 Well welcome everybody. My name is Daniel Rothenberg. I co-direct the Center on the Future of War, which links the institution we're at today, obviously New America with Arizona State University, based out in Arizona of course, although also with an office here. So we're thrilled to have such an exciting panel here with the release of a report that's available outside if you haven't already picked one up. So very briefly, I'm just going to introduce all of our panelists, pass things over to Jesse to present the plan for the event and then there'll be presentations for all the panel. So Jesse Kirkpatrick is an international security fellow here at New America and works quite a lot with ASU as well. He's a research assistant professor and interim director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at George Mason University and he's a political military analyst for Johns Hopkins University, the applied physics laboratory and an expert on the ethics of peace and security with an emphasis on emerging technologies. Gregory Koblenz is an associate professor in the Sharr School of Policy and Government and the director of the Bio Defense Graduate Program at George Mason University. He's also an associate faculty at the Center for Security Policy Studies at George Mason and the member of the Scientist Working Group on Chemical and Biological Weapons at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington. His research and teaching focus on international security and weapons of mass destruction. Dr. Megan Palmer is a senior research scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. She leads a research program on the governance of biotechnology development with a focus on how security is conceived of and managed. Her current projects focus on assessing strategies for governing dual-use research, analyzing the international diffusion of biosafety and biosecurity norms and practices, and understanding the security applications of alternative technology design decisions. Edward Perrello is the principal researcher for our our Curiti, a boutique consulting firm conducting research on public policy challenges in synthetic biology, conservation, biotech, and biosecurity. He's also a research fellow at George Mason University where he works on security policy related to genome editing tools. His research interests include the oversight of human genome editing, state and non-state actor development of biological capabilities, and the application of synthetic biology to ecological challenges. And finally we have David Roman who's the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merrigan professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology at Stanford University. And he's the chief of infectious diseases at the Veterans Affairs in Palo Alto, in Palo Alto Health Care System. He's also a senior fellow at the Freeman Spoli Institute for International Studies where he directs the biosecurity initiative and he's involved in a variety of different high-level initiatives including vice chair of the National Research Council Committee that reviewed the science performance of the FBI, the FBI anthrax letters if you remember, and the chair of the Forum on Microbiological Threats and a member of the Committee on Science, Technology and Law and currently a member of the Intelligence Community Studies Board, all of which are part of the US National Academies of Science. And he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2011. Great well thank you Daniel and thank you everyone for being here. It's always a pleasure to be at New America and to spend time with Daniel in particular. So we're going to try to keep our remarks relatively brief today. We're going to present the outcomes, findings, methodology, and structure of the study that we've run over the course of two years. And we're each going to be presenting in turn and I'm going to be starting off with giving you just a little bit of a brief overview and introduction to the study, the sort of structure and design and the motivation. So the purpose of this project was to really kind of dig deep on questions related to risk, security, and genome editing. We decided to focus in particular on a type of genome editing, CRISPR, which many of you are likely familiar with, and Eddie will be giving an overview for those of you who aren't about how the technology works and why it's important. We want to focus on the security dimensions for a number of reasons. One is that these dimensions are complex, that they're studied often, but what we found is that we wanted to craft a study that had a team of experts who really cut across disciplines. So we had a series of stakeholders from backgrounds including science and technology, humanities, particularly ethics and bioethics, security, policy, social sciences, and technology. And the reason that we wanted to do so is that we wanted to be able to speak to a wide audience, engage a range of stakeholders, and we'll explain in a little while why that's important. And we wanted to contribute to the suite of studies that already exist in this space. David's going to be speaking a little bit about that in a few moments, so I won't say too much more. So here's the project team. We've already been introduced, so we're live and in person and you might hear, but a little bit about the study process. As I mentioned, this was a two-year study. The backbone of it was really three workshops in person, invitation-only workshops. The first one occurred at George Mason University and one at Stanford, another one at George Mason. Underpinning these workshops were the commissioning of several issue briefs. So here are the project contributors, many of whom wrote these issue briefs that you see here. And we commissioned a number of issue briefs on a variety of topics. I won't go into them in detail. They're behind me, as you can see. But we reached out to experts and asked them to author these issue briefs so that we could do a deep dive on various areas related to genome editing and security in particular. To bookend each of these issue briefs, we also authored two working papers. One that kind of gave a lay of the land of risk and security assessments, kind of state of the art or state of the field, I should say. The second one was looking at frameworks for policy and governance. So a little bit about, you know, to give you some foreshadowing is that we really sort of grouped our takeaways into kind of two major categories that speak to the methodology and the design of our study approach. And the first is using CRISPR, genome editing CRISPR in particular is a lens. And that's a lens to view the complexity of this emerging security landscape. And the second is to use genome editing as also as a focus. So we wanted to use it as both a focus and a lens, a focus to drill down onto these complex security issues. And as a lens to kind of zoom out and see some of the broader takeaways or broader dimensions of biosecurity in general. So one of the real questions that we asked, we asked two questions. The first was how is genome editing in particular affecting this space? The second was how is it affecting biosecurity more broadly? So a number of our colleagues, including David, have been on a host of studies, panels and have a long history, not too long, but a long history of experience in this space. So I want to hand it over to David to put the project in a little bit of context. I'm going to make just a few brief comments, but I hope you all know that we're happy to return to any of these points in more detail afterwards. But just a few points about challenges, about current and ongoing efforts, and about the contributions of this study. First, on the topic of challenges, I think one can easily imagine that there are several. First, there are multitude of advances in science and technology that might be worthy of this sort of focus, as well as a multitude of risks. And around each of these, there is a great deal of uncertainty about likelihoods and consequences. And that's true for the benefits as well as the risks for each of these possible areas of study. There's also, in our estimation, a dearth of adequate landscaping effort to stand back and look at this array of possible advances worthy of study and think about where does one begin? How do we prioritize? Are there any that deserve much greater attention than others? And finally, there's the challenge of geography, of cultural variation in the way in which humans, populations of humans, look at any of these issues and think about where they might have concerns, where they might see unusual opportunities, and how to balance those two. So those are some of the challenges that we thought about and try to address. On the topic of current and ongoing efforts, all of you know well of many of these studies that are highlighted here in little images. There are plenty of others as well. And I think each of these studies had important things to contribute to the conversation about the topic at hand here. When we looked at these, and we did in a somewhat deliberate way, we realized that there was, in many of these cases, unusual focus on a particular problem to the exclusion of others. And involvement of a particular set of participants in the study