PERSPECTIVES

Perspectives: Governing High Technology in an Age of Scientific and National-Security Risk

By Sally Ann Vazquez-Castellanos, Esq.

One of the stories I remember most vividly from the beginning of COVID-19 is that of Dr. Li Wenliang. Here is another interesting article developed with the help of ChatGPT.

Li was the young ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital who, in late December 2019, warned fellow physicians in a private WeChat group about patients suffering from what appeared to be a SARS-like illness. Screenshots of his messages circulated beyond the group. Chinese authorities subsequently accused him of spreading rumors, and Li was among the physicians questioned by authorities. He signed a police admonition concerning his statements.

Weeks later, Li contracted COVID-19 after treating an infected patient. He died on February 7, 2020. He was 34 years old.

His story stayed resonates with me. After all this time, I have not forgotten.

Last week, unexpectedly, it came back to mind while I was sitting in a theater in Las Vegas watching ONE.

I had gone to see a performance. I left thinking about technology and about what people and powerful institutions can do to other people’s lives.

The production’s use of sound, light, projection, movement, digital effects and an extraordinarily coordinated technical environment reminded me how sophisticated the systems surrounding us have become. There is nothing inherently sinister about immersive technology. To the contrary, entertainment demonstrates what technology can accomplish creatively when engineering and human imagination work together. Or, is there. Perhaps we’ll get to learn more together via Perspectives later on down the road.

But the experience caused me to think about the other systems increasingly operating around us: artificial intelligence, data collection, telecommunications networks, facial recognition, cybersecurity systems, biotechnology and the enormous surveillance capabilities available to governments and private companies.

It also brought me back to a question that has followed much of my work for Perspectives:

How should societies govern high technology when scientific capability, national-security interests and commercial development move faster than the institutions responsible for oversight?

That question became unavoidable during COVID.

COVID, Information and Institutional Trust

Li’s story matters because it was fundamentally about information.

Who possessed information? Who was permitted to communicate it? How quickly could scientific information move through institutional channels? And what happens when an emerging public-health threat collides with governmental concerns about misinformation, public order or national security?

Those questions should not be confused with the separate—and still contested—question of exactly how SARS-CoV-2 originated.

More than six years after the beginning of the pandemic, the origins debate remains unresolved. Scientific assessments have produced evidence supporting zoonotic emergence, while the possibility of a research-related incident has remained the subject of governmental, intelligence and congressional investigation. Different U.S. intelligence agencies have reached different assessments, often with low or moderate confidence.

Those distinctions matter.

Uncertainty is not evidence of conspiracy. But uncertainty is also not a reason to stop asking questions.

Have we stopped asking questions?

That principle becomes particularly important when dealing with emerging technologies and national security.

Fauci, Wuhan and the Importance of the Record

Dr. Anthony Fauci inevitably became part of this controversy because of his position as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases during the pandemic and because NIH-funded research, EcoHealth Alliance and research conducted in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology subsequently became subjects of intense congressional scrutiny.

The resulting debate has often collapsed several distinct questions into one.

Did SARS-CoV-2 originate through zoonotic transmission?

Could a laboratory-associated incident have occurred?

What coronavirus research was being conducted in Wuhan?

What research did U.S. institutions fund directly or indirectly?

How was “gain-of-function” research defined under the applicable federal policies?

What did American public-health officials know at various points during the earliest weeks of the outbreak?

And what did they communicate publicly?

Those are related questions. They are not the same question.

That is why contemporaneous records matter. NIH’s publicly available FOIA library includes Fauci correspondence, EcoHealth Alliance materials and records concerning coronavirus research. Congressional investigations have produced additional documents and testimony. Those primary materials deserve careful examination independently of the political characterization placed upon them.

Please remember that I am in a bit of a news black out of sorts myself. I understand this story has been moving through multiple controversies—but I thought it interesting to revisit an old but necessary chat.

The controversy surrounding Fauci continues. But Perspectives should resist turning unresolved scientific questions into established conclusions merely because they have become politically contentious.

The larger issue is institutional accountability.

