Promoting Effective Biosecurity Governance: Using Tripwires to Anticipate and Ameliorate Potentially Harmful Development Trends

Abstract

AbstractSynthetic biology is a new, rapidly growing interdisciplinary field which seeks to use engineering techniques to alter and construct new biological components, devices, and systems. The rate of synthetic biology development and research has increased over the past two decades in both industry and academia (Ahteensuu 2017). Applications include medicine (new vaccines, delivery of therapeutics, and treatments), energy (biofuels), environmental remediation, food production, and general industry (detergents, adhesives, perfumes) (Evans and Selgelid 2015; Gronvall 2015). While synthetic biology heralds advances in these fields, its techniques could also be adapted for malicious purposes and used by terrorist organizations, rogue actors, or hostile nations to create dangerous pathogens, invasive organisms, or other disruptive biological agents (Yeh et al. 2012). Such potential makes synthetic biology a dual-use research area of concern (DURC) as the same techniques can be used to benefit or harm people, animals, environments, technology, or nations (Getz and Dellaire 2018). To cope with threats arising from synthetic biology’s dual-use nature, biosecurity is needed to prevent, detect, and attribute biological attacks.