to the exclusion of others, such that you might imagine the effort to be understandably but necessarily limited by both of those things, so scope and kinds of participants. And finally, there's then relatively little follow-through or follow-up to any of these previous studies. We can't know that we will have engendered that here, but we address this issue of how do we create a process rather than a product that has lasting and ongoing meaning and activity. And so that would be one of the points we would make about the contributions that we hope to make with this report. That in essence, we want as much to use this particular advance, technological advance, as illustrative of how a group of diverse people might sit down and think through this or some other problem, think about scenarios, work through scenarios. And by doing so, realize the realities of what it will take to do something useful and then make that an ongoing process. And so think about issues that some call adaptive governance mechanisms or regimes that iterate and think through how to better the kinds of actions that have been taken before. So I want to walk you guys through genome engineering, technology and wetware, the tools that are actually used inside cells. So you can get an understanding and an appreciation of what's going on at the molecular level as well as what's going on at the application level, why are people using it, and then a little bit higher up at the industrial and sectoral level. So what you see behind me is a schematic representation of what's called the central dogma of biology. Effectively, that DNA, the thing that we care about most in this discussion at least, is turned into RNA and then eventually into protein. And when we're talking about genome engineering, what we're talking about is editing DNA in order to modify the proteins at the resultant end of this process. So why would we want to edit a protein? Proteins make up a huge chunk of our bodies and cells that we want to experiment with. They are the hormones, they are the digestive proteins, the enzymes and so on and so forth. They are essential for organisms to function. It's very difficult to modify proteins directly, but if you can modify the source of the protein, the DNA itself, then you can make very specific changes in these proteins. You can change the function of the organism at a very precise level. So what I'm about to show you next is how this occurs at the molecular level using a genome engineering tool called CRISPR. And I'm going to show you a video which comes from the McGovern Brain Institute. We're starting a little bit late in the process where the CRISPR molecule has already been introduced to a cell. So here we go. This is the Cas9. This is the nuclease protein which is capable of cutting DNA. And the blue strand, that double-stranded molecule, that's the genomic DNA. It's unwound by the Cas9. And that red element is a programmable guide. You can change that and it provides specificity. And when the binding is perfect, when those sequences match up, the double-strand genome breaks. I'm just going to go back and start again with that one, just so you can catch it again. So we've got the CRISPR, the Cas9 molecule, coming to the cell. It's unwinding the double-stranded genome. It's checking for a match between the guide RNA, the programmable element, and the genomic DNA. And then you see both strands of the DNA break. Now at this point, almost every cell in the living world will say, whoa, whoa, whoa, we have a break here. This molecule is no longer functional. It's broken. The cell will try and repair it. And it will do it randomly. It will try and maintain the overall integrity of the genomic molecule by introducing a random piece of DNA. And this has the great function of sparing the function of the genomic molecule overall, but it disrupts that individual element. So if you target a specific gene, you can modify it. You can delete it. You can functionally knock it out. You can also insert DNA at the same time. So here we have what's called a donor molecule of DNA, something specifically designed to bind to that cut site and introduce a new functional element. And this is how you can conduct gain of function work, where you can overwrite existing genetic functions with others. So with this, you have a very, very precise tool, more or less, that allows you to ablate old function and introduce new function. This all happens in cells, in dishes. And it happens in the context of this genome editing protocol, where these are the steps that a scientist would take in order to execute this correctly. They would start by looking at the underlying sequence as a digital representation. They would look for possible guides where they can get that conformational match and precisely target an element and cut. And then they're trying to select for something which is computationally predicted to work very well at the on target site whilst avoiding what's called off targets, places that you don't want to cut accidentally. You then synthesize these guide RNAs chemically, you can do this in a lab. And then you can complex them with something called a genome editing vector. It's basically a vehicle which allows you to introduce CRISPR elements into a cell with these custom elements, the guides, as well as the standard elements, the CRISPR molecules. They can be introduced in any number of ways. There's a lot of different vectors. You can use viruses, you can directly deliver them into cells. I won't go into the details. But ultimately, once those elements have been inserted into the cell, the cell reads them, it boots them up using this central dogma process of DNA to RNA protein. You have those functional genome editing components in the cell. They do their job. And then you'll end up with a population of cells, some of which are edited correctly. Others are edited incorrectly, because there are off targets. And the vast majority of the cells will not actually be edited at all. So you'll have to select for the ones that you wanted. So we break this down into three broad categories of application of CRISPR or genome engineering in general. Cell line engineering is where the researcher is concerned primarily with modifying a cell in culture. And that's it. They do not want to generate whole organisms. They just want the cells edited at the other end. And cell line engineering or model cell lines is one of the mainstay activities here. So say you have a number of patients with a disease. They all show a characteristic mutation. The scientists would say, oh, I bet this mutation is involved in the disease. So what they can do is they can take a cell, introduce that specific mutation at the target site, and then see if these cells end up having the characteristics of those diseases. You have a model of the disease to conduct experiments on. In bioproduction, you're modifying a cell to produce chemicals or proteins in bulk. So you can purify those, sell them on for commercial value. And then in cell therapy, you're actually modifying the genes in order to exert a therapeutic effect at the end. And you can do that either by delivering edited cells to a patient or modifying their tissues directly. In a whole organism engineering, very, very similar to what you see in cell engineering, the difference is you are aiming to get a whole organism that can reproduce with other edited organisms or other wild type organisms, and they can propagate themselves over time. So you get multiple generations of edited organism. And again, we see the same kind of thing. Scientists are interested in doing this to have models of disease. You may edit a monkey to have a cancer, for instance. You may develop a commercial variant of an organism that can produce a chemical protein that you eat or protein for therapeutic in very, very high quantities. And there's a novel application which has really found a lot of interest in recent times because of CRISPR, which is the gene drive, the engineered gene drive. Here you're modifying an organism with the express goal of altering how it's going to pass on its DNA to other organisms. So typically, you take two organisms, they produce progeny, they'll have a certain distribution of how their genes are inherited. But with a gene drive, you can get what's called super Mendelian inheritance and drive into all of the offspring the precise trait that you are looking for. And this has great applications for pest control, which I'll get to in a moment. The final family of activity that we look at is screening. And in many ways, screening is similar to the engineering applications that I just walked you through. The difference is that with cell line and whole organism engineering, it's very deliberate. You know exactly what you want to do, what you want to edit, you do it in a small quantity. Whereas with screening, you're randomly editing, you are editing using what's called a library where you're designing potentially many millions of guide RNAs to modify potentially thousands of targets in a single organism. And then you look at how your edits cause a particular trait to be altered. And then you can work backwards and you can see how combinations of modifications could lead to certain characteristics. And from there you can