How to deter biothreats in the age of gene synthesis

"The barriers to reading, writing, and editing DNA are falling fast. A scientist can now order synthetic gene sequences from manufacturers and have them within days - soon, it could be common to produce them right in the lab using a benchtop DNA synthesizer. High school students are learning CRISPR gene-editing techniques. Artificial intelligence (AI) platforms trained on biological data are accelerating experimentation and generating sequences that don't exist in nature."

"The hope is that these developments will lead to new breakthroughs in healthcare, agriculture, energy, and more. The fear is that they will lower the threshold for profound misuse of biotech, while simultaneously increasing the scale of what bad actors can accomplish. The risks aren't hypothetical - in early February, the FBI raided an alleged illegal biological lab operation in a Las Vegas home."

"Bad actors who want to deploy a bioweapon are going to need a bioweapon to deploy, which means they need to get their hands on a biotoxin or pathogen. In the past, they would either have to find it in nature - isolating anthrax from soil, for example - or steal it from a secure research facility that already did the digging. But now they can try to get synthetic DNA."

Advances in DNA synthesis, affordable benchtop synthesizers, CRISPR education, and AI-generated biological sequences are rapidly democratizing biotechnology. These technologies enable faster research, medical, agricultural, and energy innovations but also lower barriers for malicious actors to obtain or create pathogens and biotoxins. Companies that manufacture synthetic DNA can mitigate risks by meticulously screening orders to detect potentially dangerous sequences or buyers. Governments and industry must balance enabling legitimate research with implementing safeguards such as universal screening, improved oversight, and anticipatory defenses to address both current threats and future capabilities that could enable larger-scale biological misuse.

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