Why it’s ambiguous rather than right/wrong

1. Key condition (“$500B of public investment starting around 2020”) did not occur.

   • The U.S. National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative launched in 2022 was accompanied by roughly $2 billion in federal funding across several agencies, far below $500B. (bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov)
   • A 2024–2025 White House update notes that total U.S. federal investments in biotechnology/biomanufacturing since the 2022 bioeconomy executive order are just over $3.5 billion, and that these actions have helped catalyze about $46 billion in combined public and private biomanufacturing projects since the start of the Biden administration—still an order of magnitude below $500B in public money alone. (bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov)
   • In Europe, the Circular Bio‑based Europe Joint Undertaking (CBE JU) and its predecessor have provided about €1.3 billion in EU public funding to bio‑based and biomanufacturing projects since 2014. (cbe.europa.eu)
   • Other national programs (e.g., Canada’s Strategic Innovation Fund support for vaccines and biomanufacturing of about CAD 792 million) are material but still tiny relative to a $500B public spend. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • Putting these together, global public support for biomanufacturing has grown but is tens of billions at most, not $500 billion starting in 2020. Since Friedberg’s prediction is explicitly conditional on that level of public investment, the condition is unmet, so the claim about what would have happened under that policy cannot be directly tested.

2. What has happened in biomanufacturing since 2020 (context, not a direct test of his claim).

   • Next‑generation/advanced biomanufacturing markets (especially for biologic drugs) have grown rapidly: estimates put the next‑gen biomanufacturing market at about $18–19B in 2020 and project growth to $80–85B+ by 2031, driven largely by pharmaceuticals and biologics. (statista.com)
   • Separate market reports show biomanufacturing revenues in the mid‑tens of billions in the mid‑2020s, with strong CAGRs and dominance by biopharmaceutical applications. (pharmiweb.com)
   • Biomanufacturing is also expanding into materials: companies such as Modern Meadow use biofabrication to produce lab‑grown or bio‑based leathers and textiles, while broader “biodesign” work is scaling mycelium composites, bacterial cellulose, algae‑based polymers and other bio‑fabricated materials for applications in packaging, textiles, construction and more. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • EU and U.S. strategies now explicitly highlight biomanufacturing and bio‑based materials as strategic sectors, and programs like CBE JU have financed multiple first‑of‑a‑kind biorefineries and bio‑based materials plants. (cbe.europa.eu)

3. Assessment

   • Friedberg’s directional intuition—that large, coordinated public investment could strongly accelerate biomanufacturing and drive expansion from food into pharma and materials—is consistent with how smaller but real investments have played out so far. However, his specific counterfactual was: if about $500B in public money were deployed starting around 2020, adoption would be substantially accelerated and the sector would rapidly expand from food into pharmaceuticals and materials.
   • Because the $500B public investment never actually happened, we cannot observe the world he was describing and thus cannot empirically confirm or refute the magnitude of acceleration he predicted.

Conclusion: The core prediction is a counterfactual conditional whose trigger condition (≈$500B public investment starting around 2020) has not been met. Therefore, whether his “$500B would substantially accelerate adoption and rapidly expand biomanufacturing from food to pharma to materials” is ambiguous given real‑world data, rather than clearly right or wrong.