assign genome, genotype to phenotype. You can understand how that organism works. You can do this in cells in a high throughput manner using computational tools like with handling robotics. And you can do this in absolutely crazy scales. Or you could do this in organisms where you're editing a smaller group of organisms. And you're really just limited on how many you can fit in your facility once they're adults, which is significantly less than the footprint. It's easier to have a lot more cells in a facility than to have a lot of adult animals, for instance. So in terms of how this breaks down into the industry, really I guess there's two hemispheres. There's the biomedical research and the human health up top, where we're interested in understanding the function of genes and mutations and then exploiting or applying that knowledge to medical interventions. And then the second hemisphere on the bottom is really about agriculture and industrial biotechnology, which is exploiting genome engineering in order to go more for these productive capabilities. And you can see the split is by and large oriented to human health and medicine. That's where the majority of the focus is on where we're getting useful applications from genome engineering. So with that I'd say that's the essentials for understanding what CRISPR is and how it's being used. And now I'm going to hand over to Greg, who's going to walk you through the risks emanating from misuse of the technology. Okay, great. As Eddie just highlighted, the flexibility, the precision, the versatility, ease of use and the rapid diffusion of genome editing technologies has opened up a lot of opportunities for the peaceful beneficial applications of this technology. But at the same time, it raises a number of concerns about how this technology can be misused. And in this report, we looked at misuse from a broad definition, with that the security broadly defined. Because we wanted to be able to capture areas where risks could have multiple different types of sources. And likewise, look for policies that would be able to enable us to deal with multiple risks at the same time. So we looked at kind of four types of security concerns in general. One is biosafety, the effects of the accidental release of an edited organism into a population or into the environment. We looked at the role of dual use research, which is research that generates information or knowledge or technology that could be designed to be used for peaceful beneficial purposes, but could be misused or misapplied in ways that cause harm. We also looked at biosecurity, which is the deliberate misuse of the technology to cause harm in the context of either a state run biological weapons program or the case of bioterrorism. And then lastly, looking at reckless applications, which is where the technology is being used in ways that are not fully thought through, consequences that are not anticipated, or people don't give due prudence and do consideration to the effects of their research, the effects of the products that they're selling. And so looking across these four different domains, these are the same types of concerns we've had for many years for other technology. So we've had concerns going back to the 1970s with recombinant DNA in this in this respect. In the 2000s the concerns are more about synthetic biology and some of the safety and security concerns revolving around that technology. But the report we try and highlight, you know, how concerns about genome editing in CRISPR in particular are kind of quantitative and qualitatively different and create new challenges in this in this area. And one of the specific subsets of what we look at are the ways that genome editing technology enables different types of threats than what we are contritionally used to. Now there is the standard concern that these tools offer ways to modify microbes to be more dangerous. There's a long list of attributes that have been a long standing concern that a nation state or a terrorist group could modify a pathogen to make it more lethal, more transmissible, some other attribute that make it more useful as a weapon. And this is a long standing concern. This is what most of our biodefense programs large are designed to respond to. And CRISPR is one tool but of many tools that have applicability in this space. Where CRISPR has a unique or a unique application or special advantages is in these other categories of risks that as Eddie alluded to deal more with affecting the source code directly, affecting the DNA of humans, plants and animals directly as opposed to enabling a pathogen that would cause harm if it infects the population. And so there are areas around what we call hijacking the microbiome, weaponizing gene therapy and gene drives and weapons where the same basic knowledge and processes that you would need to have in order to repair repair DNA that is causing disease or is causing a harmful condition. Those same knowledge that you need to repair cause abuse to disrupt normal functions of these genes and actually cause the disease of concern. So for example, we now have a much greater understanding about how the human microbiome operates, how integral it is to many different biological systems and processes that we rely on and that understanding unfortunately creates new vulnerabilities and new knowledge about what it would take to disrupt the homeostasis that we rely on for lots of functions. Likewise, in the area of gene therapy, understanding about how to manipulate and modify DNA to circumvent the immune system or to have effects in in the nervous system or for other physical processes, again gives, provides that insight and those capabilities in terms of the vectors that are needed to have a harmful effect if that's what's desired. And of course with gene drives, while the emphasis obviously is on how do we either eradicate vectors that cause disease, how do we eradicate pester invasive alien species, the ability to drive genes into a population that could be used to spread harmful genes in a population that would either have environmental consequences or have direct human health impact if it's enabling a vector to spread disease more efficiently, spread new diseases or live in areas where they're not currently viable. And what this collection of different types of risks really has in common is they challenge the traditional bio defense paradigm which is very much focused on dealing with a small list of pathogens that we are concerned of being used as weapons. And so one of the major takeaways from this report is how genome editing is expanding the attack surface that we worry about from the context of biosecurity. Attack surface is a concept that comes out of the cybersecurity world which is a way of kind of describing and measuring the number, the type, the accessibility, the consequences of vulnerabilities in code or in a computer program. And we're seeing something similar here where given our much greater understanding and knowledge about how the code operates for humans and how that translates into RNA and proteins and our ability now with additional knowledge, initial tools that enables to go in and edit that source code more easily, it creates more opportunities for that system to be hacked. And that hacking could be done for legitimate reasons for all the applications that Eddie described or it could be done by accident or for recklessly by people who are not taking the consideration of the consequences of their actions or again it could be done in a deliberate way to cause harm to either humans, plants or animals. And so this creates challenges for a system that has been designed to deal with a small list of pathogens in terms of medical economic management, development, detection, attribution, all of our dual use research oversight systems are geared towards a list of pathogens. Does not cover much of the genetic editing research that we've been talking about so far. And just to add a caveat or qualifier here, the risks we look at, we're not saying this is going to happen tomorrow, although we've been surprised by things that are happening just the last week so it's hard to rule things out. But there are still barriers to the use of the technology and to the misuse of this technology. There is still a large fundamental gap in our collective knowledge of how does genotype translate into phenotype, how do you actually take the knowledge of how genes operate and manipulate that in a way that will get a predictable result in the physical trait that you are looking for in an organism or in a cell. There are still, aside from the equipment and materials that I talked about, there's still a good amount of tacit knowledge and skill required to use these tools successively and effectively. And this is not just around the molecular biology techniques in the laboratory, but there's also a great deal of bioinformatics knowledge and skill that goes into designing the genome editors and targeting them correctly. And then lastly, when we think about how do we go from an agent or organism or gene editor in a test tube to it being something that is able to cause harm on a large scale out in the wild, there is a great amount of additional work and knowledge and materials that are needed for