There is a question I keep returning to — one that sits underneath the policy debates, the appropriations fights, the executive orders, and the increasingly urgent memos circulating through the national security establishment:

Can America actually make things with biology?

Not design them. Not discover them. Not publish papers about them. Make them. At scale. Reliably. On domestic soil. With a workforce that exists and supply chains that don’t route through adversarial nations.

The answer, right now, is: barely.

And it looks like this. Last year I stood in a pilot biomanufacturing facility — one of the few we have — and watched a team troubleshoot a fermentation run that had gone sideways at 5,000 liters. The organism was producing at bench scale. It had produced at 500 liters. At 5,000 liters, oxygen transfer became the constraint — at least, that’s what the team suspected in real time. The metabolic profile shifted. Yield dropped by a third. The lead process engineer — one of a few hundred people in the country with this specific operational expertise — was working through it with a combination of sensor data, experience, and what I can only describe as biological intuition. There was no model to consult. No binder. No runbook. No second shift that had seen it before. She was debugging a living system at industrial scale, mostly alone, in a building that smelled like warm yeast and sounded like a submarine engine room.

That scene is the bioeconomy. The rest is narration.

I’ve spent two+ years as a commissioner on the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, producing the most comprehensive governmental blueprint for biomanufacturing reindustrialization the United States has published. The NSCEB report is thorough. It is specific. I believe in the architecture. But government reports — even good ones — describe what should happen. They do not describe what it feels like to build in the gap between should and is. And they do not tell the builders, the operators, and the capital allocators where the openings actually are.

That’s what I want to do here. This is the first in a series.

The podcast audio was AI-generated using Google’s NotebookLM.

The Gap Nobody in Washington Understands Viscerally Enough

Two pieces of writing crystallized the biomanufacturing problem for me recently, and neither was about biology.

The first is Aaron Slodov’s “American Shenzhen” framework — a detailed blueprint for rebuilding U.S. hardware manufacturing capacity: government as anchor tenant, 75/25 commercial-to-defense revenue models, special economic zones, streamlined permitting, venture-backed manufacturing startups. The insight is structural: Shenzhen didn’t emerge from a single policy. It emerged from a system — procurement signals, physical infrastructure, workforce pipelines, and regulatory architecture reinforcing each other simultaneously.

The second is Oliver Hsu’s recent primer on factory economics for a16z, which articulates what venture capital is only now internalizing: the IP is the process. In these companies — and biomanufacturing startups are definitionally among them — the moat is not intellectual property in a patent filing. It is the production process itself. The yield curves. The learning rates. The operational knowledge embedded in people and equipment and process.

I read both and thought: this is the framework I wish I could have injected directly into the NSCEB’s deliberations.

Because here is what the data looks like from inside the commission. The United States’ share of global API production has collapsed from roughly 23% to approximately 3% over three decades. More than 90% of generic pharmaceuticals consumed in the U.S. depend on imported ingredients. Industry surveys indicate that roughly 80% of biopharma organizations are actively engaged with Chinese CDMOs. China holds approximately 58% of global synthetic biology patent filings, 28% of biological manufacturing patents, and 30% of novel antibiotics patents. That’s not an edge. That’s installed capacity. That’s a country that has been running production volume while America has been running conferences about it.

The NSCEB report lays this out. The number one message is the urgency. The window for American biomanufacturing reindustrialization is open, but it is not open indefinitely. And the dynamics that will close it are not political. They are economic.

The Learning Curve Is a Race — And We’re Losing It

This is where Hsu’s factory economics framework becomes essential, and where the venture and builder community needs to pay close attention.

Wright’s Law tells us that costs decline predictably with each doubling of cumulative production. The learning curve is the race that defines factory companies. The competitor with more cumulative production has lower costs. Lower costs win more contracts. More contracts mean more production. More production steepens the curve. The advantage compounds.

China is further down the biomanufacturing learning curve than the United States in multiple product categories. Every year America does not build domestic production capacity is a year China accumulates more volume, drives costs lower, and makes the gap harder to close. This is not a static competition. It is a dynamic one, and the dynamics favor whoever starts manufacturing first and fastest.

Now, biology adds a complication that makes this race harder than any hardware equivalent. Biological systems are stochastic. A fermentation run that works at 10 liters may behave differently at 10,000 liters — not because of engineering error, but because living organisms respond to conditions in ways we don’t fully understand. That engineer I watched troubleshooting the 5,000-liter run? She was navigating exactly this problem. The yield curve in biomanufacturing is less predictable than in semiconductors, aerospace, or any other production domain. And yield is the single highest-leverage variable in factory economics. A 20-point yield advantage can create a cost differential that determines who survives.

This is the core tension, and I want to name it precisely because I think it’s the single most important concept in biomanufacturing strategy:

Biomanufacturing fails in circles. It only scales in spirals.

The circle: the learning curve demands production volume, but production volume requires facilities that won’t get built without capital, and capital requires the predictable yields that only come from production experience. No yields, no capital. No capital, no facilities. No facilities, no learning. No learning, no yields. The system is closed. Nothing moves.

The spiral: break into the circle at any point — with government demand signals, with patient capital, with science that steepens the yield curve — and the circle becomes a spiral. Production generates learning. Learning improves yields. Yields unlock capital. Capital builds more facilities. Facilities train the workforce. The workforce improves operations. Operations improve yields. The system opens. Everything moves.

In a circle, you die waiting for certainty. In a spiral, you manufacture your way into it. The circle is what kills startups. The spiral is what makes nations competitive.

The NSCEB understood this. The report’s six pillars — political commitment, private sector mobilization, defense integration, innovation infrastructure, workforce, and allied coordination — are designed as a system specifically to break the circle and start the spiral. Push on every node simultaneously. That’s the architecture.

But here’s what I want to tell the builders and investors directly: the government is going to be slow. The NSCEB report took two years. Implementation will take longer. If you wait for the full system to be in place before you move, you will be too late.

The opportunity is in the gap between the signal and the infrastructure — and that gap is open right now.

How a Builder Wins in the New Landscape

Let me be concrete about this. Instead of listing the plays abstractly, I want to walk through what the next twelve to thirty-six months look like for someone building a domestic biomanufacturing company — and how the NSCEB architecture, as it comes online, changes the game at each stage.

You start with a facility strategy

This is the first decision and the one most biotech founders get wrong, because they’re trained to think about molecules first and production second. In the new landscape, production is the strategy. You need a facility — or access to one — that can run at pilot scale today and commercial scale within three years. The NSCEB recommends a network of precommercial biomanufacturing facilities operated through DOE and DOC, plus a $120 million biopharma manufacturing center under the Defense Bioindustrial Manufacturing Program. If you are a startup, the question is whether you build your own or position to be the anchor tenant in one of these government-catalyzed facilities. Either ...

Ep 61 - The Biomanufacturing Reindustrialization Thesis