Panjabi says. "This is biology's century."

Geopolitics shaped the evolution of sign languages around the world, according to a new study.

Why it matters: Sign languages have been "marginalized, underdocumented and understudied," leaving a gap in understanding about human communication, the researchers write.

What they did: Computational tools have revealed how different spoken languages are related, helping to trace the histories of the people who speak them.

• Applying those same tools to sign languages has been more difficult because the historical records about sign languages are thin and the languages are documented as static images even though they are practiced using fluid movements of gestures, the researchers write today in the journal Science.
• A team led by Natasha Abner, a professor of linguistics at the University of Michigan, analyzed the relationship between 19 sign languages by coding different parameters of a sign's form including handedness (one- or two-handed), the number of selected fingers, and the location of the signing space in relation to the body and movement.

What they found: The analysis revealed two separate sign language families — European and Asian — that don't appear to have had any long-term contact between them.

• They also described a family of Western European sign languages broadly influenced by French sign language. "During the rapid expansion of deaf education in the 18th and 19th centuries, many schools and teachers had connections to France and the French educational system," they write.
• A cluster of Czech, Austrian and German sign languages shaped by exchanges in the Prussian kingdom and Austro-Hungarian Empire "resist a purely geographic explanation and affirm that languages reflect the histories of the lands and peoples using them."
• They also detected two subfamilies of Asian sign languages.
• The authors note that "although our dataset is large relative to those of other work on sign languages, the number of languages studied is small in comparison to the scope of many spoken language studies."

The big picture: The methods "offer promise in overcoming the disparities in our understanding of the histories of diverse languages and communities," the team writes.

The untapped potential of stem cells in menstrual blood (Sneha Khedkar — Knowable)

How cancer hijacks the nervous system to grow and spread (McKenzie Prillaman — Nature)

Scientists found a major clue why 4 of 5 autoimmune patients are women (Mark Johnson and Sabrina Malhi — Washington Post)

Sea otters and their insatiable appetite for plant-eating marsh crabs helped save a California marshland from erosion, according to a new study, Axios' Bec Falconer writes.

The big picture: "It would cost millions of dollars for humans to rebuild these creek banks and restore these marshes," said co-author Brian Silliman, a professor of marine conservation biology at Duke University, in a statement accompanying the study published yesterday in the journal Nature.

• "The sea otters are stabilizing them for free in exchange for an all-you-can-eat crab feast."

State of play: Sea otters were once hunted to near-extinction in Elkhorn Slough, a salt marsh-dominated coastal estuary in central California's Monterey Bay.

• The landscape has changed notably since the sea otters returned to their former habitat in the decades following the introduction of conservation efforts.
• "[I]n areas the sea otters had recolonized, salt marshes and creek banks were becoming more stable again, despite rising sea levels, increased water flow from inland sources, and greater pollution," said the study's lead author, Brent Hughes, a Sonoma State University marine ecologist, in a statement.

What they did: The researchers conducted large-scale surveys across 13 tidal creeks and small-scale field experiments at five locations around the estuary for nearly a decade in order to examine sea otters' impact on the environment.

• The animals were excluded from some test sites but were able to recolonize in other places.

What they found: The researchers discovered erosion had slowed by up to 80% to 90% at sites with large populations of otters — and some marshes were expanding.

• "The return of the sea otters didn't reverse the losses, but it did slow them to a point that these systems could restabilize despite all the other pressures they are subject to," Hughes said.
• "That suggests this could be a very effective and affordable new tool for our conservation toolkit."

Yes, but: Marine biologist Johan Eklöf of Stockholm University, who was not involved in the new study, told ABC News the conservation of otter populations was only a short-term solution against coastal erosion. He said trying to prevent factors including pollution and sea level rise would be better in the long term.

The bottom line: "Most ecologists maintain that we need to reduce the stressors," he added.