production, delivery, dissemination that go beyond just the narrow skill set that you need in the lab to actually build the gene editing vector that you need for your research or your application. So there are still barriers that this is not something that we're talking about as being immediately feasible by unskilled amateurs, but it's also worth noting that all these barriers are falling. And in the report we talk about some of the trends that we see in this field, in part because of this large demand for improvement to health, to agricultural productivity, for industrial uses, there's a huge amount of research that's being funded by governments, by universities, by the private sector. The whole goal is to solve these barriers that were to use that we've described, but has that same dual use application of also reducing the barriers to misuse. So again, this is a key area that's going to require a long-term attention to. Now, in order to kind of help illustrate some of these risks that we talk about in the report and to try and put a little more, put these more concrete terms, we develop some scenarios that are tied to these different domains of risk in terms of biosafety, Julius research, reckless applications and biosecurity concerns. And to talk about some of those scenarios, I will turn this over to Megan. Thanks. So as Greg mentioned, one of the things we wanted to do was to develop tools to really begin to think through the complexities of the governance challenges that exist in this space and strategies that we might employ in order to counter them. And as David also mentioned, we thought about this project really not just as a product, but as a process. So the co-development of these scenarios was one of the tools we used in order to begin to imagine the types of things that might be on the horizon. So these are each borrowing from a number of these different risk areas, from dual use, from biosafety, biosecurity, and reckless actors, but there's really a lot of sort of crossover between the actors and the aims. There was a number of criteria we used to develop the scenarios and to select them. Primarily they were used to illustrate some of the less intuitive governance gaps, but also to highlight the diversity of actors and motivations, technical capabilities that might be employed, particular technology applications of interest. We also wanted specifically to look at things that were sort of plausible, but not immediately possible, because there was a lot of concern in this study as there are in others around the potential information hazards that might be coupled to the development of scenarios. And lastly they really weren't worst case scenarios in terms of the potential number of individual sort of casualties that might be employed, but really to begin to look at these sort of less intuitive and less intuitive gaps. So these are just some illustrations. There was six scenarios that are developed in the report. There's others that could be imagined here, but there are a place to start. I'm going to walk through just three of them in a little bit more detail and highlight the others. So the first of these we call CRISPR charlatans, and it is even more relevant this week perhaps than a couple weeks ago. This is the scenario where we imagined there might be a small sort of outbreak of inflammatory bowel disease like symptoms that occur locally. And then over time it seems to spread quite quickly across the country. And as we began to unravel the source of these conditions, it becomes evident that all of these individuals have been taking the same probiotic. Going one step further, that probiotic, it finds out that the firm actually inspired by the claims of what might be possible by modifying the bacteria in that probiotic designed to contract out to a research organization that puts in an immune modulator into the probiotic. And this is what is causing some of these conditions. One of the reasons that we wanted to highlight this is to show the diversity of new types of products that might be imagined using genome editing in order to enable their development. And these are exposing really the attack surface that is our bodies in new ways of delivery and dissemination that might be taking advantage of areas that are more loosely regulated in this example, a probiotic that sort of falls between, you know, a food and a drug, especially if it's not making medical claims. Another thing that we wanted to highlight is the ability to actually contract out to research organizations that might do these types of things on demand and with less oversight. As we begin to look at the types of policy options and these are just examples, there's one in the book, it shows the increasing importance as these tools are developed and used in a number of different sectors to engage industry in co-developing the types of oversight that might be required, especially taking advantage of actors that really do want to safeguard their industry to figure out where those gaps are and particular high risk consumer goods. We talked about delivery as being one of the key bottlenecks as some of those delivery and computational design elements that the process might be ripe for more oversight. But of course, Chuck coupled to this is just overall strains in regulatory capacity. So how do we enable different regulatory agencies to work together to identify these risks? One of the second scenarios we developed, we called weaponized bio narratives. And this scenario revolves around a malaria lab that's looking into one of these technologies, gene drives, to develop a self propagating system that might be able to either sterilize the vector or cause it to not be able to propagate the parasite. And in this case, we look at an actor, an environmental group that happens to know one of the lab members, steals their card and does a small scale release of these agents. It's actually in a place where it's winter, it's not likely to propagate. But what does propagate is the story. So it's videotaped that begins to be picked up by different groups knowing that this is already a polarizing narrative. It's a story that equally propagates by even state sponsored misinformation campaigns. So even though there isn't a physical effect, the psychological and the ultimately the effect on the economy and on science is quite large because there's a distrust of the technology that could have sort of widespread beneficial applications. And so here the story was really around, you know, we're dealing more and more with not just risky technologies but risky communications. The uncertainty that David spoke about can itself really be used to polarize and seed fear and doubt even without a physical effect. And secondly, there are many different actors with many different motivations that may be leveraged in order to make an event and really a political event. And the third that I'll give some detail around was around the development of new types of biological weapons that have new strategic uses. And in this case a dissident that is targeted and the regime that's going after them is interested in a way that's more covert to assassinate that individual. And so they take advantage of published research to look at an agent that might be able to cause a neurodegenerative disease that might be less easily detectable. And that initial test that's successful might inspire further programs. And so here again it's, you know, our initial calculus around traditional biological weapons programs may no longer hold with some of the new types of capabilities we're beginning to see with these technologies. So we have to begin to reevaluate the initial assumptions behind this. And also the idea that the footprint, the scale of these types of programs may differ widely because of the availability of a wide amount of public research that has increasing dual use potential. I won't go through the other ones in detail, but some of the other, oh and I'll just say we're on the edge of the biological weapons convention meeting of state parties this week. And so this is one of the topics, genome editing, genetic weapons and gene drives that is, that is on the docket. And it increasingly begins to bring our focus to the need to do landscaping. Science and technology review understand how these new types of capabilities and new types of actors affect our agreements around what we will do or not do. So some of the other scenarios were increasing around vulnerabilities in the agriculture and commercial sector, developing new types of disease resistant organisms like pigs that might be reservoirs for human disease. The idea of new types of bioterrorism being able to contract out to commercial firms to develop pathogenic bacteria out of non-pathogenic bacteria using these new types of tools, but perhaps familiar ways to deliver them. And biosafety incidents that can occur from labs that are developing these technologies and all of the infrastructure around them that may not recognize immediately the types of risks inherent at the forefront of knowledge just because they're unfamiliar and there's a lack, there's really a dearth of expertise on knowing how to handle these things in the midst of uncertainty. So collectively these scenarios are really meant to