Science and Technology

Every U.S. politician wants to reinvigorate manufacturing, but most are chasing a 20th-century version of it. Visions of blue-collar Americans assembling cars or forging steel might have electoral appeal, but they do not reflect the industries that will meaningfully bolster the U.S. economy and its competitiveness.

High-tech manufacturing of semiconductors and other parts of the artificial intelligence supply chain have received plenty of attention, but these products make up only a narrow slice of the physical economy. To truly revitalize the United States’ manufacturing ability, it needs a new paradigm that can touch all corners of the economy.

Every U.S. politician wants to reinvigorate manufacturing, but most are chasing a 20th-century version of it. Visions of blue-collar Americans assembling cars or forging steel might have electoral appeal, but they do not reflect the industries that will meaningfully bolster the U.S. economy and its competitiveness.

High-tech manufacturing of semiconductors and other parts of the artificial intelligence supply chain have received plenty of attention, but these products make up only a narrow slice of the physical economy. To truly revitalize the United States’ manufacturing ability, it needs a new paradigm that can touch all corners of the economy.

That paradigm is biomanufacturing.

Simply put, biomanufacturing entails using a biological system, usually a living microbe or a specialized protein, to make goods. For millennia, humans have used biomanufacturing, from the fermentation used to produce beer or cheese to the scaling of penicillin production during World War II, and, more recently, the development of recombinant human insulin in the 1970s. Today, biomanufacturing can produce everything from mRNA vaccines to materials used to make plastics.

Soon, a wide range of advanced materials, bulk chemicals, and even cement could be grown in specialized vats and bags using methods that are more precise, resource-efficient, and environmentally friendly than traditional manufacturing. The way we produce agricultural goods, materials, consumer products, and more—as much as 60 percent of the world’s physical inputs—could be transformed by biomanufacturing in the coming decades, a market shift worth trillions of dollars.

The United States, as the pioneer of this industry, still holds a slight lead, particularly across the laboratory tools, vats, specialized consumables, and other technologies that underlie biomanufacturing and enable industrial-scale production. Yet because of its disjointed........

© Foreign Policy