Synthetic Biology

In the 2010s, breakthroughs in synthetic biology — the engineering discipline of redesigning organisms by rewriting their DNA, from editing existing genomes with CRISPR to building novel microbes from scratch — triggered warnings about humanity "playing God" with living systems and potentially creating deadly biohazards. Two headline experiments crystallised the dual-use fear. In 2005, Jeffery Tumpey and colleagues at the CDC reconstructed the 1918 Spanish flu virus (which had killed tens of millions) from archived genetic fragments, publishing the method in Science. In 2017–18, virologist David Evans's group at the University of Alberta synthesised horsepox virus from mail-order DNA, a feat many biosecurity experts considered a roadmap for reconstituting the extinct smallpox virus. In 2016, US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper shocked the scientific community by adding genome editing to the annual list of Weapons of Mass Destruction, cautioning that CRISPR could "increase the risk of the creation of potentially harmful biological agents." Stanford biochemist Matthew Porteus celebrated CRISPR's medical potential but admitted "it's right that people are concerned" that someone could "generate some super infectious bacteria" for evil ends. Amateur and student-run competitions like iGEM (the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, in which undergraduate teams build novel organisms) fuelled debate about whether powerful tools were slipping out of the hands of trained professionals.

The COVID-19 pandemic (2020–23) and the ongoing argument over gain-of-function research — experiments that deliberately make pathogens more transmissible or more dangerous, often to anticipate future outbreaks — and the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis brought all of these concerns back to the top of the biosecurity agenda. The 2024 revisions to US NIH oversight policy, tightening review of pathogen research, reflect how durable the 2010s synthetic-biology anxieties turned out to be. The underlying question is still with us: how to keep a field that can treat disease from being the one that unleashes it.