illustrate, you know, the number of different types of risks, the number of actors that are involved in both posing and in mitigating those risks and the types of strategies that we might employ and to begin to imagine the things that are on the horizon. Now I'm going to just hand it over to Jesse to wrap us in. Great. So the question is what are some of the key takeaways from this study? And we really can group them into two categories. The first is those that are specific, again, to genome editing in particular. That's genome editing as a focus. And then the second is those that speak to some broader trends in the life sciences and biosecurity in particular. So if we see here, we've discussed many of the benefits that both Eddie and Greg have touched upon. And we wanted to make clear at the outset that it is extremely important to recognize that genome editing could play a critical role in improving the human condition. Whether it's through increasing crop hardiness, greater agricultural yields, breakthroughs in advances for medicine, improvements to the economy, and so on and so forth. So our goal was at the outset to make explicitly clear that there are benefits, but we also have to safeguard the risks. The second is is that it's clear that CRISPR and genome editing, that they are going, that this technology has and will continue to disrupt the biosecurity landscape. One way, as Greg mentioned and Megan mentioned and others is that we found in the report is that the attack surface is going to be increasing. Whether it's through different paths of exploitation, different actors in this space, or ways that we possibly couldn't imagine, this landscape is shifting and we need to be aware of that and safeguard against it. The third is that this, that the study also suggests to us that there are broader trends in the landscape that we need to pay attention to. Now the only way that we're going to be aware of these broader trends is if we take the technology seriously. So we endeavored in this study to really do a deep dive. I mean that's why many of you who are not trained in the life sciences, you know, sat through a good bit of this, a good bit of this review of this study that is, that is technically specific. The goal here was is that really the devil is in the details. That in order for us to be able to think about both genome editing and the broader picture is that we have to be, we have to focus on the specifics as well. Only be only, only through looking at that, looking at the small, the small part of topography, can we zoom out and get a better sense of what this landscape holds. And in doing so, we recognize, and this was one of the attempts in illustrating this through the scenarios and through the sort of that the different actors that we, that we highlighted and that we explored in the study is that, that there are going to be different stakeholders than we've seen in the past. Part of this is simply or a large part of this is simply just the function of this technology, what it, what it makes capable, what it enables. And that's, that's in part the composition of this, of this research team is that, is that, you know, this is both by function and design that we have, that we have policy experts, security experts, medical doctor, technology expert and ethicist. The idea is that we need to be able to, to engage these key stakeholders in various areas and be able to speak, speak to them in their own language. Last, is this last, no, last but not least, is that in terms of thinking about the governance options, and Megan mentioned, mentioned just a few, you just got to taste there are many more in the full report. But that, that our call is, is that more applied research is needed. And being able to prototype and test different types of governance measures before the stakes are too high. And so be able to think about how to incentivize actors to act well both through push and pull factors, be able to engage social scientists, those in the tech community and so on and so forth, to adopt some of these, structure them, think about them and move forward and, and productively designing types of policy options that can be widely adopted and accepted. And so in thinking about that, we really crafted a kind of a, a two prong approach to a path forward. And, and this, this isn't just one path, there are many, that there, there is a, you know, again in the, the governance options that we present are, are you know, not the end all of be all, there are options and there are many. But the first is, is that we need to focus on a strategy of collaboration. Again that's in, it's, it's bringing people like this, people like, like the collection in this room to bear on these tough problems, to engage stakeholders. So that's, that's, you know, members of, members of the government, you know, policy wonks, security experts, you know, and those that are, that are working in the science. So we need to go from, you know, from, from bench side to, to bioethics. The second is, is that, while working and endeavoring to have that collaborative engaged approach, we also need to hedge against the possibility that there may be failures and gaps and they are likely to occur. And so what might we want to do about that? Well, one option is, is that we need to use technology and we need to use security, innovation as a security strategy. So we need to harness the technology such as genome editing and future technologies to safeguard against the very risks that they may present. So I'll just give one, one or two examples of how this, how this could, how this could occur. There are a few government programs that are investing heavily in, in, in, in designing technologies using genome editing that can, that can detect, that can detect uses, harmful deleterious uses of the technology that can remediate, try to bring the environment back to a, back to a sort of genetic baseline. And these are defensive technologies. So one path forward is to, is to think about how we can bootstrap the use of this technology because it's not going away into creating and crafting better biosecurity strategy and policy. So a few of the acknowledgments here, we have our project contributors, had a host of research assistants. One co-author who is in this room but is not on stage, I'd like to thank in particular and there, that's Sara Denton. And we had many research assistants, institutions and workshop participants. Real quick plug, all of the issue briefs are available online at editing biosecurity.org, as are the working papers. And if you are unable, or if you want to save the paper, the full reports are also available as well. And I think with that, we will include and take questions. So we'll open the questions from all of you. Briefly, if you can say your name and your affiliation. And if you want to direct a question to a particular person, please do that. And so we'll just open the floor. And there's a mic that's traveling around. So just raise your hand. I want to shut up. My name's George Robertson and I'm an advisor to the Joint Program Executive Office of Chemical and Biological Defense of the US government. One of the things I just briefly looked through your report is risk needs to be quantified. And I believe there are two risks, one of which is what I'll call the risk of the project, which is what you quite well described here today. And the other is the risk of management, the risk of oversight. And from in an earlier life, I was working with overseas vaccine developing manufacturers. And the emphasis on quality was top down. If the manager wanted it, you had good quality. If they didn't, they didn't. Part of my job at that point was to change that attitude. But I'd like to query the panel on, frankly, if you can, which is more important, the risk of the project or the risk of the oversight and perhaps the deliberate or accidental release issue or those sort of things. So thank you. I'll take a stab at that. I don't think it's just the amount of one or the other. I think there are different mechanisms that you'd want to have in place to mitigate risks opposed to a specific project and then programs in place to ensure that that oversight is done consistently and with high standards and that you don't have the risks that come out of lack of oversight. So you could have a more generic process that is a matter of kind of educating the scientists who engage in these types of projects where they understand the nature of the risks that are potentially manifesting themselves. And so that would require the people in the trenches, in the labs, at the bench to be very kinds of this. But at the same time, there does need to be some top down in terms of, OK, here's the guidance, here are the standards, here's what's expected of you. And again, that's part of the collaborative approach that we would hope can flow out of this is you have both people from the science technology side and from the policy side coming up with what are the appropriate types of oversight that would raise the awareness, would mitigate some of those risks, but would not be so burdensome as to get in the way of the kind of research that is very, very valuable. But finding that balance is not easy. It's automatic. It's going to require a good deal of dialogue