 Thank you. I'm Patrick Tucker, technology editor for Defense One, and we have a fantastic discussion about weaponizing different aspects of biology to join you at lunch today. With me is Dr. Gaiman Bennett. He's assistant professor of religion, science, and technology at Arizona State University. Dr. Gary Merchant, the Lincoln professor of emerging technologies in law and ethics, also at ASU, and Dr. Michael Crowe, who's the president of ASU. So the topic of that we're discussing today, how will digital biology transform conflict? So who here today thinks they have a good understanding of what digital biology is? Raise your hand. You ambitious people. No. Okay. What is digital biology? Start that. I'll jump in first. Digital biology, like a lot of new scientific brands, means many things to many people. But maybe we could name three flavors of it at least. The first is what we might call old school digital biology, emerged in the 1990s with the genome projects. That was a time in the life of molecular biology in which just drives and computer technology made things possible in biology that weren't possible before, including creating kind of dependencies in everyday lab life between what you do at the bench and the need to organize what you do at the bench on a computer just because there's so much data. The goal there was basically can you move from biology to bits to biology. Now we're in a kind of next generation of digital biology, which is can you move from bits to biology to bits? That is to say, can you use computers to design new living systems? Can you produce those living systems in your lab? And then can you upload that information on the internet for other people to be able to play with things that you've built? Using digital, using information technology and the power that is available to us to take what we know about biology and essentially create new forms of biology is an aspect of what you just described. Is that fair? Right. The sort of outside goal of second generation digital biology is something like computer-aided design. Can you know enough about living systems to understand how their function works in relationship to the biological underpinnings? And can you build a computer-aided design program that encodes the biological functions such that you could design a new living system without really having to know very much about the underlining biology? Is there a difference between that and what is popularly now being called synthetic biology? There's a lot of overlap and certainly synthetic biology for the last ten years has been one of the sources and drivers for what could be called digital biology. It's been a kind of brand that's attracted people from outside of biology like computer engineers and physicists into biology to begin to think about how biological systems work on the model of digital systems that's created a whole set of new opportunities in biotechnology. It also raises the question of a kind of limit of how far you can take analogies. So one of the big questions in molecular biology is can you think about living systems like computer systems and how far will that get you scientifically? Can you think of living systems the way we think about computer systems and where do we so we're not when we talk about synthetic biology, we're not necessarily talking about growing you know like gigantic monsters with like huge hands to go and take our enemies and throw them like the Hulk or something like that. We're talking about developing new organisms or perhaps even just taking solutions that exist in nature and applying them to real world problems. These are I guess some of the things that present themselves as the potentials within the digital biology space. What will this do for us in ten years? What are we going to get as a result of the digital biology revolution in ten years? You know I think the way to look at these things and long before I was a university president I was a professor of science and technology policy thinking about where science and technology systems would take us in a sort of futuristic kind of way. And the way to look at this is not so much the details of what digital biology will allow. You have to assume that with the binary code that we've mastered and we have computational engines that can calculate at whatever increasing speed we can calculate that ultimately that speed will continue to accelerate on a logarithmic basis. You match that with now the mastery that we have of digital instruction systems called DNA which are reducible to four coded items. You have then six items for letters in the way that we're using them and two numbers in the way that we're using them. If you can compute at whatever speed you want to compute and you can move those things around in a set of instructions to be able to re-engineer anything therefore you can engineer anything from that and what that means then in the spirit of Craig Venter's idea of life at the speed of light. You have then the following thing that you need to think about and that is individuals ultimately being empowered to create physical biological systems capable of performing any function you'd like them to perform and transporting them and moving them in whatever way you'd like to transport and move them at relatively low cost without major facilities and so that's the thing that you need to think about. Right so this is a great example so now now we know who a digital biologist is in the real world. Craig Venter is an example of someone doing the digital biology and creating synthetic biology solutions now and his project at least as of May 2010 that's what he says he did. Right well his project right now is is unique when it's related directly to what we're talking about. He's looking for the creation of a new type of algae that can be used as a fuel. Algae is a lipid it's a you can use an olive press and you can get a