Zachary Karabell, a Post Opinions contributor, writes “The Edgy Optimist” on Substack.
If you’re a news consumer, you know one thing for certain: The news is bad. Really bad. Wars rumbling. Economies crumbling. Millions taking to the streets. Elections brewing with bitterness and contention.
It was ever thus in the news business, but in the hypercharged social media world, the worse things are, the better for clicks. However, there is so much that never makes the news or is barely noticed — even if it’s eye-poppingly wondrous.
I was just at a health-tech and longevity conference called DOC in the San Francisco Bay Area, and if ever there was a postcard for what is going right in the world, that was it. Not because anyone is promising the end of aging or the eradication of disease and death — there are snake-oil vendors aplenty for that. No, it was a demonstration of just how much time, expertise, care and, yes, money are being devoted to how humans can live a meaningful health span in a world where many of the basic threats to health have been tamed but myriad other issues remain.
First, the money. The National Institutes of Health, which the Trump administration has attempted to politicize, disburses more than $35 billion a year to research labs across the country. In addition, the private sector spent close to $200 billion on health care research and development in 2025. That figure is many billions higher when accounting for investment in tangential fields, including cutting-edge academic research on cellular biology and corporate spending on artificial intelligence models focused on biology or biochemistry.
It’s what the money is being spent on that should offer some hope that the future is not a bleak compendium of bad news. At that conference, there were several hundred clinicians and researchers, all of whom are dedicating their lives to unlocking the nature of cells, aging and the genetic code and translating that into improved quality of care for actual people.
So much of this work takes place in the United States because, until recently, that was where the money and labs were. But now China is pouring billions into health sciences and other research. By some accounts, it now spends more on total R&D than the U.S. does, even though it has a smaller economy. China has also become a powerhouse of academic health and aging research, with its total journal publication output having increased by a factor of more than 30 since 2000.
China’s emergence as a health science innovator should not be seen as a threat. It is instead a boon to humanity — much of that research is published and publicly available just as Western research has been. But it is also a reminder that to push the boundaries of health, a society needs both the will and the resources, and government support of research that doesn’t have immediate commercial application is essential. One good sign for the U.S. was the Biden administration’s creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, a multibillion-dollar initiative in the Department of Health and Human Services to fund cutting-edge biomedical research.
What is telling is that China increased its overall R&D spending at a faster clip than the U.S. in 2024. And in pharmaceuticals, China increased its R&D spending by 20.7 percent per year between 2010 and 2022, compared with 5.5 percent in the U.S. Although the cost of health care in the U.S. continues to rise more than 7 percent per year (far faster than inflation), America isn’t investing enough in the research that will accelerate the next wave of health improvements — from understanding how cells age and regenerate (key to potential cancer cures) to using both artificial intelligence and gene editing to enhance life at every stage from the embryo onward.
The U.S. would do well to emulate China and spend more on research because, ultimately, that research will reduce the cost of health care. Early detection of diseases alone will save hundreds of billions of dollars in future treatment. But the good news is that China’s involvement means the health of humanity doesn’t rise and fall on whether the U.S. gets R&D right.
People would do well to pay more attention to the work that these billions of dollars are funding. The fusion of AI and decades of research about the body could provide vibrant health to the bulk of humanity. The drive to survive and thrive is a basic human impulse, and people are doing more, rapidly, than anyone could have dreamed. It is to humanity’s collective detriment that people don’t pay more attention to that. There is so much going wrong in the world, and not attending to what is going right makes it even worse.
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