At lunch, Zhang pushed a small pot of yogurt toward me. Until recently, the Chinese seemed to show little interest in yogurt, or in dairy foods in general. As the middle class grows, that situation is changing. “It’s specially developed here,’’ he said, explaining that the millions of strains of beneficial bacteria contained in yogurt included a combination of new probiotics. B.G.I. has several teams trying to sequence the human microbiome, as well as those of other animals. Understanding bacterial genomes may be as valuable to maintaining good health as learning about the DNA we inherit from our parents.

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During lunch, Zhang talked about millet. China’s one-child policy has prevented the rapid population growth that has threatened the economic future of many of the world’s developing countries. But cultivated land is in short supply, and in the coming decades feeding the nation will require sophisticated agricultural techniques. Archeologists believe that people began cultivating foxtail millet more than seven thousand years ago, and that for millennia it was more common than rice in China’s arid north. But rice, with its high yield of grain, gradually won out. Millet is actually a grass, with thin, leafy stems that can reach six feet, higher than a stalk of wheat. Zhang is convinced that a properly bred crop could provide an additional source of food for humans and for livestock.

Researchers at B.G.I. recently planted a test crop not far from their headquarters. “It’s very drought-tolerant,” Zhang told me. “This plant could be valuable in Africa, where it will be needed even more than in China, especially with conditions of global climate change.” The B.G.I. team mapped the location of DNA responsible for specific traits in the plant; then the researchers bred the plants to create seeds with the exact mixture of traits they sought. Technically, this millet is not genetically engineered; no genes were moved around in a laboratory to breed it. Although the company does work with engineered crops, Zhang says that B.G.I. has attempted to avoid the controversy that comes with producing G.M.O.s. “Yes, even in China they are out there,’’ he said, shaking his head mournfully. “It doesn’t make sense, but there are other ways to breed crops, too.”

Another of Zhang’s projects focusses on cassava, a starchy root that is grown principally in Asia and Africa. Five hundred million people rely on cassava as a source of carbohydrates, but it contains few essential micronutrients. Climate change will make cassava harder to grow, but where it does flourish it will become more important than ever. B.G.I. has undertaken an effort to engineer nutrients into the vegetable; that would make it an edible, healthy source of protein that can be eaten throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The company is also working with the Gates Foundation and the International Rice Research Institute to sequence thousands of strains of rice. Farmers could then create crops that might withstand local challenges, like flooding, drought, or particular pests. The United Nations predicts that, by 2100, there will be as many as ten billion people living on the planet, and half of them will rely on rice as a central source of nourishment. There are twenty-four species and up to a hundred thousand varieties within those species—enough to find plenty of useful traits. Until recently, “this research would have been impossible,” Zhang said. “But with today’s technology I have no doubt that we can feed the world.”

In November of 2002, a mysterious disease sickened thousands of people and killed scores in Guangdong, China’s largest province, which includes Shenzhen and has a population of more than a hundred million. Pandemics often originate in the crowded provinces of southern China, pass through Hong Kong, and then spread to the rest of the world. For weeks, the Chinese government, preoccupied with its image abroad, its agricultural exports, and its tourist industry, said nothing. By the time the disease—severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS—was widely recognized, it had infected thousands of people, from Shanghai to San Francisco, and hundreds had died. SARS was an international public-relations disaster for China; if the virus had been more contagious, it would have created the new millennium’s first grave public-health crisis. The Chinese government was humiliated; both the health minister and the mayor of Beijing were dismissed for mishandling the epidemic.

Nearly a decade later, in May, 2011, a rare and deadly strain of E. coli bacteria appeared in Germany. It quickly spread to Sweden, Denmark, and other European countries, and eventually to the United States. More than fifty people died, and thousands got sick. China’s reaction—B.G.I.’s, really—could not have differed more sharply from the country’s response to SARS. The company deployed its genomic technology to determine the infectious strain and reveal the mechanisms of infection. Once a sample of the bacteria had been deposited at a B.G.I. research laboratory in Hong Kong, it took just three days for the team there to sequence the bacterial genome; as the work progressed, company researchers posted details on Twitter. The data were made public under an open license, which meant that any research team could use the information at no cost. Many did. The episode underscored the weaknesses of hewing to the usual scientific approach to such medical issues: produce data, analyze it, publish it in a scientific journal, then eventually release the information to the public. In a 2012 report on the future of scientific collaboration, the Royal Society of Britain credited B.G.I. with an openness that saved lives. “Within a week, two dozen reports had been filed on an open-source site dedicated to the analysis of the strain,’’ the society wrote. “These analyses provided crucial information about the strain’s virulence and resistance genes—how it spreads and which antibiotics are effective against it. They produced results in time to help contain the outbreak.”

In public appearances, B.G.I.’s chairman, Huanming Yang, never fails to stress the collaborative nature of genetics, and American researchers praise the company for its willingness to work with them. Indeed, many of B.G.I.’s projects are led by Western scientists. The company routinely offers to sequence data at reduced prices, or even for free, if researchers share the results of their work. That has helped B.G.I. churn out many articles for prestigious journals, an important measure of success for a relatively new company. (As sequencing becomes cheaper, however, the top scientific publications have begun to regard such research as less worthy of special recognition.) Nationalism, at least in a rapidly advancing field like genomics, is increasingly regarded as a vestige of an era before Twitter and the Internet. “If by nationalism you mean hoarding data, that just isn’t happening,’’ George Church told me. Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, is an adviser to B.G.I. and one of the company’s most visible proponents. “I am just glad that there is somebody in the world who has the priorities and the money to do this—to hold this in place while the rest of us are getting our act together.’’

B.G.I.’s sequencing data have already produced unexpected insights into human evolution. In 2010, the company, along with a team of evolutionary biologists at the University of California at Berkeley, compared the genomes of fifty Tibetans, all of whom lived in villages at elevations of fourteen thousand feet or higher, with those of forty Han Chinese who lived in Beijing. Each subject had ancestors who had lived in the same region for at least three generations. Researchers found significant genetic differences between the two groups. Ethnic Tibetans appear to have split off from the Han people about three thousand years ago—an instant, in evolutionary terms. The Tibetans’ rapid adaptation enabled them to thrive with low oxygen levels at high altitudes. The research team discovered at least thirty genes with mutations that had become more prevalent in Tibetans than in Han Chinese. Nearly half of those genes turned out to be related to the ways in which the body metabolizes oxygen. One particular variant was discovered in fewer than ten per cent of the Han but in nearly ninety per cent of the Tibetans. “This is the fastest genetic change ever observed in humans,” Rasmus Nielsen, a professor of integrative biology at U.C. Berkeley, said at the time. Nielsen led the statistical analysis. “For such a very strong change, a lot of people would have had to die simply due to the fact that they had the wrong version of a gene.”

The influence of heredity on intelligence is complex, involving thousands of genes interacting in such intricate ways that researchers have not yet managed to draw genetic patterns. It’s possible that they never will. But B.G.I. has begun to try, and while scientists at the company take exceptional pains to say there is nothing secretive or threatening about its Cognitive Genomics project, the work has already raised questions in the West. “In twenty to forty years, at least in the developed world, most babies could be conceived through in-vitro fertilization, so that their parents can choose among embryos,’’ Hank Greely, a professor at Stanford Law School and the director of the university’s Center for Law and the Biosciences, told me. Greely’s book on the ethical implications of genomics and human reproduction, “The End of Sex,’’ will be published next year. “That way, the parents or someone else can select among a limited number of embryos with the combination of genes they most want to see in their offspring. It’s going to happen. And China will have fewer cultural and legal barriers to it than we will see in the United States.’’