That’s what I’m thinking. If we can restrict EUV technology to the West then why can’t we restrict DNA manufacturing? Not to the West in this case but to capable governments like with Nuclear power.
[0] "43 freight containers and weighing in at 165 tons." - https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2024/12/03/asml-releases...
[1] not in red blood cells
Versus EUV which one could dump literally unlimited amounts of money into solving and still probably fail for decades.
EUV is the pinnacle of a highly advanced supply chain, you could clone it but it requires many billions of dollars of R&D and massively specialized components; an economy like China likely can support the manufacturing tree required.
I would not be surprised if DNA printers seem end up closer to EUV or even more commoditized, if they are an extension of how all pharma/biotech manufacturing and research gets done.
But this is ultimately contingent on what the technology tree looks like. You couldn’t prevent diffusion of 3D printed ghost guns, even if you wanted to.
I will give you a classic example, the Lipid Nanoparticle used for the delivery of mRNA vaccine is the real lynchpin of covid vaccines. The media never talks about it. Any biology student knows how lipid bilayers work (they are the basic building block of cells, it's like asking a programmer what a terminal is). But the process of manufacturing those lipid nano particles at scale was the main bottleneck for delivering mRNA to the target cell. That was the trade secret. It's not sexy or hot like mRNA so the media doesn't talk about it. It's why many developing countries tried to make their own vaccines and failed completely. The mRNA was the easy part but what use is a bunch of mRNA if you can't get them delivered to cells?
Any biology student (even high school ones) can describe how a cell membrane works. But designing a man-made one that can be created at scale and be guaranteed to fuse with mammalian cells is mostly a matter of trial and error. It's a bit like finding viable pseudo linear memory use alternatives to the basic attention architecture in machine learning. Every lab has their own take on it.
With AI nowadays the search space of viable biotech ex nihilo experimentation is much smaller given that you can just prompt it to give you plausible protocols.