Abstract: Pandemics have been suggested as global risks many times, but it has been shown that the probability of human extinction due to one pandemic is small, as it will not be able to affect and kill all people, but likely only half, even in the worst cases. Assuming that the probability of the worst pandemic to kill a person is 0.5, and assuming linear interaction between different pandemics, 30 strong pandemics running simultaneously will kill everyone. Such situations cannot happen naturally, but because biotechnology is developing analogously to Moore’s law, it may become possible in the near future (10-50 years from now), because of biohackers, CRISPR, bioprinters, AI-assisted DNA-programing, and weapons of “knowledge-enabled mass destruction” published on the Internet. It could also happened in case of large-scale biological war, or if a rogue country released its entire biological arsenal simultaneously. We also will address other scenarios and risk increasing factors as well as mitigation and adaptation strategies.

In this paper I argue that, yes, science, technology, and engineering are now the most important subjects for ethics to study. Due to the dramatic expansion of human power brought about by science, technology, and engineering, ethics needs to re-evaluate how humans should act given our new power. But it is not only ethics that needs to study science, technology and engineering – likewise, scientists, technologists, and engineers need to study ethics with great diligence, and embody ethical behavior in their lives, as befits many professional engineering societies’ goals of holding paramount the health, safety, and welfare of the public.

Authors: Catherine Jefferson, Filippa Lentzos and Claire Marris

— Numerous emerging technologies promise great, but finite, benefits while also placing humanity at tremendous risk, even the risk of extinction (an infinite loss). This paper argues that these risky technologies need to be developed with great care and that three strategies should be broadly implemented in order to facilitate risk mitigation and adaptation towards these risks. The first strategy is to mitigate risk by containing the research and development of risky technologies to science, technology and engineering (STE) professionals. The second strategy is to mitigate risk by directing technological development towards good uses of emerging technologies and away from risky uses. The third strategy is to adapt to catastrophic risks through defensive adaptation: preparing for disaster response and recovery. STE professional societies should play key roles in this project to create a better future.

Global catastrophic risks (GCRs) are risks of events that could significantly harm or even destroy civilization at the global scale. GCR raises a number of profound ethical issues, with a range of ethical theories suggesting that GCR reduction should be society's top priority. This paper discusses GCR ethics in the context of dual-use bioengineering: bioengineering that can cause either benefit or harm, including increases and decreases in GCR. Advances in bioengineering offer great promise, but also introduce new perils. Key ethical questions include what phenomena hold intrinsic value and how the phenomena are valued across space and time. Another key question is how decisions about bioengineering risks should be made. The global scope of bioengineering and GCR suggests a role for international law. Bioengineering does not fall neatly within existing international regimes such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, Cartagena Protocol, and Biological Weapons Convention. An international regime with comprehensive coverage of bioengineering would help address dual-use bioengineering as it relates to GCR.

Amid the renewed concern in the last several years about the potential for life science research to facilitate the spread of disease, a central plank of the policy response has been to enact processes for assessing the risks and benefits of “research of concern.” The recent controversy regarding a proposed redaction of work on the modification of a H5N1 avian influenza virus is perhaps the most prominent such instance. And yet, a noteworthy feature of this case is its exceptionalness. In the last 10 years, life science publishers, funders, and labs have rarely identified any research as “of concern,” let alone proposed censors. This article takes this experience with risk assessment as an invitation for reflection. Reasons for the low number of instances of concern are related to how the biosecurity dimensions of the life sciences are identified, how they are described, how the assessments of benefits and risks are undertaken, how value considerations do and do not enter into assessments, as well as the lack of information on the outcomes of reviews. This argument builds on such considerations to examine the limitations and implications of the risk–benefit experiment of concern framing, the politics of expertise as well as the prospects for alternative responses.

Authors: Catherine Jefferson, Filippa Lentzos and Claire Marris

The Select Agent Program was one of the US government’s legal responses to the mail anthrax attacks in 2001 and to the perceived risks associated with recent developments in synthetic biology. A “select agent” is a microorganism or a toxin whose handling, transportation, and storage are controlled by federal laws. Since its inception, this regulatory framework has fostered opposition from biomedical researchers, partly because of its time-consuming features. As I argue here, however, grounds for resistance have also turned on whether there is anything specific to so-called “pathogenic organisms” that warrants their being classified as select agents. For, while providing a more complex picture of the microbial world, current dynamical perspectives on host-parasite interactions operate as a platform from which to criticize taxonomic lists of select agents. One such perspective, the damage-response framework, developed by immunologist and biosecurity expert Arturo Casadevall, reconceptualises host-agent interactions by situating pathogenicity on a continuum, rather than locating it in a specific structure of either the host or the parasite. This paper illustrates how the damage-response framework provides arguments for rejecting the Select Agent Program, often charged for being blind to biological variation as well as to the context-sensitive nature of infectious diseases and further explores how the threats of naturally emerging diseases and bioterrorism are intertwined by scientists intending to rationalize a relaxation of regulations. Finally, a discussion of the different forms of regulation relevant in this context is introduced. More generally, this article calls attention to ways in which biomedical concepts circulate between science and science policy, and how they shape scientific practices along the way.