When we talk about what makes a nation strong, we reach instinctively for the familiar levers armies, economies, semiconductors, ships. But running quietly beneath all of them is something older and more intimate, i.e., the mastery of life itself. The ability to cure or to sicken, to feed a population or to starve one, to grow a crop that withstands a drought or a pathogen that crosses a border…Biology has always been an instrument of statecraft—from poisoned wells and court