among these different stakeholders to get there. And one of the key takeaways from our report is we need to start that conversation now. We don't want to wait until after there is a biosafety incident. We don't wait till after there is some major regular, well, there already has been, another major regulatory failure or oversight failure or biosecurity incident that it's much better to have those conversations now when we can kind of plan ahead and not be caught in the reactive trap that that happens after a major event. I'll just follow on the thing. I think it's a core challenge of how do you ensure that the leaders of the increasingly diverse number of organizations that are conducting this work can prioritize security as a topic. It's something that in the life sciences establishment is not always top of mind and isn't necessarily natural. And so part of these projects even was to give individuals who are working across the diversity of organizations the chance to work on something proactively where they become more of a leader in thinking through the gaps instead of a real sort of compliance mindset that leads to other types of problems. And so that's why part of the project was really focused on this process of what do you need to actually equip people to feel like they can they can take ownership of whether it's a project or a process management issue. I would also add of course we do not want to see this viewed as an either or proposition. I'm also mindful of the realities which often result in that kind of trade off happening. It's sometimes a function of the kind of mechanism that's deployed for the oversight meaning law for example hard to revoke or change. Guidelines were easy to do so and so sometimes the choice of mechanism might then allow for less of a either or and more of a flexible iterative adaptive kind of approach where both can work together well. But you know it's a very important point and you only have to go out to NIH and talk to folks who have tried some experiments in registration for example and have data that show that even the most mild form of registration for use of a database results in clear evidence of diminished use and you know and lack of beneficial work. So it's a really important point. Yeah, a lot of the work that's been described of course has been done by other means like lentiviruses, plasmids et cetera. However this is far more I think exciting for what can be done because many of those insertions into the genome are random and as we all know they can have some bad unintended effects. So certainly in the USEU there are institutional biosafety committees but as you and I were talking beforehand David there's no real Australia group for how we can track this because now it's commodity items at BioRad or something like that. So it's but the idea of understanding and the depth of it clearly especially to the biosafety community to start I believe is extraordinarily important. Thank you. Thank you. I'm a reporter from Hong Kong Phoenix TV. I have a question for Dr. Wellman and also other experts. As we all know there's a group of Chinese experts Chinese scientists created two babies by gene editing. What's your comments on that? Do you think that's a breakthrough or do you have worries in this case? And also do you think there's a universal standard for gene editing in the world? Thank you. As you know the events of this past week have engendered a lot of discussion. I will I'm happy to make a few comments speaking as an individual but perhaps in the spirit of the report as well. As an individual I'm greatly concerned that there doesn't appear to have been the kind of open pre-planned discussion of what might have been the motivations the options and then the approach to addressing what might be some real questions and and potential beneficial purposes. Without that kind of discussion you end up with a lot of ad hoc activity which is sometimes hard to reverse. Once you pass certain lines you don't walk back and I think some lines were crossed here not of a technical sort but of an ethical and is this what we as a larger set of interconnected societies want for ourselves? That was transgressed, that was violated in an ad hoc way without the kind of discussion that this report seeks to clarify and describe because there are many people with viewpoints that were not adequately reflected and represented when early decisions were made to do these experiments at least judging from what's been made publicly available a lot of people caught by surprise and I think when you look at the kinds of any of these complicated scenarios and think about what are all the kinds of viewpoints invested interest that that deserve a place in a conversation many would seem to have been left out of this. Hi there, my name is Mei Feng and I write a lot about China not so much about science and I'm kind of curious this whole discussion about the CRISPR technology is sort of illustrated you know the big debate between what can be done and what should be done clearly but my question pertains more to who, which is we've clearly all outlined a very big need for oversight across industries but clearly as what's happened with China there's also a need for oversight across borders and so my question would be have you identified any potential bodies that should be having oversight over this because clearly we say they should be but who's going to be doing it and how can that be done and I know this is a bit of a difficult question bearing in mind this intense global rivalry with every country vying to gain an edge in biotech you know increasingly science technology is a global is a really global enterprise and so the communities who are involved right at least at the stage of research and development are often sharing a lot of this this information and so I think what we're going to see is not just one you know one central body that's going to be helping to to figure out what that should we do or develop norms but it's going to be a number of bodies that are trying to set strong norms but increasingly I think we're dealing with a sort of network governance regime where it's who are the communities right that individuals working in this space identify with and where do they take their cues so few people in this in this room and myself included have worked with organizations like the international genetically engineered machine competition uh... that this year involves i think three hundred and forty teams from forty eight countries were involved and actually almost a third of those teams were from China these are teams that all are coming together to share their discoveries right about what they're doing care share the cutting edge of what's happening uh... it's also been coupled to programs uh... like the one that ed you here helped develop with the fb i uh... sponsoring some of these programs so that when all of these individuals who are operating see something they think is not quite right uh... it's not just awareness building they have a whole community of first peers that they can speak to about what might be right uh... and also are plugged into professionals and networks that whose responsibilities are around safeguarding you know individual countries and individual uh... organizations and so i think that increasingly actually having eyes on what's happening in this space is going to be just as important as say an oversight uh... capacity somewhere but you we can't get away from the fact that this is a technology that everybody wants to develop because of it because of its promising there is no particular strong governing body bodies with oversight over this process right now or appears to will be in the future that we see there are several strong governing oversight bias you can then maybe uh... picture but right just this week with the biological weapons convention talk about a strong norm right around a technology that we are we we are not using for right and that that's very different than other areas of technology uh... and so those types of institutions really are the foundation on which all of these other types of uh... capacities and actions are built yeah i mean one of the uh... one of the more interesting findings was just you know how many diverse applications are of the of the technology and clearly use of genome editing for germline editing is kind of become front and center because of what what happened in china recently uh... but there are there's a period of other applications and we do have some pretty strong dorms and red lines on some of them so the idea of using uh... you know uh... gently modified organism as a weapon right there was a red line that the biological convention says is uh... prohibited right most countries in the world have signed up to this so this is not something that's kind of up for debate or that requires any kind of consensus building so there are some very strong norms out there uh... there have been attempts to build some norms around things like human germline editing not gotten institutionalized but there have been different groups that have kind of promoted the idea that we need a moratorium or we need to have certain criteria in place conditions met before this is acceptable type of research to go uh... forward with