burnable fuel from it but it's also extremely nitrogen it requires a lot of nutrients to grow and this is a big barrier to turning it into a really cost effective fuel solution and so if you can synthetically engineer a new type of algae if this is an ongoing military project within the navy as well then you can basically run your huge energy hungry battleships and all of your equipment and your entire economy on ponskum in addition to basically feeding it to people because it's extremely protein rich. So I've talked to this is so when we talk about what this could result from this this is a great example. I spoke to a NASA scientist Dennis Bushnell he's head of the research facility at Langley and in addition to being a rocket scientist in his spare time he talks a lot about energetics like that's what he does over there and he pointed out that you can create a type of algae that can be irrigated with salt water you can grow it in parts of Africa that we today consider wasteland and you can create economic opportunity in that place that has never existed before by creating a viable food crop a fuel crop just completely economically transformed this place. Is this realistic within the next 10 years not necessarily for algae but more broadly as a result of the digital biology revolution? Well in 10 years no but I think the way to look at this though is this you know we've sort of lived through the the century of of physics with Einstein and quantum this and quantum that and physical systems and so forth and while all of that is continuing biology now is evolving at an even quicker rate as a as a fundamental area of knowledge than physics evolved and that's leading us to the point now where you can conceptualize what you just said which is being able to transform or engineer life forms to perform whatever function we want them to perform to produce whatever chemical output physical output whatever it is that you'd like them to produce they could then have the capacity to do that in relatively short order the extent to which one can move to what you're describing which is a photonic driven a photon driven economy where you're taking the photons from the sun most of which are wasted on the earth most of which are reflected or wasted and you're take converting those photons into electrons as you want to use them into molecules as you want to use them through a plant or an engineered plant or biological system all of those things are the are the way in which everything's going to change from from what we eat to where we get it to how it grows to how we grow it to how we fight to how we fight it to how we move forward all everything will change so the notion is not so much the details of the change it's understanding that our ability to transform information and to calculate from the tools that we have whatever transformative outcome we want is accelerating so quickly that you have to be able to anticipate and expect anything positive or negative positive would be food production enhancements or medical production enhancements from microorganisms or or larger scale organisms that we're that we're driving forward in places that have access to nothing like that right now to the negative side of that which is the design construction and distribution of things that are not so good for us you can kind of say look at the algae industry you sort of see these three generations of products that I think is symbolic of the broader life sciences revolution of the first generation of just taking this enormous biodiversity that's out there already there's already thousands of strains of microalgae and so on that people have been collecting and testing and seeing if they can make products in them and now right now we're now genetic the engineering algae where we're just adding in genes or mutating genes or moving them from one species to another and then the next generation which is we're now moving towards and what people like Craig Venture are talking about is is basically designing those algae from the ground up uh that the naturally occurring variations that we can move between species now is not enough power we basically have to basically create them from scratch and that's the whole stepwise progression all the life sciences are going in right now okay can I flood just don't stay too long this question but flag two other things um first of all with regard to the challenges of producing a fuel out of um biology algae or or switch grass or whatever it is um the biggest variable right now is not the biological difficulty the biggest variable the economics of petroleum based fuels and and the cycles of investment in advanced biotechnology relative to how feasible it is for a number of reasons um second um right now it's still a big open question of how you begin to farm something like algae because of questions of environmental impact so that's still being worked out and that's a big issue right and a third variable in all of this which I think is really crucial to the question of the future of conflict which is the major biological breakthroughs around things like engineering and algae for biofuels isn't even necessarily the end product you get it's the little techniques along the way that you're beginning to perfect that allow you to do more powerful work more reliably um at less expense right which means then the barrier to access for people doing these things goes down so just the example of the venture institute's work on algae um the big threshold was dan gibson produced a means by way of which you could take a set of strands of DNA you could put them in a single pot and they would anneal together in a way that was correct and uh functionally robust yeah that used to take lots and lots of steps and lots and lots of money and lots and lots of expertise so the so-called gibson method is born right and within a few months labs all over the world are