My name’s Cameron Wells, and if you’d told me five years ago I’d be running a fermentation line in a biomanufacturing facility outside Bloomington, Indiana, I would’ve laughed you out of the barracks. Back then, I was an Airman First Class in the 3rd Medical Support Squadron, stationed at Travis. Logistics. Paperwork. Syringe kits.

If there’s one chapter in the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology’s final report that lays bare the disconnect between potential and preparedness, it’s Chapter 5. The message is as critical as it is uncomfortable: we are not ready. Not ready to govern the biotechnology age, not ready to build it at scale, and not ready to defend our position in it. That’s not a reflection of a lack of interest or ambition.

This is a guest post from Stephen Turner, who publishes the Paired Ends Substack about genomics, computational biology, and data science. He also happens to be one of the best bioinformatics engineering leaders I’ve ever worked with. Just sayin’. So I wanted him to share his thoughts on how he went from an academic to a leader in industry.

I lost the frogs before I noticed the silence. That sounds backward, but the mind is built for pattern, not absence, and it took days before the void between cricket chirps registered as dread. The rainforest research station where I worked, three stilted cabins and a satellite dish that hiccuped more than it spoke, had always been an orchestra pit. Now the concert was on intermission, and no one had told the audience.

Let’s get one thing clear: in biotechnology, innovation isn’t optional. It’s existential. In Chapter 4 of the NSCEB Final Report , the message is unambiguous - if the United States wants to maintain its leadership in biotechnology and national security, we must out-innovate our strategic competitors. That doesn’t just mean investing more.

At first, no one noticed the grain fields dying. The war wasn't declared with a missile launch. It wasn't announced with tanks, drones, or hackers tapping on keyboards. It started in the soil. The first reports came from a logistics base near Lubbock. A strange blight on the stored wheat stocks, brown lesions on the kernels, a chemical smell no one could quite identify.

There’s a lot of talk these days about “technology races” and “the future of war.” But in biotechnology, we’re not racing toward some far-off sci-fi battlefield, the future has already arrived. Chapter 3 of the NSCEB Final Report makes it brutally clear: The U.S. military is not ready. Not because we lack good scientists. Not because we lack powerful technologies.

Classified Transmission : NBCO Operational Network | Node 19 | Biosentinel Correspondence Clearance : Nova Five Author : Agent Delta-Rook Subject : Field Report: Midwestern Deployment of Modular Biofabrication Unit She stood in the dark, the smell of corn husks and carbon steel mixing in the early morning fog.

The United States has no shortage of good ideas. Biotech breakthroughs are still born here. They still spin out of our national labs, our university incubators, our startup accelerators, and the brains of some truly ridiculous graduate students with wild hair and whiteboards covered in dreams. But too often, those good ideas don’t go anywhere. They stall in a regulatory maze. They fail to raise capital. They never scale.

“State Fourteen is down. Switching contingency feedstock to Vermont and Utah.” I blinked twice to clear the haptic overlay from my vision, watching as a pale blue arc lit up across the Appalachian corridor. Fermentation input lines were rerouting in real-time, wheat husk to algal base to sugarcane waste, just another day in the life of a national biotech grid under siege. It wasn’t a cyberattack. It wasn’t sabotage. It was something worse.

Last week, we hit “publish” on a major milestone for the U.S. biotechnology industry: the final report of the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB). Two years of work. Over 1,800 experts. 180+ pages. And now the real work begins.