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Remember the hot mic that caught Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin talking about organ transplants and immortality? Organs could be swapped in endlessly, they said. People could grow younger. They might even live forever. Xi added that this century, humans may reach 150. It was a rare window into how two autocrats think about biology, time, bodies and control. Now what if I told you that an American public university helped supply and underwrite the dual-use science and research that could serve that ambition? 🚨This is a story about University of Washington and how it helped China develop cutting-edge biotechnology by partnering with Shanghai’s Origincell Technology Group - a firm designated by the Department of War as a Chinese military company. The focal point is Professor Dayong Gao, director of University of Washington’s Center for Cryo-Biomedical Engineering and Artificial Organs. In 2017 he received the Origincell Endowed Professorship from a $1 million company gift. Origincell later described him as chief scientist. University officials stood on stage for the ceremony. His federally supported cryopreservation research, funded by the Pentagon / @NIH / @NSF, lands in Beijing’s dual-use sweet spot. The same methods that preserve living cells and tissues at ultra-low temperatures also scale into industrial biobanks, a capability with obvious civilian uses and darker ones in a state already building genetic repositories in Xinjiang. (YES your tax dollars are funding this) Origincell builds automated freezers and cell-bank systems. It partnered with PLA-linked hospitals, including a million-sample automated biological sample bank billed as military-civil fusion. Chinese-language records have listed Gao with honorary or guest roles at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences and the PLA General Hospital - roles that do not appear on his English UW biography. So basically he had one resume in English, and another in Chinese. After the Pentagon listing, UW stopped future endowment awards and scrubbed public references to the Origincell professorship. The reason the Pentagon is interested in this is because a military that can freeze blood, tissue, and organs can keep wounded troops alive. But haven't we already run this experiment? For years, US taxpayers funded bat coronavirus work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through the shady non-profit EcoHealth Alliance. The NIH later told Congress that experiments produced a chimeric virus that made mice sicker. EcoHealth failed to report required thresholds on time and there was really no oversight. DARPA had already rejected a related proposal as too risky. Then the world got COVID. Officials spent years arguing definitions of “gain of function” while a lab in a police state sat on the data. That is what joint, high-risk biological research with the CCP produced. Public universities sit on the front line of the US science base. They take in billions in federal research money (the University of Washington alone received well over a billion dollars in recent years) while also opening the door to foreign endowments, dual appointments, and joint platforms with entities tied to the CCP’s military and state apparatus. I hope Congress, NSF, NIH, and the Pentagon will look into freezing high-risk awards, map every dual appointment and foreign endowment in biotech and STEM more broadly, require Chinese-language source disclosure, and end the fiction that China is a normal science partner for US universities. cc: @DrJBhattacharya @NIHDirector_Jay @regardthefrost @PattyMurray @SenatorCantwell @SecKennedy @mkratsios47