using the gibson method so these not very sexy little techniques sort of just below the surface are really what are driving capacity across domains okay so we've established so far um that the digital biology is something that's uh highly established that the potential is enormous that the uh ability to work with it is expanding as exponentially quickly as is Moore's law in the realm of information science the barrier faster than Moore's law the barriers of entry and accessibility are going down as quickly so when do we get weaponized Ebola later out and see what can we do uh though i mean if if the costs of accessibility keep going down the potential is the insist that there was going to be a wide diffusion of of different people all around the world that are going to be doing cutting-edge research no longer just in big university labs but in garages and in in hacker spaces and things like this if this is the same trajectory that was you know sort of like the hacker space is going to become the biohacker space three things what can we do to keep that from very quickly becoming as big a mess security wise as is the internet philosophy so i think i think one thing we have and i mean if you guys disagree but i think we have time and because i think it's going to be a lot slower we think if someone's one said that you know we we tend to over estimate the power of technologies in the short term and underestimate their powers in the long term that's certainly the case in this area you know biology is hard compared to mechanical or chemical or digital or cyber technologies or systems where you can control and manipulate them so much easier biology is really hard because it evolves it interacts it's grows it's by definition living and to make stable biological systems that do what you want to do is extremely challenging and difficult so the backyard you know the garage or the basement uh di wire isn't going to produce a powerful biological weapon anytime in the next 10 years they maybe you know they'll put something on a salad bar somewhere and kill a couple of people possibly that would be a tragedy but in terms of a national security threat i don't see it in the next few years so i think in the long term it is huge but not right now and i think i think gary's making a brilliant point and that is that you know when the physicists at alamogordo uh fell to the ground in july of 1945 you know we've been saying my god what have we done they hadn't had enough foresight or thought about the nuclear weapons that they that they had been party to designing and when the physicists later tried to pull back the genie that they'd let out of the bottle they were frustrated that it was too late it was already out of the bottle in biology i agree with gary that we now can see from our physical past what we are capable of doing we're now empowered on a biological front for which the consequences are even greater because we are biological and thus uh uh interruptible in in interesting ways biologically and so perhaps the way to deal with the concept of conflict which is conflict avoidance conflict resolution and so forth is to take a completely new approach to avoid a future war built around biological systems as opposed to physical systems by thinking about all of the design issues that we should put on the table right now relative to how to manage this particular area of science unlike how we didn't manage physics physics was unmanaged and you can see where that got us biology is now got more potential to have both positive and negative outcomes than physics for a lot of reasons we have the the foresight and the potential wisdom to be able to manage it to avoid conflict by by in a sense you could even code it in certain ways you could design certain things where certain outcomes are not possible but you have to be able to think about that right now at the outset well i think that this this town is founded on the notion that human beings are going to disagree about management i mean that's what this is this is a big town that that manages things and this this issue is already creeping into the debate about what to do with uh with biology here's an example in in january of 2012 the team from the university of wisconsin found that the presence of uh lysine in the 627 position of the p2b protein essentially made h5 in one an aerial weapon it it allowed it to exist in the hotter lungs of ferrets and mammals um and that was a big change that means it's very dangerous it can be passed aerially that research was funded by the government but there was a big fight in congress to um uh basically restrict it to uh there was a moratorium on on publication and even to defund different research like that so there's a moratorium right now on that research right and and there's a self-imposed moratorium among many scientists including many at our own institution that won't engage in certain kinds of research because of what the results could mean so that means that no one's going to engage in them so it doesn't it doesn't mean that but there's ways to advance this in a different way where where you can think through the process about how to guide science to certain outcomes which is considered heresy by most scientists to think about the notion of guiding science so you're self you're self-arresting though um you're you're self-alinquishing but we can't how do we create a space where everyone follows that seems to me that um the h5n1 is a great example of a number of things we've been talking about the h5n1 affair um first of all it took both the guys in wisconsin and ron fuji's lab um who is the other scientists who did this it took them specialized facilities many years millions of dollars lots of expertise but once you publish the sequences it takes far less capacity to be able to reproduce what what they do so although gary's right that things in biology remain