Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Considerations for Top-Down Governance for Biosecurity and Synthetic Biology

Abstract

Synthetic biology promises to make biology easier to engineer (Endy 2005), enabling more people in less formal research settings to participate in modern biology. Leveraging advances in DNA sequencing and synthesis technologies, genetic assembly methods based on standard biological parts (e.g. BioBricks), and increasingly precise gene-editing tools (e.g. CRISPR), synthetic biology is helping increase the reliability of and accessibility to genetic engineering. Although potentially enabling tremendous opportunities for the advancement of the global bioeconomy, opening new avenues for the creation of health, wealth and environmental sustainability, the possibility of a more ‘democratic’ (widely accessible) bioengineering capability could equally yield new opportunities for accidental, unintended or deliberate misuse. Consequently, synthetic biology represents a quintessential ‘dual-use’ biotechnology – a technology with the capacity to enable significant benefits and risks (NRC 2004).