Christian Enemark writes that the expansion of interest and investment in biotechnology in East Asia is being driven mainly by infectious disease challenges, economic interests, and security concerns about biological weapons. A key challenge will be to ensure strict biosafety measures extend to all new laboratories - it would be tragically ironic if a leaky laboratory became the source of an infectious disease outbreak crisis. In East Asia, it is clear that biosafety lags dangerously behind expansions in the biotechnology industry.