much more difficult to do than what often gets talked about say around diy bio it it is the case that things are getting easier the bar is going down so once they've done that work it would take a competent technician a few thousand dollars in a few weeks to reproduce what they've done because they have the sequences online okay so that's the first point the second point is one of the questions i think we need to ask moving forward um around the management of these new technologies um is how do we shift from a frame of containment um to the to a framework of the fostering of the ethics of responsibility among um practicing sciences that's part of what i meant that's the code into the actual machines individuals science the process itself these abilities like is in the in the case of isaac asimov's you know notion of robotics you know there's this notion that the robot can never be designed to injure a human that's like no joke that's not a science fiction thing that's a code inside the model you saw one of the big blockages in h5n1 affair was precisely the ethics of the researchers who were doing the gain of function research they were part of an ethical community which um for better or for worse really understood what they were doing as if you will salvational they were they were engineering these strains in order to save lives but that culture didn't have attached to it um a kind of sobriety around the question of when you bring powerful new things into the world what kind of responsibility comes with it and so the attempt to critique that work often met with a kind of stonewall among some of those researchers that what they were doing was always inevitably good and the only harm that could come from it would be so-called misuse um but that belies then i think for me it belies the insufficiency of of a kind of culture of ethical responsibility within the laboratory which asks quite seriously this question when we create powerful new things that we hope bring good to the world how do we also set into motion things which might be problematic it also raises so there's two really key questions that raises that go beyond that specific example so one is do we do the experiments and as dr. crow mentioned you know some a lot of researchers are saying we don't think these are ethical but in the military context i think it's a huge dilemma for say our military because um if if we we know that there's going to be people out there who won't follow those same self-imposed restrictions to understand what those threats are and to be able to counter them do we have to create the monster ourselves and i think that's a huge dilemma whether we have to do that or not to know how to defend ourselves and to know what's possible and you could argue that both ways but i think that's a huge issue that particularly from a military national security context is there and the second one is when we do this stuff we publish it and that's what the h5 n1 got wrapped up in is you know does the government or does journal editors or the scientists themselves decide not to publish this stuff and again that's this whole issue of open access maybe again knowing about this and and having a community of scientists who are well meaning to understand this would argue in favor of more publication whereas that also creates little risks that other people will see it that that would use it from our for nefarious purposes so those two issues of should we be doing the monsters ourselves and then secondly when we do this research and find this stuff should we make it open access so so one of the ways to sort of think this through is who would have imagined that digital biology would transform conflict not immediately but eventually in ways well beyond anything we've ever experienced as a species because we've never really had you know genetic weapons or we've never really had things targeting particular groups or whatever we've never had anything like that and all of that's possible but now imagine that we we we avoid conflict in the future by rethinking how we do science now to not take away any of the notion of the fundamental discovery aspect of things but this notion of a of a tool that we've been working on at asu in our in our consortium for science policy and outcomes which is a tool called real-time technology assessment where you start thinking through and this is really hard and we're just at that we're not even a an infant yet we're still just sort of conceptualizing how you would do this how would you think about the implications of a technology at the time that it became scientifically feasible not doable but feasible how would you think through all of the implications and then how would you then guide the evolution of the technology so that you do not get these unbelievably inalterable unrecoverable outcomes which you know could affect the outcome of the entire species that's what's at scale the counter argument actually comes from the scientists themselves science once it is guided in any possible way will not produce the results that have produced so many positive things for us we can line up all of the positives that have come from physics and all of the negatives that have come from physics and they are complicated in their outcomes the biological outcomes the biologically based conflicts of the future would be wild by comparison i'll wipe out your food supply i'll wipe out your water i'll wipe out your ability to reproduce i'll wipe out your ability for your gene line to advance i'll do this i'll do this i mean i don't know how those kinds of conflicts will be dealt with but it would be better to sort of confront them now before they're feasible by rethinking how we do certain other things so one of the things you're you're saying is that in order to really feel safe from the terrifying potential of of synthetic biology in the years ahead we have to reach for a