New biosecurity group aims to prevent biotech disasters

Biosecurity experts today launched a new international nonprofit designed to prevent modern biotechnology from causing harm. Known as the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science (IBBIS), the group aims to develop technological and policy guardrails to reduce the risk that biotech tools, such as the ability to synthesize and edit DNA, are accidentally or deliberately used to create deadly toxins and pathogens. Biologists have long hailed a culture of open science, freely sharing reagents, tools, and open-access publications. But in recent years, researchers have also shown they can build dangerous viruses and other microbes from scratch . Dozens of companies worldwide that print DNA sequences on demand for biology experiments make it even easier to synthesize a pathogen. This advance, along with new gene-editing tools, such as CRISPR, and easy access to artificial intelligence (AI), have raised concerns that bioterrorists could use such tools to create bioweapons, or that legitimate scientists might create new infectious agents by mistake. “Biological threats present a significant global security risk, and the stakes couldn’t be higher,” says nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz, former U.S. secretary of energy who is now CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), which raised money from donors to launch IBBIS. The United States and many other countries regulate labs working on dozens of “select agents,” microbes that pos...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news