uh... but i think we're still that is still in the earlier phase what i would say is that the response we've seen so far from uh... authorities in china and from uh... relevant uh... uh... threes in the u.s. been encouraging in a sense that no one is kind of you know uh... dismissed this or or downplayed it or marginalized it they said this is important issue we need to investigate we understand why what happened why it happened and you know is there something wrong with our processes or do we need stronger norms in this in this case i think now we're asking these questions uh... in a way that hopefully will be productive and fruitful and i think one of the other kind of takeaways is that the conversation we need to have in a couple of these different areas as well right not just wait for someone to do something that transgresses one of these boundaries uh... but instead we need to be having these conversations ahead of time and trying to establish some of these norms and uh... and red lines and limits early on and make it clear to communicate to the scientists uh... what what's kind of expected and the positive is to do this in a way that is productive and it's not getting in the way of a legitimate beneficial research and again that's why we need to have this collaborative approach between disciplines between countries in order to have that be something that is a enduring way of managing the different ethical social risks that this technology poses i think uh... i want to come back to what you said earlier david which is that it's key to remember that nations have a plurality of views from the different publics that reside inside and i used to think back when chris perri from the block damn we need international treaty where we can just deal with this upfront and avoid any issues the trouble i realize that that is that one that would take quite a long time for nations to negotiate effectively and second how can nations accurately reflect the opinions of the citizens on this technology and this is complicated when the technology has so many different applications in different spaces right the views on gene drives in nation a could be completely different from gene drives in nation b and they may have divergent views on germline editing or clinical uses in terms of an effective strategy i've seen in the u k for understanding how publics respond to technologies and how they demand it used i would point to the example of the british human fertilization and embryology authority uh... which has conducted some very uh... in-depth studies on attitudes to genetic engineering of humans with regard to mitre chondrial donation therapy where three parents provide genetic material in order to produce a single offspring and the u k i believe spent about ten years running several workshops with religious leaders patients average citizens scientists parliamentarians in order to get a very deep understanding of what the national view was in order for parliament and others to make effective decision now when it comes to what we saw in china last week i'm i'm still on the fence and the reason for that is because i think when you think about genome engineering on a long enough timeline i would say sure will probably end up using it in humans the question is how long will it take for us to get there effectively where we're all bringing each other along for the ride and we're all comfortable and i would say that if we do move towards a treaty or something a few rungs down it might make the most sense to outlaw things quite brutally initially but also give us the flexibility to uh... reinstate applications as they become more acceptable in a society as the years and decades roll on and i think you will see the change in attitudes over the coming decades it may even be less uh... thank thank you very much that terry taylor from the international council for life sciences uh... thank you very much for the report which i look forward to reading detail and your comments uh... my question comes from a policy implementation point of view rather scientist point of view and i was it's it's about the international regulation rather than domestic regulation and i wonder what what you would see any of you would see is the first one or two steps to improve the international regulatory i'm i'm a little bit of a skeptic because personal experience in this area uh... i was a little bit uneasy when i saw in your reports you said about looking at the scope of the biological weapons convention coverage i think the word is i would that makes me uneasy as a former negotiator more definition results in a narrowing down that would be my my big fear of the political risk would be involved in doing that but uh... and really listening to the the last remarks so by you should we be looking at a evolutionary process so there's a whole bottom up process maybe it's a matter of timing maybe the time is not right to have an international convention should there be something new what would it be and we need to look at the other existing instruments that already exist uh... like the convention on biodiversity resolution fifteen forty of the UN Security Council these other things that we have to look across the landscape maybe there's a time for another asylum conference of that kind galvanize the internationally scientific community which that had a big impact of course at its time uh... so i wonder about your views on that thank you very much we've seen is within uh... what is often a usefully flexibly large umbrella of uh... of these international agreements a lot of the difficulty does come at that the sort of level of implementation and and how to carry forward where often broad recommendations or or broad coverage of scope so i've been personally hard to see a lot of the the partnering initiatives that have brought together uh... to or more countries right to share their efforts on how to say develop a dual use research of concern oversight something that is sort of plagued us for for a long time to share you know how did they define it where they were how did they reach out to different groups how can you use the same the same types of of tools uh... and so i think there needs to be a lot more sharing of resources and approaches at that level at that sort of ground level of what might be possible uh... and i think there's all only so much you can do always at the level at the sort of highest level and it needs to be a lot more the resources and attention put into to partner information sharing i would just i would add so you mentioned that the cbd that can convention on biological diversity so make him is talking about sort of bottom up so i'll speak to the top just a little bit uh... as you likely know there was there was just a meeting in which gene drive was under discussion uh... there was the threat of a moratorium on the research and uh... that did not occur so that the research is uh... able to able to go on uh... under narrow circumstances so that's that's one example in which uh... in which it's you know which there is a uh... international treaty body that is taking up taking up these topics the other was the bwc and you had a point about the narrowing of the scope and i think that's a legitimate concern uh... but there are certainly i mean i i i take your point to be a part of your point to be uh... in which i agree is that uh... yeah we we might do well to uh... to look at existing treaty bodies existing institutions that it that in which this might fall under the per viewer scope of of you know if they're of oversight as opposed to say recreating the wheel uh... so i would i would say it's you know one one potential risk you know with with starting at that starting at the top is that uh... such you may not get the stakeholders like megan mentions who often are the ones that are in the trenches and are going to be going to be needed to do this research to implement it all the guidelines and rules if i could just address the specific point about the bwc definitions are again double detail kind of uh... matter uh... but more fundamental is uh... a need for uh... that community of diplomats and stakeholders to even know what is happening in the realm of genome editing and so this idea that's been floating for a long time has not yet to be implemented has been a establishing a mechanism within or connected to the bwc that does regular systematic reviews of science technology relevant to the convention as we talked about uh... you know uh... crisp and you know editing are just one of many emerging technologies that are going to have an impact in this space looking at you know automations and that biology are filled with artificial intelligence uh... and so having uh... away of uh... looking across those technologies uh... for the purposes of identifying where potential risks and to what extent do we need to not change the nature of the treaty but have an agreement among the state parties that the kind of general purpose criteria covers you know all the things that we're worried about i mean that that's a valuable function uh... and so i think there are a lot of things that that are existing institutions bwc convention biodiversity need to be uh... you know updated in a way to take an account these new technologies that