Synthetic biology and biosecurity

Abstract

Synthetic biology has become one of the most dynamic research fields in the life sciences. In reality, though, the term is used to cover a host of different approaches rather than a single defined discipline; these range from the large‐scale assembly of DNA segments to the development of new tools and technology platforms, and to the search for the minimal cell and the origins of life. The evolution of the field has also been accompanied by the recognition that the concomitant shift in biology from a descriptive to a predictive science, and the technologies that will ensue, bring with them a range of potential societal implications and dangers. > …the different subfields of synthetic biology have different kinds of security implications, which are already relevant or will become so at different points in time Taking these dangers seriously seems to be warranted given past misuses of advances in the life sciences; major scientific breakthroughs have repeatedly informed offensive state‐level biological weapons programmes (Dando, 1999). These abuses have been relevant across the board, from bacteriology in the late nineteenth century to aerobiology and virology in the mid‐twentieth century, and to the early stages of genetic engineering, which found its way into the clandestine Soviet biological weapons programme of the 1970s and 1980s. This pattern of misuse raises the spectre that governments or terrorist groups might also abuse future advances in the life sciences to produce biological warfare agents. It should be self‐evident that the different subfields of synthetic biology have different kinds of security implications, which are already relevant or will become so at different points in time. Clearly, the potential security implications of synthetic genomics—with its capacity to generate rapidly large DNA molecules—are of more immediate concern than those of some future minimal cell construct that could act as a chassis …