cultural change in sort of the way science is done and also the way the military seeks a strategic advantage because the military never wants to be in a fair fight everyone will say this fair fights are dumb not for us don't want it and the entire nature of scientific exploration is we will feel free to explore we must have that you know freedom and if we're going to produce results that aren't you know pre-programmed in so we have to change both science and entire military culture in order to be safe from digital biology and simulations and congress and legislation too and everything because i mean the way washington works is exactly the opposite of what dr croger just said but they're trying to do with real-time technology assessment it's a weight to the problem is already manifest and you've got a huge problem and and and then you try to fix it after the fact and we do that environment and yeah safety and everything so you have to change uh washington too but so but so those kinds of things so i my my brain doesn't go very far on those kinds of things like you know somehow so we have to change this we have to change that everything changes everything always has changed everything changes dramatically as a function of new each new input to the system the thing that you have to decide is whether or not you're going to be involved in intelligent design or random design so we have all these changes many of which are the product of random design that is the things that we're faced with the things that we're interacting the way that we're working so this notion of can we think about change in a way where it is a product of somehow intelligent forethought even if it's only limited intelligent forethought can you get a better net net outcome to reduce a potential threat and thus certain conflicts by moving in that direction and the answer would be i hope so yeah because otherwise randomness random design with these kinds of technological capabilities in the hands of x people that the outcome is is is the threat index is so high that it means we have to change even if it's hard who cares if it's hard that doesn't mean anything you just have to do it we have to figure out some way to rethink this stuff before we can no longer think about it all right in the time you have left let some open up to question then we'll shoot right to you right who has a question in the audience about there we go yes park thank you i'm sure and berk with new america could you talk to us a little bit about the state of play with the innovation globally and also the state of play with the moral dimensions you're talking about globally are these concerns shared and even if we don't create monsters are those monsters already being created somewhere else that give us a sense of how this looks globally so one thing that i do a lot of my work in is looking at sort of non-traditional governance that goes beyond legislation regulation because the problem with legislation regulation applies to jurisdictions whereas some other types of mechanisms can apply much more broadly across international borders by things like codes of conduct and other types of things that are done by scientists and other organizations that basically aren't limited to jurisdictions so i think a lot of the interesting developments is is to try to uh is a number of initiatives to look at things like you know industry code of conduct of screening dna synthesis sequences that's being applied by these voluntary programs that go beyond the united states to internationally now there's still you know one in russia and one some other outlets that may be not playing along with that so you're still going to get some bad actors but uh this idea of moving from a national system to an international because it's an international problem if someone has a terrorist weapon you know in belgium it makes just as much different as if it's in the united states if it gets to you know isis or whoever so to look at new models that basically apply things like anticipatory uh anticipation and try to real-time anticipation and try to do it across national borders and international like how worried are you about um some of these places internationally what they're doing keep are we should be we worried about what synthetic biology looks like in russia should be worried about what it looks like in the hands of a donetsk separatist i mean what is i don't know i don't know that we should be worried about scientists um in russia or try any more than scientists in the united states i don't i don't know what basis on which we would make that kind of a judgment but i would say two things with regard to the question the global dimension and the moral dimension first since the 1990s and the the publication of um uh protocols and molecular biology publication that shares how to do what you want to do um the question of governing biology through restriction was basically out the window so knowledge and know how is everywhere um u.s institutions are still the very best uh lots of biology still uh learned through tacit knowledge in the lab and and the top institutions the united states are still the best institutions in the world um but uh knowledge and know how um is everywhere basically for any number of reasons okay so then um the moral question so for about six years i lived in labs as a kind of in-house ethicist as an as an attempt to get upstream of some of the moral questions can you uh rationally design the way in which synthetic biology is headed um limited success success in that experiment in that um we learned what we could do and what was uh less possible to do um but we kept running into the problem of just the intransigent forces of how institutions work um how people are pursuing their careers how they can get their funding which companies are going to be interested in what they're doing those those questions trump last