As bioengineering capabilities continue to advance, JaimeYassif says that it will be critical to ensure biosecurity safeguards keep up. She argues that “the world is nowhere near establishing strong enough guardrails”
—the potential building blocks of a dangerous pathogen—could be just an online order away. In recent years, the cost ofsynthesis has continued to plummet, new suppliers have emerged in countries around the world, and bench-top synthesis devices that make it easier for scientists to printEven more concerning, one of the main barriers to a step-by-step blueprint to assemble thatinto a transmissible, lethal virus could be no more than a paywall in a peer-reviewed academic journal.
Growing concerns about potentially risky dual-use bioscience research were highlighted most recently around research at Boston University involving an engineered variant of the covid virus. Earlier controversies included experiments on the lethal H5N1 avian-flu virus that made it more transmissible among humans, and an article showing how to use mail-orderto synthesise the horsepox virus—a close cousin of smallpox—from scratch. These incidents raised troubling questions.
One major challenge is that the barriers to entry for engineering biology are falling, making it possible for a broader range of actors, including those with nefarious intent, to use these technologies. For example, it is now easier than ever to read, write, and edit—the underlying blueprint for all life on earth—and to shape the fundamental properties of biological systems or even build them from scratch.
According to the Global Health Security Index, which measures biosecurity and pandemic preparedness capacity across 195 countries, as of 2021, 94% of countries had no national-level oversight measures for dual-use research. There is also no international organisation dedicated as its top priority to reducing these risks, notwithstanding the critically important work of theand the Biological Weapons Convention.
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