Twist CEO Emily Leproust Supports Trump Tariffs
Emily Leproust has thrown in her support for Trump tariffs, suggesting that there should be increased tariffs on DNA synthesis for IP reasons:
“When a pharma company sends their DNA to us, they are sending us their IP. When they are sending that DNA to our competition in China, they are sending their IP. And there are very strong rules in the US around IP protection and transparency, and those are not quite the same in other countries,” Leproust said.
The whole comment submitted to the Bureau of Industry and Security is quite interesting and worth reading. My summary goes like this:
Salaries are lower in China, that’s not fair.
Twist use an advanced automation system, so we don’t need people. This makes us very competitive (note Twist ran at a loss of >$200M for the past three years1).
Don’t tell China how to make DNA used in Pharma because that discloses IP to China.
We have better Biosecurity than China.
Twist only uses <30% of it’s manufacturing capacity.
The United States should invest in domestic DNA synthesis supply chains. (and by implication other US companies should be forced to support this via increased tariffs).
Even shipments of DNA <$800 should be subject to tariffs, because there are a lot of those.
Twist likes “Administration’s America First Trade Policy”.
Let’s unpack this a little:
China Is Too Cheap (1,5,6,7,8)
Statements 1, 5, 6, 7 and 8 all appear to be suggesting that non-domestic manufacturing is too cheap and they can’t compete. As such it just seems to be playing into the general Trump administration thesis around Tariffs. And nothing really unique to DNA Synthesis.
Trumps Tariffs don’t seem to be primary about economic realities2. Twist appear to be playing into this in an effort to promote their own interests.
IP (3)
If you really believe this, it suggests that there should be a total ban on Pharma performing DNA synthesis outside of the US. It’s not a cost thing, if a company sends a $500 synthesis run outside the US it leaks as much IP as $10B in synthesis of the same material.
In any case, I suspect there are greater threats to IP leakage than DNA synthesis. In many cases we want the manufacturing processes to be widely disclosed/discussed for public health reasons and there may be better ways to protect IP here (such as enforcement of patents).
Biosecurity (4)
Similarly the biosecurity angle doesn’t make much sense in terms of tariffs. If you want to “prevent the possibility of this technology being used for nefarious purposes”. Those nefarious actors are unlikely to be dissuaded by a small additional tariff…
Summary
Twist’s statements appear to play into the Trump administration tariff project in an effort to protect and expand their own business. The IP and Biosecurity angles seem weak.
Perhaps this will work in Twist’s favor in the short term.
Longer term… this doesn’t seem like a positive direction.
This video provides a view on Trump tariffs that makes sense to me. Here are a couple of key quotes:
“Trumps tariffs feel counter productive on any economic picture of reality… You can imagine intellectually targeted Tariffs based on solid bipartisan consensus, thereby making targeted tariffs stability last and the world can respond to that appropriately..”
“We’ve got a situation where the leader acts recklessly to clear the political scene. Much of Trumps policies…are about deletion, to clear space…for a leader to be beyond the law. So we’ve got shifting conceptions of what the leader… wants… taking priority over economics… So this is not economic rationality but the rationality of making economic policy subservient to the enterprise of putting the leader beyond the law… And…economic rationality becoming subservient to techniques used to put the leader beyond the law, for example blaming foreigners becoming a central feature of economic policy.”