twist on this on the moral question to the extent to which synthetic biology or advanced biotechnology whatever you want to call it moves outside of familiar institutional settings the question of how you govern the ethos of those settings is going to be a wide open one we might look to things like the growth of the hacker culture in computer science but we don't know really whether or not a so-called garage biologist will uh share some of the as it were political ethos of the hacker culture so this question once this moves out of the major institutional settings and it's moving outside of the major institutional settings um what will be the techniques by way of which we can foster an ethics of responsibility I think what I would add on the moral question is that um we face the moral dilemma of our scientific capability outstripping our cognitive skills uh and so we're we're moving faster in our knowledge relative to what we can do scientifically than in how we make decisions or how we should govern this or not govern that and so one of the things I think that that that people don't completely grasp on the question of morality and I'll go to Phil Kitcher uh a philosophy or philosopher of biology who uh basically wrote in his book science truth and democracy that science being pursued without a defined objective is amoral it's not immoral it can become immoral but it is amoral and he argues vociferously against the notion of pursuing science without an outcome as your objective because of how it might ultimately be used so imagine and this is very hard to conceptualize biologists who now are advancing on biology realizing that one of the things that they have to do along the way is as they advance from science to technology they must find ways to ensure to the extent possible that weapons or other nefarious outcomes from these technologies might be at least minimized or somehow understood or protected against that's a completely different way about thinking about science and it requires us to move to a modality for science very different than the present design that we have so the design that we have was laid down by van der bar bush in 1945 in science the endless frontier which is this open-ended all things are good all outcomes are good well we know all things are not good and all outcomes are not good but we need a we need a much more sophisticated way to think about the moral basis under which we approach science and that's what's missing right now it's a it's still a discussion it's not a it's not an action-oriented agenda i'm harlan oman thank thank you very interesting panel i have more of an observation i'd like you to respond to uh some 40 years ago a very chilling novel called white plague was published in which the author who's a biologist engineered in the dna was pretty accurate the disease that killed off 90 of the female population in the world with all sorts of effects you haven't read the book it's interesting to go back the other part of my observation is we've had cyber since marconi more than a hundred years ago yet we still don't know what a cyber declaration of war would be required and it's taken us a very very long time so what would you suggest ways to come up with some kind of a system of governance or at least anticipation of what the consequences are so that we don't get into a similar position um as we have been with cyber where we have this interesting issue about which we really don't have a code of conduct or any kind of a deterrent framework well let me uh tag onto that the geneva conventions that prohibited the use of biological agents in formal warfare between formal parties um there's a lot of uh non-state actors that don't feel like the geneva convention really applies to them is this still an adequate uh international framework for the uh relinquishment of the development of biological weapons and if not what would you replace it with well see i i don't think there is one instrument and so in this area people talk about a web of prevention that that you might have some international treaties you might have statues that protect you know access to select agents and so on but you have to have a lot of other things as well you have to have uh standards and codes of conduct that are international you have to have the technology solutions that scientists trained in a different way that's right the education of the scientists and and the ethical training of scientists and all those things together is what gives us our best hope it's it's it's flimsy and it's you know unsatisfactory in so many ways but it's better than anything else and and so it's a combination of many different instruments and tools that includes international law but includes domestic law and a lot of other things as well i think one of the difficulties is if you're working on fundamental questions in biology and even in synthetic biology where it's so application oriented people are still solving some pretty basic problems it feels like there's such a distance between what you're doing in the lab and the kinds of impacts it will have in the world um that it's that i think that a real challenge is how do you get young biologists to get in their guts this feeling like biology should never be used for harm um analogy to the way in which doctors are trained if doctors are inculcated with a sensibility that i ought not do harm that i ought to be using um uh my capacity is to save people's lives uh how do you begin to foster that same kind of deeply ingrained ethic among biologists and biotechnologists especially when it's impossible to draw a straight line between what they're doing at the bench and the kinds of impacts it will have on the world and and a culture that is presently organized to take no responsibility for the implementation of what they develop by someone else yeah so you know we just did the science someone else made it bad