From Hong Kong to Tianjin: synthetic biology's turn to Asia

In October 2008 the fourth international synthetic biology congress, SB4.0, met at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, on a hillside above Clear Water Bay. The first three meetings had been held at MIT, at Berkeley and at ETH Zurich. Hong Kong was the series' first stop in Asia, and in hindsight the location said more about the field's future than most of the talks did.

At the time, attention was elsewhere. The money in 2008 was oil money. BP had committed half a billion dollars over ten years to a new energy biosciences institute led by UC Berkeley, and oil, chemical and agribusiness giants were signing deals with start-ups that promised to turn sugar into fuel using engineered microbes. Critics in Hong Kong warned that a "sugar economy" would pull land, water and crops away from food, and that governance had barely moved since activists objected to the field's self-governance plans in 2006. Even so, a civil society panel on the global social impacts of synthetic biology made it onto the program, with speakers from Asian and Latin American groups, which would have been hard to picture two years earlier.

More than sixteen years on, the fuel dream has mostly faded. The Asian location has turned out to be the lasting story.

Why Hong Kong mattered

A conference venue is not a strategy. Still, SB4.0 caught a shift that was already under way. Asian universities had begun sending student teams to iGEM, the international synthetic biology competition then still run out of MIT. Chinese researchers had contributed to the Human Genome Project and to the large sequencing efforts that followed, and they understood that cheap DNA reading and writing could become an industrial base, not just a research tool. Governments in the region were starting to describe biotechnology as an economic pillar rather than a scientific curiosity.

When the series returned to Asia, at SB7.0 in Singapore in 2017, nobody treated the location as a novelty.

China builds a bioeconomy

The clearest change since 2008 is in China, where synthetic biology has moved from university labs into national planning.

A few markers:

• Scale in fermentation. China already produces most of the world's vitamin C and a large share of bulk amino acids through industrial fermentation. Synthetic biology builds on that base: the same tanks, engineers and supply chains can produce engineered strains' output at scale.
• Big science. Chinese teams at Tianjin University, Tsinghua University and the genomics company BGI built several of the synthetic yeast chromosomes in Sc2.0, the international project to redesign the entire genome of baker's yeast. Their papers appeared alongside American and European groups' in 2017.
• A national plan. In May 2022 China's National Development and Reform Commission published the country's first five-year plan dedicated to the bioeconomy, covering medicine, agriculture, biosecurity and biomanufacturing.
• Political priority. In March 2024 the government's annual work report listed biomanufacturing among the emerging industries it intended to promote. Several cities, Shenzhen and Tianjin among them, have built industrial parks and publicly funded "biofoundries", automated labs that build and test engineered strains at volume.

Not every provincial announcement will produce a working industry. But the direction is clear, and it differs from the 2008 Western model in one important respect: in China, the state sets the agenda and venture capital follows, rather than the reverse.

Starch from carbon dioxide, in a lab

The result that brought this shift to wide public attention came in September 2021. Researchers at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reported in Science that they had made starch from carbon dioxide without plants.

The process had two stages. First, a chemical catalyst used hydrogen to turn carbon dioxide into methanol. Then a designed chain of enzymes, drawn from many different organisms and engineered where needed, converted methanol step by step into starch. The authors reported that, under their lab conditions, the pathway produced starch considerably faster than a maize plant does.

It was a striking piece of pathway engineering, and the coverage it received was understandable. It is worth being precise about what it wasn't. It was a cell-free lab system, not a factory. It depends on hydrogen, which needs large amounts of clean electricity to produce. Its costs and energy balance at scale are unknown. Fields of maize are not about to be replaced by stainless steel.

What the result did show is ambition. The question it was designed to answer – can a country make staple carbohydrates independent of farmland? – is a food security question as much as a scientific one. That framing is common in Chinese biomanufacturing policy, and it should make anyone who followed the 2008 sugar-economy debate pay attention. The worries then were about biomass demand pushing farmers off land. The newer vision is about making farmland less necessary. Both raise the same underlying question: who controls the production of basic goods once it moves into proprietary microbes and patented processes?

A generation trained on iGEM

The quieter shift is in people. iGEM, which began as a small MIT course, became an independent foundation in 2012 and moved its Grand Jamboree from Boston to Paris in 2022. Over the same period Asian participation grew enormously. Chinese universities and secondary schools now send one of the largest national contingents, often the largest, and teams from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and India are regular entrants.

That matters for more than medal tables. iGEM is where many young synthetic biologists first learn the field's tools and also its norms: the habits around biosafety, the expectation of open sharing of parts, the requirement to think about "human practices" and community engagement. A generation of Asian researchers has come up through that culture, and some of them now run labs and companies. The norms will travel with them, adapted to different institutions.

The rest of the region

China is the biggest story but not the only one. Japan adopted a national bio-strategy in 2019 aimed at making its bioeconomy among the world's most advanced. Singapore has invested steadily in synthetic biology research. In August 2024 India's cabinet approved its BioE3 policy, built around high-performance biomanufacturing. The common thread is industrial policy: governments treating the capacity to engineer organisms as something like the capacity to make semiconductors.

What the shift means for governance

When synthetic biology was mainly an American and European field, its governance debates happened in American and European venues, with US security agencies and European ethics councils as the main audiences. That is no longer enough, for at least three reasons.

Biosecurity needs global reach. The screening of synthetic DNA orders, which grew out of the self-governance debates of the field's early conferences, only works if providers everywhere take part. A large and growing share of DNA synthesis, sequencing and biomanufacturing capacity now sits in Asia. China passed a national Biosecurity Law that took effect in April 2021, and Chinese and international scientists drafted the Tianjin Biosecurity Guidelines, a voluntary code of conduct for researchers, the same year. Those are real steps. But there is still no binding international standard for screening, and the major powers are increasingly unwilling to share information about their biotechnology sectors.

Competition is crowding out other questions. Washington now discusses biotechnology largely in national security terms. A US congressional commission on emerging biotechnology has framed the field as a contest with China, and the proposed BIOSECURE Act, aimed at Chinese biotech firms, passed the House in 2024 before being left out of the defense bill in December. When governance becomes mainly about winning, the questions critics raised in 2008 – land use, farmers' livelihoods, who owns the platforms – drop further down the list.

The old agricultural questions now have Asian addresses. In 2008 the fear was that Northern biorefineries would draw sugar and biomass from Southern fields, a concern familiar from the debate over biofuels and transgenic crops. Today some of the largest planned biomanufacturing capacity is in China and India, which are also major agricultural producers with hundreds of millions of small farmers. The impact on rural economies of switching production from fields to fermenters – vanilla, sweeteners, oils, eventually starch – is a domestic policy question there as much as an international one. The language of a "bioeconomy" can also obscure as much as it reveals, as the earlier debate over the green economy showed.

Multilateral forums do exist. The UN Convention on Biological Diversity, whose 2022 biodiversity summit took place under Chinese presidency, has a process for horizon scanning on synthetic biology. The World Health Organization published a global framework on the responsible use of the life sciences in 2022. Neither has the reach or the teeth to shape how national bioeconomy plans are designed.

Back to the hillside

Reading the reports from SB4.0 now, what stands out is how Western the expected future was. The companies named were American and European; the money was from Western oil majors; the critics worried about Northern firms appropriating Southern biomass. The meeting happened in Asia, but the story was still about the West.

That has flipped. The interesting question for 2025 is not whether Asia will be a major center of synthetic biology – it already is – but whether the governance conversation will follow. If the field's rules continue to be written in Washington and Brussels while its factories are built in Tianjin and Shenzhen, the gap between the two will be where the problems collect.