The Great Power Show: The Geopolitical Gene - Biology as Statecraft

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 alchemists, to penicillin, which helped win a world war and vaccine diplomacy of a pandemic still fresh in our memory.

And today, biotechnology sits at the center of both extraordinary opportunity and profound vulnerability. Precision medicine and engineered crops on one side; supply-chain chokepoints in APIs, fermentation capacity, and genetic-sequencing equipment on the other. It is, increasingly, a domain of great-power competition, and, at its hard edge, of military capability.

Manoj's guest for this conversation is Shambhavi Naik, one of India’s premier scholars working at the intersection of biotechnology and public policy, and his colleague at the Takshashila Institution. Together, they map the life sciences as a vector of national power across their full arc. They begin with the deep history of how rulers harnessed, and weaponized, biology. They then trace the emergence of germ theory and the 20th century scientific breakthroughs that reshaped the global balance of power.

From there, the two examine the architecture of regulation, offensive bioweapons programmes, the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, and the verification gap at its heart. Finally, they turn to the present day, where they explore the strategic competition between the United States, China, the European Union, and India; the economic and security dimensions of biotechnology; its emerging military applications; and what the world’s most powerful leaders should be doing about it.

This is a conversation about the most fundamental technology of all…the one that operates on us.

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