and so it's it's a really really complicated outcome like when i was at columbia university in the 1990s as a professor i taught students who were required to take a course if they received funding from the NIH they were required to take a course on in a sense the ethics of research and their role in research and it was a one of my worst experiences in my teaching at columbia uh because students didn't want to take the course they thought that it was completely utterly a waste of their time they their responsibility was to do good science what happened to their science was someone else's responsibility and so there's this this lack of connection between the notion of the scientist and what they're ultimately responsible for and we have not even conceived of the mechanism by which you do not thwart the finding of the fundamental operations of nature while at the same time giving responsibility to the scientists we haven't figured that out yet but we we need to another question right here i'm mark hagrod at the natal academy cyber center with their other contingent here of the natal academy if i could play with that title for a second and ask you the panel to comment on what it was how will the digital biology revolution transform our warriors like this midshipman sitting in front of me it seems that that's going to be where it hits first when we begin to ask them to modify for battlefield performance and i would submit is this maybe the first step for arms control that we don't require any military member across the world to be subject to modification for battlefield performance so open question well that's definitely not the path that we're on right now we're on the path of maximum modification in whatever way necessary to produce whatever type of warriors necessary to advance and the number of projects that are underway in that realm are are significant and many and so these go back to this notion of us not being sufficiently outcome in the long run outcome oriented enough to think through all the consequences of where we're of where we're headed and i i went to my phd program was in an area called science and technology policy and every week for the years that i was there on tuesdays we had the technology run a muck movie and it was always about you know the the soldier who was genetically altered who then you know they're the jason born syndrome or the or the whatever you know it would be the modern versions of this and so hollywood has done a good job of showing us what some of these outcomes are and we all pay to go to these movies and they seem really interesting okay well at some point they'll actually be real uh and so one has to think that through i think we're already in a gray zone on some of this so just pick an example which seems innocuous there are a number of efforts going on right now to use microbiology to produce the precursors precursor chemicals to make munitions is scalable it seems like it's much more environmentally sound than using synthetic chemistry to do these things but it opens the door not to the violation of things like the the biological warfare convention but opens the door to allowing young biologists to practice their biology in a way that ultimately is oriented toward military outcomes okay so we can have a conversation about whether or not that's good or not and under what conditions we should do that but as we begin to move these capacities forward it's toward deliberate use for for military ends i think one of the questions is going to be how do we continue to foster a culture of responsibility among the biologists i just like to say i think the era of genetically engineering soldiers is decades away i mean today we'll have more like pharmaceuticals brain machine interfaces equipment psychological training and so on those are the issues today genetic modification of humans is decades out there yeah but would you would you agree though that the policies the procedures the mechanisms that we take now for modification now will influence ultimately our culture yes and the acceptance of those later genetic that's right so we shouldn't sit on our hands we need to look at it proactively but it's we got time i guess it's tricky so like what you're describing is is um manipulating that guy to make him a super soldier it would be a somatic uh little did you know that you're soon going to be super ensign right and it is i like a great book on this is uh by sir e and will meet he's the guy that clone dolly the sheep and and he uh he's really out front about how very difficult it is to um take apart a gene and decide which attributes are the ones that are going to result in super intelligence math skills you know um the ability to quickly pick up another language this sort of thing even though we do know some parts of the brain that are associated with that the technical problem just enormous absolutely huge but uh that doesn't mean that getting to your framework point um that research isn't going to be undertaken and that it isn't even unethical i mean if you look at pre-implantation genetic diagnosis now this is the very beginnings of this right um and we all agree that we actually want to bring genetic science into reproductive science more just results in healthier populations we can't begin to think about a framework yet where um uh we draw a red line between ensuring a healthier population because of by using the benefits of genetic science and uh not making super soldiers but it seems to me that that line that test won't be something that we test in this country it might be something that another country test that doesn't have quite the same uh uh uh ethics that we do but i won't name them or speculate as to which ones and uh with that i hope you guys enjoyed lunch and uh please give it up for our panel thank you guys as far as we know there's no algae in the lunch right yeah no algae no way to say