The Code Breaker

During COVID, I was also listening on Audible to Walter Isaacson’s The Code Breaker. I was riveted.

The timing probably contributed to my reaction to the book. So did the controversy that led to me developing Perspectives and It’s Personal.

The world was confronting a virus at the same moment I was listening to the history of a technology that allows scientists to manipulate the fundamental biological code of living organisms.

Isaacson’s book centers substantially on Jennifer Doudna and the development of CRISPR-Cas9. Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier demonstrated how a bacterial defense mechanism could be transformed into a programmable gene-editing system.

The implications were staggering.

CRISPR offered the possibility of treating genetic disease by altering DNA itself. But almost immediately, the scientific breakthrough generated another question:

Who owned it?

The CRISPR Patent Battle

The resulting patent dispute became one of the most consequential intellectual-property contests in modern biotechnology.

The University of California group associated with Doudna and Charpentier—commonly referred to in the patent proceedings as CVC—and the Broad Institute, associated with Feng Zhang, disputed priority over important applications of CRISPR-Cas9 in eukaryotic cells.

The distinction is critical.

Doudna and Charpentier’s foundational work demonstrated CRISPR-Cas9 as a programmable DNA-cutting system. Zhang and other researchers subsequently demonstrated its operation in eukaryotic cells—the complex cells found in animals, plants and humans.

The patent question therefore became considerably more precise than the popular formulation of “Who invented CRISPR?”

Patent law asks different questions from the Nobel Committee.

Scientific discovery, conception, reduction to practice, patentable invention, claim scope and commercial licensing are related concepts, but they are not interchangeable.

That distinction continues to matter today.

In 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated an important Patent Trial and Appeal Board determination concerning conception and returned the priority dispute to the PTAB after concluding that the Board had applied an incorrect legal standard.

In March 2026, however, the PTAB again ruled in Broad’s favor on the disputed priority question involving CRISPR-Cas9 in eukaryotic cells.

The decision does not mean that Broad simply “owns CRISPR.” It’s been reported that the continuing dispute illustrates how a foundational technology can become divided among overlapping intellectual-property rights, research institutions, commercial licensees and emerging biotechnology companies.

And that is where the story becomes larger than patent law.

When Science Becomes a Platform

CRISPR began as scientific research. It became intellectual property. Intellectual property became commercial infrastructure. Commercial infrastructure attracted enormous investment.

We have watched variations of this progression before.

The internet moved from government and university research into global commercial infrastructure.

Artificial intelligence moved from academic laboratories into platforms capable of influencing employment, communications, education, advertising, national security and political discourse.

Neurotechnology is beginning a similar transition. I fear I may have some of my own understanding of that type of technology.

Once a technology becomes foundational, ownership is no longer merely a private commercial matter. Questions of access, interoperability, competition, privacy, security and public welfare inevitably follow.

CRISPR adds something even more fundamental:

human biology. Today, I would say that we must care about dignity and human rights as well. This in the wake of a decision to live stream an execution. Where we are at today is the demonstration of a lack of humanity.

He Jiankui and the Line Science Crossed

That concern became tangible in 2018 when Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced that he had used CRISPR to modify embryos that resulted in the birth of gene-edited children. This is another area of concern.

He reportedly targeted a gene to confer resistance to HIV. Chat tells me that the scientific community reacted with extraordinary alarm.

The controversy involved questions about informed consent, medical necessity, research ethics, off-target genetic effects and germline modification (perhaps I will have a further chat on that later)—changes capable, at least potentially, of being inherited by future generations.

The phrase “designer babies” suddenly stopped sounding entirely hypothetical.

China subsequently prosecuted He, and he was sentenced to imprisonment for illegal medical practice.

The episode demonstrated something that has become increasingly important across high technology:

The ability to do something technologically does not answer whether it should be done.

Law, ethics and institutional oversight exist precisely because technical capability and societal legitimacy are different questions.

Surveillance and the Other Side of the Technology Question

That brings me back to ONE.

The technological sophistication that makes an immersive theatrical environment possible belongs to the same broader technological age that has produced extraordinarily sophisticated systems for collecting, combining and analyzing information.

That does not make entertainment surveillance.

