This year, American independence turns 250 years old. We will gather with our families and in town squares across the country to celebrate the freedoms our founders declared—freedom from foreign control, freedom to chart our own course, and the freedom to protect our families.

Yet even as we mark this milestone, a vital form of American independence is quietly slipping away: our freedom to control the medicines we rely on.

The United States built the world's gold-standard biomedical research enterprise. For generations, American scientists working under rigorous safety and validation standards have developed drugs that have saved millions of lives, from cutting-edge cancer therapies to new treatments for complex rare diseases. It was a system the rest of the world envied. Today, that system is eroding — leaving the door wide open for foreign adversaries like China to take the lead.

The numbers tell a sobering story. Just a decade ago, China accounted for just 17 percent of new drugs entering human trials. Today, that figure has jumped to 46 percent, nearly tripling in 10 years. Meanwhile, the United States........

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