At the Shenzhen headquarters of the Chinese genetics
company BGIGroup,there’snoexcuseforpoorhealth.
Employeesareurgedtopunctuatetheirdayswithquick
burstsofhigh-intensityexerciseontheweightbenches,
pullup bars, and spin bikes placed in the open-plan offices’
breakout areas. Riding elevators is officially discouraged. For
those who insist, the company has placed a simple injunc-
tiononthedoors,inEnglishandChinese:“DOSQUATSif
takingthelift.”Forlunch,in-housecoffeebarsoffera selec-
tionoflow-calorie “nutrition meals” as well as a curious
“decreasing serum uric acid series.” During their off hours,
employees set out on arduous group hikes up and down
the verdant mountains surrounding the city, often led by
senior executives for whom physical fitness is a component
of annual performance reviews. “If I get fat, no bonus,” one
jokes, a little anxiously.
BGI’s co-founder, chairman, and animating force, 65-year-
old geneticist Wang Jian, insists on all this exertion not just
because he believes healthy workers are more produc-
tive. He also wants the more than 6,000 employees of his
company, one of the world’s largest producers of genetic
research,tobewalkingadvertisementsfortheirproducts.
Tothatend,employeesandtheirfamiliesareencouraged
tosamplethewares,undergoinga regularbatteryofgenetic
andotherteststoscreenforsuchillnessesascancer,heart
disease,anddementia. Monitoring and prevention plans
areputinplaceforthosewithworrisomeresults.Withthe
rightdiagnosticsandhealthfullifestyles,Wangprofesses,
everyoneatBGIshouldliveto 99 orolder.Itwilltakea
whiletotesttheclaim:Theaverageageofhisemployees
is justover30.
Whole-genome sequencing, the technology that drives
BGI’s business, is no longer particularly new. But Wang says
genomics is about to become the core of modern medicine,
forseveralreasons:Sequencingisbecomingcheaperand
morereliable;researchisadvancingtothepointwhere
geneticfindingscanunderpintreatments;andgovern-
ments—above all, China’s—are encouraging their deploy-
ment at large scale. And he says BGI, which manufactures
sequencing equipment, sells diagnostic tests, and performs
research for drug companies, can be the company to take
it there, becoming China’s first global life-sciences giant in
the process.
Someday soon, Wang predicts, getting your entire genome
sequenced—a far more elaborate enterprise than commercial
tests such as those from 23andMe Inc., which examine only
small portions of a person’s DNA—will be as unremarkable as
getting a vaccination. Such testing will be repeated through-
out your life, informing health decisions, eating habits, and
perhaps even your choice of mate. And it could guide your
medical treatments, eventually provided in BGI hospitals that
specialize in acting on genomic insights. “Nowadays, medi-
cine mostly comes from the industrial revolution. It’s physi-
cal, it’s chemical: Kill the tumor, poison the tumor, burn the
tumor,” Wang says. “We go back to real biology.”
The field of genomics has come a long way since the first
draft sequence of the human genome—the complete list of
the billions of chemical “letters” that make up our DNA—
was unveiled in 2001. The world Wang describes may finally
be possible. And if the challenges of realizing it were purely
technological, then BGI might be better poised than any-
one else to make it happen. But genomics is an ethically
and politically fraught proposition, and for Wang to win
the world over to his vision, he’ll have to answer a funda-
mental question: Why should anyone trust a Chinese com-
pany to do it?Wang takes to the exercise rings at the China National
GeneBank, which BGI operates in Shenzhen