title: Innovation and Security in Biotechnology: Deliberating Foresight Knowledge for Biosecurity Policy
Creators: name: Kernchen, Roman
Publisher: name: Eyvor Institut 
Year: 2019

description: The production and utilisation of foresight knowledge, such as prognoses, scenarios, outlooks and narratives about possible futures, has become an eminent feature of the action at the interface of life sciences and society and a subject of increasing interest in scientific and technological studies. In many areas of biotechnology, actors are striving to make conclusive statements about developments in the future. Corporate leaders try to inspire investors with business plans. Military strategists attempt to construct bioterrorism scenarios. Analysts in the financial sector estimate biomedical markets. Multi-disciplinary committees discuss potential ethical concerns. Journalists highlight and dramatise upcoming trends. And the popular culture disseminates science fiction images to a broad audience. In conclusion, many forms of anticipatory intelligence have a role to play in the process of projecting and monitoring, supporting and challenging, controlling and regulating, revising and redesigning the future of life sciences. Notably, recent advances in biotechnology, in particular the gene-editing technology and synthetic biology, have significantly improved our capabilities in biological engineering, along with progress in the areas of information technology and robotics. A systematic foresight analysis to identify, assess and prioritise new scientific and technological approaches is needed to address the challenges and opportunities arising from such progress. In this respect, the analysis of the potential for misuse of biotechnological advances is of growing importance. The fast pace of transformation within the bio sciences and biotechnology is simultaneously presenting new opportunities for building technological capabilities and for enhancing security vulnerabilities. The threat spectrum will be expanded to include new possibilities for disruption or manipulation of biological systems and processes in humans, plants and animals, in addition to future threats from edited pathogens. The range of potential vectors, targets and effects will grow fast as genome editing becomes available for research and exploitation of biology. Genome editing potentially could be used to develop new biological weapons, including those that can affect the microbiome and the immune and nervous systems. The diversity, flexibility and accuracy offered by new genome editing techniques, such as CRISPR does increase the target range, which comprises the number, accessibility and severity of vulnerabilities that could be used to cause damage, either maliciously or accidentally. In order to assess the future capability of malicious utilisation of biotechnological innovation, a foresight analyst should reflect on the use of the relevant and emerging technologies. These include ease of use (if a technology is not sophisticated to use, it is assumed to be more widely used), speed of technology development, barriers to use (technological barriers such as inability to predict the function from a certain DNA sequence), synergies with other technologies and overall costs. The analyst would also have to assess the potential for using technology as a weapon. These considerations would include the production and supply capability of the technology, the extent of the casualty when used as a weapon, the foreseeability of the outcome (to what extent a malicious actor could be certain that if a technology were to be used to make a weapon, he would have the envisaged outcome), the necessary testing and the reliability of the technology, i.e. its predictability and effectiveness.