Biology's Tectonic Shifts and Novel Risks.

AuthorCronin, Audrey Kurth

Many people worldwide can now read, write, alter, and share the building blocks of life. This development is as significant as the invention of the printing press or the discovery of human genetics, and it is changing what biology is and why it matters. Biology has become engineering, using computer power to make or create anything with a genetic code. New tools and approaches emerge daily, especially at the intersections of biology, materials science, computing power, big databases, and artificial intelligence. So, assessing the security risks and opportunities of today's rapidly developing biotechnology demands a broad focus and agile thinking, or we will miss things.

The standard approach of using historical incident data or case studies of terrorist attacks or bioarms programs may not take account of radical developments in biotechnology. Life's software and the hardware to dissect it are evolving. Driven by a juggernaut of commercial profit-making, a biological revolution is unfolding that echoes the computer revolution of the last century, and it is directly or indirectly affecting everything, including war and peace, as well as the impact, likelihood, and provenance of bioweapons.

What follows first is a description of the broad global revolution underway in biology, especially its open patterns of technological innovation, which differ from those of the 20th century. Our thinking and frameworks must also change. Second, it explains how progress in biotechnology echoes the evolution of computer software, programming cells as if they were individual computers. Biological hardware is also evolving, the third section argues. It is getting smaller, cheaper, and more accessible--just as computers evolved from mainframes to laptops in the last century. But truly understanding bioweapons requires looking not only at biology but also at clusters of new digital technologies, and the fourth section explains why and what these are. Fifth, given all these new developments, we examine the implications for bioterrorism. The sixth section considers where the greatest future threats are emerging--notably insider threats, unethical tinkerers, and proxies clandestinely supported by states. Finally, the conclusion draws together the themes and suggests policy solutions.

The Open Biology Revolution

The field of biology has changed in the past five years, and commercial processes drive those changes. Reading (DNA sequencing), writing (DNA synthesizing), altering (gene editing), and sharing (via the internet) genetic code is now easily done. In assessing what this means for future threats, looking exclusively to states, conventions, and treaties will only get you so far. Without understanding the full scope of capabilities and techniques that private biotech companies are developing, you cannot see where we are headed in terms of both risks and opportunities.

States dominated technological innovation in the 20th century. Military or scientific elites limited the availability of new technologies--things like nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Biological agents such as smallpox or anthrax, or Yersinia pestis (which causes plague) were hidden away in secret biological weapons facilities. Those clandestine, well-equipped laboratories required high levels of expertise, were protected by security classifications, and were very difficult to find. We spoke of the 'proliferation' of known bioweapons and used phrases like 'dual use,' meaning they had two types of users: civilian and military.

Now, given the widespread ability to create new molecules or alter existing bacteria and viruses, the term 'proliferation' seems inadequate. Synthetic biology and gene editing mean we may not even know what new agents or living organisms to track. (1) 'Diffusion' better captures the concept. (2) Plus, there are many types of users: professionals in private companies or universities, government scientists, "prosumers" (3) (amateurs with professional equipment and interest), hobbyists (as in, the makers' movement), and even amateurs--all well beyond 'civilian' and 'military' The phrase 'dual use' is an anachronism. As Kenneth Wickiser and his co-authors concluded in this publication in August 2020, "As the technology improves, the level of education and skills necessary to engineer biological agents decreases. Whereas only state actors historically had the resources to develop and employ biological weapons, SynBio is changing the threat paradigm." (4)

In the last century, we also built a robust international structure of treaties and conventions that curbed the worst state excesses, notably the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention. (5) According to NDU biological weapons expert Seth Cams, in the years between 1915 and 2015, the maximum number of state biological weapons programs operating simultaneously was eight, with some existing for very short periods. (6) It was not perfect: Western intelligence agencies failed to identify the Soviet Union's large covert biological weapons program, along with those of Iraq, South Africa, Chile, and what was then Rhodesia. (7) But overall, this state-centered approach stigmatized and reduced the military use of biological weapons. (8)

Now, patterns of innovation in biology are far more open. (9) Virtually all of today's technological advances were first initiated by publicly financed basic and applied government research during the Cold War, then commercialized in the 1990s, which vastly sped up technological progress. Genetic engineering started in 1973, when biologists Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen first cut a gene from one bacterium and implanted it into another. (10) The field developed very slowly at first. But with advances in computing power, data storage, and machine learning at the end of the century, a wider range of scientists in private companies and universities began working on things like gene editing, synthetic biology, and using open-source datasets and AI to discover new molecules. They are producing exciting new developments that could help feed the world's population, cure diseases, create new biofuels, and mitigate climate change.

But open technological innovation is also much harder to monitor. (11) For good or ill, innovation in the life sciences is driven by commercial processes that lie outside traditional state purview. In this respect, it echoes the development of digital computers, especially commercial software, hardware, and expanding computing power.

Biological Software

Progress in biotechnology is deeply entwined with the development of digital technologies, especially computers. Both the hardware and software of biotechnology are changing rapidly, and that magnifies the risks.

This relationship to computers is not accidental. One of the founding pioneers of synthetic biology was MIT-trained computer engineer Tom Knight, who was also co-engineer of ARPANET (a) and spent the late 1960s and 1970s designing hardware and software at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In the 1990s, Knight went back to school to learn about biology, and then he set up a molecular biology lab within MIT's computer science lab. (12) Progress in biotechnology and computer science has been deeply intertwined ever since.

It is easier to see how commercial biotechnology patterns are unfolding if we briefly reprise the recent evolution of computer software and hardware. At the beginning of the computer age, hardware was king--clunky, expensive, and rare. By contrast, software was built collaboratively and shared. Early pioneers thought that hardware was something you paid for, while software was something you copied and shared. Indeed, in the 1970s, part of the hacker's credo was "software wants to be free."

When Bill Gates was first getting his start, for example, Microsoft's BASIC spread freely among hobbyists. A crucial turning point was Gates'...

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