Biological risk and Screening DNA
Content note: Potentially grim in tone. About potential biological catastrophes. I encourage you to skip if you feel like it.
My day job involves thinking about how to prevent deliberate pandemics. I almost never write about it here because it can be heavy, dour, depressing.
I’ll share about it here because it strikes me as important, and I figure at least some of you might find it interesting.
From an article I just published:
“In May 1995, a few weeks after the doomsday cult Shinrikyo Aum released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway—killing 13 people and injuring 5,500 more—two Ohio police officers knocked on Larry Wayne Harris’s door. Harris was a trained microbiologist and a former member of the white supremacist Aryan Nations group. The officers held a search warrant for one of the deadliest organisms in history: Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes bubonic plague.
A concerned employee at a laboratory supply company had called the Centers for Disease Control, or CDC, after fielding repeated calls from Harris asking when his samples of plague would arrive in the mail. When the CDC contacted Harris to ask about the plague samples, Harris claimed that he was doing research for the CIA to stop an “imminent invasion from Iraq of super-germ-carrying rats.” In the end, falsely asserting that he was working with the CIA was the only illegal thing Harris did—amounting to wire and mail fraud.
It wasn’t illegal, however, for Harris to order the vials of deadly bacteria that Ohio police officers later found in his car. This incident spurred new laws to restrict the sale of bacteria or viruses. But today, rapid advances in DNA synthesis have made it possible for would-be bioterrorists to make pathogens, rather than buy them.”
You can read the full article here, which I co-authored for Asimov Press. It’s the most accessible thing I’ve written on biosecurity1.
My biosecurity magnum opus is “Securing Benchtop DNA Synthesizers”, a 41 page report that forecasts the future of benchtop DNA synthesizers and proposes several technical and political mitigations. I’m hoping to release it in the next couple of weeks.
I don’t write about it here, but I spend a good deal of time thinking about biological catastrophes, especially those that might be deliberately caused by people — whether nation states or Ted Kaczynskis. I started working on the technical problem during my master’s thesis, and it’s what I’ve been doing professionally for the last two years.
There’s a story I can tell in more detail someday about these last two years, involving a flight to Las Vegas to recruit hardware engineers, trawling internet forums for used DNA synthesis devices, extended conversations with people at various levels of government bureaucracy. But the story’s not done.
Credits to OT for the beautiful card design.
Some of my other pieces on the topic that I’ve helped write Clarifying the Problem of DNA Screening [preprint]; Towards Responsible Governance of Biological Design Tools [for a 2023 NeurIPS workshop]; Practical Questions for Securing Nucleic Acid Synthesis [Applied Biosafety journal]; some private reports, mostly on benchtops.