The distinction is important.

My observation is instead about technological capability.

The sensors, networks, databases, machine-learning systems and computing infrastructure developed for beneficial purposes can also contribute to systems of monitoring and control.

This is where the concept of surveillance capitalism becomes relevant. Commercial platforms increasingly derive value from observing behavior, collecting information, constructing profiles and predicting future conduct.

Governments have different objectives, including legitimate national-security and law-enforcement interests. But governmental surveillance raises its own constitutional, statutory and human-rights concerns.

The difficult question is therefore not whether surveillance is categorically good or bad.

It is how surveillance power should be constrained, authorized, audited and challenged.

China, Cyber Operations and National Security

China provides an important case study, but again precision matters.

PBS FRONTLINE has reported extensively on allegations of Chinese economic espionage, cyber intrusions and intellectual-property theft directed at American businesses. U.S. government agencies have separately attributed significant cyber campaigns to actors associated with the People’s Republic of China.

The United States also has powerful intelligence and surveillance capabilities of its own.

That broader context matters because the problem is not reducible to one nation.

Modern states increasingly view:

as strategic national assets.

The enormous 2022 Shanghai police database leak provided another dimension to the problem. Reporting indicated that a database containing information associated with potentially hundreds of millions—and reportedly as many as approximately one billion—Chinese residents had been exposed or offered for sale.

The incident illustrates an uncomfortable truth about surveillance systems:

The creation of enormous centralized datasets can itself create enormous security vulnerabilities.

A database constructed for public security can become a target for hackers.

A commercial behavioral dataset can become intelligence.

A health database can become a cybersecurity target.

Biometric information cannot simply be replaced like a compromised password.

And genetic information presents an even more difficult problem because it is both intensely personal and partially shared with biological relatives.

Surveillance Capitalism Meets National Security

This is where the different strands of the story begin to converge.

COVID taught us something about the importance of scientific information.

Li Wenliang’s experience demonstrated the consequences that can follow when information encounters institutional control.

The origins controversy demonstrated the difficulty of reconstructing scientific events after trust has deteriorated.

The Fauci controversy demonstrates why contemporaneous records, precise terminology and institutional transparency matter.

The Code Breaker demonstrates the enormous promise of biotechnology and the commercial consequences of controlling foundational innovation.

The CRISPR patent dispute demonstrates how quickly scientific discovery becomes intellectual property and economic infrastructure.

He Jiankui demonstrated what can happen when technological capability outruns ethical consensus.

Cyber operations demonstrate why technological leadership has become a national-security concern.

And surveillance systems demonstrate why security itself can create new risks to privacy and liberty.

These are not separate conversations anymore.

The Governance Problem

Artificial intelligence is accelerating.

Biotechnology is accelerating.

Neurotechnology is accelerating.

Surveillance technology is accelerating.

Cyber capabilities are accelerating.

The institutions governing those technologies—courts, legislatures, regulators, universities, international organizations and democratic processes—move considerably more slowly.

That mismatch may be one of the defining governance problems of our time.

National security matters.

Innovation matters.

Scientific freedom matters.

Privacy matters.

Human rights matter.

None of those principles disappears simply because another one becomes urgent.

The challenge is maintaining them simultaneously.

Perhaps that is what stayed with me after ONE.

I went to see a performance. I left thinking about COVID, Li Wenliang, The Code Breaker, CRISPR, surveillance, cyber conflict and the extraordinary technological systems increasingly surrounding us.

Technology can entertain us. It can protect us. It can cure disease. It can connect us. It can also observe us, profile us, manipulate information about us and—in the case of biotechnology—potentially alter us.

The question is no longer whether these technologies are coming.

They are already here.

The more important question is whether our institutions, laws and ethical traditions can evolve quickly enough to govern them without sacrificing either innovation or human dignity.

That is a conversation worth continuing.

Sources & Further Reading

COVID-19, Li Wenliang and Origins

CRISPR and Biotechnology

Cybersecurity, China and Surveillance

Disclosure: This article was developed with research and editorial assistance from OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Sources should be independently reviewed before publication.

Legal Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship.

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