Insidious Insights: Implications of viral vector engineering for pathogen enhancement

Journal article

Powerful new technologies can have profound global security implications. In this thesis, I investigate how advances in synthetic biology and artificial intelligence could have dual-use potential and enable the deliberate release of pandemic pathogens. I review risks from synthetic biology based on case studies on wildlife virus discovery, viral engineering for vaccine design, and viral engineering for gene therapy. For assessing impacts of artificial intelligence, I consider large language models and biodesign tools. I find that related advances can create new methods to engineer pathogens and make such capabilities increasingly accessible to non-specialists. These risks are not well captured by existing risk mitigation measures. I argue that the management of dual-use virological research is currently defined by oversight of individual research projects. This is effective for addressing high-risk research but fails to address risks from a more diffuse set of research and technologies with dual-use potential. To help mitigate these risks, I introduce the idea of panoptic dual-use management. Inspired by methodologies to reduce carbon emissions, panoptic dual-use management involves treating associated dual-use risks as negative externalities and creating appropriate incentives so they are accounted for in decisions between projects. I explore ways in which such incentives could be created for various stakeholders. For instance, funding bodies could use dual-use risks as a tiebreaker between projects on the brink of getting funded, a practice which would incentivise researchers to preferentially propose projects with lower dual-use risks. To realise this proposal, I sketch out a framework for assigning tiered dual-use scores to virological research. I conclude by highlighting the importance of combining different dual-use management approaches across stakeholders and geographies to establish an effective complex of overlapping mitigation regimes

Authors: Sandbrink, JB; Alley, EC; Watson, MC; Koblentz, GD; Esvelt, KM

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Springer Nature [academic journals on nature.com]
• Journal: Gene Therapy
• Volume: 30
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 407-410
• Publication date: 2022-03-10
• DOI: 10.1038/s41434-021-00312-3
• EISSN: 1476-5462
• ISSN: 0969-7128
• Language: English
• Keywords: Capsid; Immune system; Medicine; Genetics; Biology; Pandemic; Evasion (ethics); Infectious disease (medical specialty); Immunology; Virology; Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19); Viral vector; Computational biology; Computer science; Vector (molecular biology); Disease; Gene; Virus