America’s Risky Retreat in Biomedical Leadership

By Cory Miller

Sunday, December 21, 2025

 

Biomedical research is now a strategic industry, no different from semiconductor, energy, or defense manufacturing. Yet federal leadership in our country is enacting policies that dismantle one of its most important scientific assets. Reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) plans to end research involving monkeys — a move framed as modernization — strikes at the heart of America’s biomedical capacity at the very moment global competitors are expanding theirs.

 

This is the latest step in Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plan to phase out animal research in the U.S., an ideologically driven effort that sidesteps scientific evidence by exploiting our understandable desire to reduce animal suffering. And make no mistake, ending research with monkeys is not the end goal. It is only the beginning.

 

For most of the last century, research with primates has been a strategic asset at the core of U.S. bioscience, an economic sector that accounts for millions of U.S. jobs and several percentages of GDP. Research with monkeys has enabled breakthroughs that define modern medicine, from cancer immunotherapies to monoclonal antibodies and the neuroscience that underpins treatments for Parkinson’s disease, depression, addiction, and chronic pain. Monkeys, such as cynomolgus and rhesus macaques, are used not because they are convenient, but because their immune systems, metabolism, and physiology most closely mirror those of humans, making them uniquely suited for optimizing treatments and identifying safety risks before experimental therapies are tested in people.

 

China recognized the economic importance of biomedical research years ago. Over the past two decades, its government has heavily invested in building the world’s largest and fastest-growing primate research infrastructure, now housing more monkeys than any other nation on the planet. China’s capacity has enabled fast, large-scale gene-editing models, rapid vaccine development, and neuroscience in ways that U.S. institutions are increasingly unable to match. China’s biomedical dominance is not merely a matter of prestige. It is a lever of economic, technological, and military power enacted by leaders with a clear vision of the unique significance of monkey research in geopolitics today and the future.

 

The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted that biomedical capacity is strategic capacity. Nations with the ability to identify pathogens, design vaccines, test antiviral drugs, and act rapidly in clinical translation are more geopolitically resilient. Countries without such capacity are forced to rely on others — and therefore are vulnerable to scientific, economic, and political instability.

 

The United States emerged from the pandemic stronger in part because President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed mobilized federal science, regulatory authority, and industrial capacity at a scale no other country could replicate. That effort demonstrated what American biomedical power looks like when our federal government acts as a catalyst rather than a constraint.

 

Yet, instead of using Operation Warp Speed as a blueprint to modernize the biomedical pipeline in our country, current federal policy is moving in the opposite direction by narrowing it. Federal leaders at the highest level now treat research with monkeys and other animals as obsolete and inhumane, asserting that it can be replaced by so-called New Approach Methods (NAMs), such as in-vitro systems (lab-based models of cells outside the body, including for entire cell clusters that mimic organs, known as organoids, or organs-on-chips that are designed to recreate organ functions), and complex AI simulations. Replacing proven animal research models with unproven substitutes is not modernization; it is strategic disarmament.

 

NAMs are powerful tools, but they are not “new.” Scientists have used them since the 1950s, and they have been widely used in drug development for 50 years. In all those decades, NAMs have never once, on their own, delivered new therapies to patients.

 

What NAMs have done is serve as invaluable complements to animal research, together producing some of the most transformative therapies of our time, including treatments for cystic fibrosis and spinal muscular atrophy. NAMs refine our questions, and reduce the number of animals used in research, but they cannot answer the most important one: What happens in a living body?

 

NAMs mimic isolated components of human tissue, but they lack blood, immune systems, hormones, and pain — the physiology that determines whether a drug heals or harms. Pour pure alcohol onto brain cells in a dish and they die instantly. Yet metabolized through the body, alcohol can be consumed safely by billions of people. Biology is not a straight line from cell to organism. What works in a dish often fails in the body. And the first test of that failure should not be in a human.

 

Eliminating research with monkeys does not end drug testing on living creatures. It merely shifts the risk to patients — and to children — by moving unknown safety dangers directly into human clinical trials. No serious scientific panel supports this approach. On the contrary, a 2023 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which was commissioned by Congress, explicitly identified primate research as essential national security infrastructure.

 

If the U.S. continues dismantling its monkey research capacity, we will soon depend on foreign scientific systems — and foreign political interests — to study and test treatments and medicines that Americans need.

 

Compounding the problem, U.S. biomedical research is already strained. After adjusting for inflation, National Institutes of Health (NIH) budgets have been effectively flat for two decades. New policy changes at the NIH have further reduced the number of funded grants, driving success rates in some programs to the low single digits. The predictable result is a research culture that avoids risk — precisely the opposite of what a competitive biomedical strategy requires.

 

These vulnerabilities amplify one another: underinvestment, regulatory stagnation, weakened workforce pipelines, and now the dismantling of primate research. China is growing stronger in the places we are weakening.

 

Reversing this decline will require clear-eyed policy choices by federal leaders. First, Congress must view biomedical research as a matter of national security and adopt multi-year, predictable funding for the NIH, similar to the Department of Defense’s model. Second, the U.S. must expand — not eliminate — primate research infrastructure, recognizing it as indispensable for national security. Third, we must restore stability to the scientific workforce by reducing training bottlenecks and investing earlier in young investigators. With funding rates at historically low levels, it means less capacity in labs to train students and fellows. Under the policies of current federal leadership, we risk losing an entire generation of scientists simply because there is not enough money or opportunity to train them.

 

And perhaps most importantly, federal leadership of our biomedical system must be grounded in scientific reality, not ideology. The stakes are too high for symbolic gestures or misinformed crusades.

 

America still holds many medical research advantages. We have the world’s premier basic science system, unmatched biotech capacity, and a culture of innovation that no other nation has replicated (yet). But these strengths are not self-evident. They require continuous investment, strategic coherence, and policies anchored in evidence.

 

If we allow ideologically driven policy to override science — if we dismantle critical research infrastructure while our competitors build theirs — the decline of American biomedical leadership will not be an accident. It will be the result of federal policy choices, and the consequences will be strategic, not symbolic.