were not even thought of when these were invented and not that it can't be done but it's just we need to put some effort into into doing that uh... at the same time uh... we don't really need an international convention with a hundred ninety three state parties in order to deal some of these issues so when we're looking at you know human germinating for example uh... it might be easier to uh... instead of having a u n-based treaty if you have who are the four or five countries that that are the biggest funders of life science research right u s u japan china uh... if they're able to agree among themselves certain standards or conditions of criteria that are needed to before uh... countries are willing to sign off on uh... you know uh... human germinating or other you know the use of gene drives that would go a long way towards creating some kind of standard that eventually be brought in other countries could could buy into uh... so i think there are a couple of different ways the international level doesn't have to be universal start with there can be multinational uh... approaches as well uh... but with the goal of making it universal over time but you maybe need to start with a smaller effort and again going back to a point that made earlier uh... this is part of the reason why there's a need for this uh... kind of iterative approach to policy building in this uh... regard having this kind of design build test approach to governance in here is important to do things at a small scale a limited scale to see what works uh... what doesn't work in you know in looking at natural experiments like what has happened in u k for other countries to learn from that experience build a replicate the things that work and avoid mistakes that are made with you know either over regulation or gaps or bad definitions so again this is going to be uh... an ongoing process with multiple paths getting to that same destination kind of the roadmap is what we've been trying to provide not the exact exit you're getting off that on on on the journey i have fever with the biotechnology innovation organization thank you for for everyone's time and your work in this important area as i have two questions uh... the first one uh... you know there's a mention of key stakeholder engagement and specifically industry in a regulatory context uh... i was just wondering very briefly uh... what level of engagement or representation from industry who was available in terms of providing perspectives and insight in terms of informing on the findings of the report on all the white papers that that were on the screen i haven't had a chance to review the reports myself and then the question the second question is is more broad and so i don't think anybody here would disagree that gene editing technology and crisper you know specifically has enormous potential to benefit the the human condition so you know the question is how do you balance you know the need to innovate because we talk about uh... applying this research but gene drives and and you know some of these other applications are just scratching the surface right and so uh... you know how do you balance the the need for innovation with addressing some of the risks and just as an anecdote you know we spent a lot of time on the hill and talking to policy makers and what we're hearing from staffers like all we're hearing are negative things about gene editing like we only hear the negative things you know in the news it takes something that happened you know earlier this week for gene editing to really hit the news and they're not really understanding you know the promise and the benefits of this technology and so you know that's where we come in we help educate a little bit in terms of the science in the application and um... and so just broadly just kind of your comments on you know how we keep that in mind as as we move forward Do you have an idea? uh... just a couple comments please chime in so I mean this this study itself was sort of fairly limited in terms of total number of people who are involved but we were lucky to have a few individuals one uh... that was from one of the sort of leading synthetic biology uh... firms uh... ginko bioworks who helped author or comment on one of the working papers uh... Eddie himself was part of a firm that provided some of the services and tools that are required in order to do these types of uh... projects uh... then we had also individuals who are working in labs but have been involved and those who have been consultants to firms to deal with uh... many of their policy and regulatory issues even just within that that small group uh... but coupled to that actually has been the importance of having a few individuals who uh... have gone through some of these security awareness building programs uh... who then are still within the firms uh... so that when they get a call to participate in something like a security thing they're not scared off but they think oh how does this let me you know protect my business and actually maybe even build new business uh... so that's been actually a big part of the second step of things is having a lot of these firms uh... now work with new types of government programs like the ones that have been piloted through DARPA and IARPA and others to actually see how they can build uh... platforms for uh... manufacturing countermeasures or uh... can contribute to the research behind that uh... so that's been a big part of at least building business around solving some of these security uh... problems uh... but i'll agree that you know stories like what came out this week uh... unfortunately you know they do have an impact on the industry as a whole when it it sheds a light a negative light on what is uh... really uh... uh... pretty amazing beneficial uh... new trajectory in the life sciences uh... maybe we need to work together more uh... and also just uh... uh... to acknowledge Sarah Carter who's in the audience who wrote our issue brief on on the bio-economy and CRISPR and biosecurity so uh... we tried to draw upon the expertise of people uh... you know in multiple ways so we're as you'll see in the final report uh... cites her work quite a bit so uh... thank you Sarah uh... on the uh... the issue of balancing risks and benefits this is what we call the dual use dilemma right it's a dilemma there is no solution if there was we'd be there already right we've been struggling with this this issue of balancing risk and benefits life sciences actively been working on this for the last uh... eighteen years various iterations of national academy of science reports uh... you know u.s. government policy and it is constantly work in progress and unfortunately we keep finding is as the technology evolves as there's no experiment as there's a new event that we realize that the framework we have is not sufficient and so uh... in the one of our uh... working papers goes through this uh... uh... looking at at that the kind of history of risk assessment that in this regard and looking how we've tried to balance these risks and benefit also looks at the governance the history of governance in duels biotechnologies and how the we've tried to struggle to adapt governance in order to deal with these these emerging and not that we never get it right but it's a constant struggle and uh... we're now in kind of the early phase of dealing with that uh... very thorny problem in the regards to genome editing uh... and what i'd say is it's two things a right you need institutions that do this for a living right you need to have this be part of you know a constant uh... you know dedicated organization that's doing the international level related to bwc or the u.s. government that is uh... focused on understanding the nature of these technologies and what impacts they have on safety the economy uh... health and and and what have you uh... and and and that's something that we're lacking so it winds up being very ad hoc because uh... it's really up to the individual stakeholders to do this without at this larger institutional framework uh... and there are a couple of uh... policy options described in the uh... report that will give you a couple insights into uh... particular options we could use to uh... expand oversight i would just add i mean this isn't about balancing necessarily but in the in the report i mean we we provide uh... a number of representative concrete actions that uh... that could be used to mitigate some of the risks in order to preserve the benefits so an example would be uh... best practices for bio safety uh... with gene drive research for example right it's it's not required uh... the level of awareness among some actors maybe relatively low given the sort of the uh... the somewhat decent nature of of the technology sort of updating and engaging at best practices that could be one uh... because it's going to affect your bottom line that you necessarily the global you bottom line of those in the industry if there's an accidental release for a bio safety laps you know another is that we we megan talked about that the uh... the bio narrative the information warfare scenario you know which you have what is you know a relatively innocuous uh... relatively innocuous kind of uh... release uh... that results in you know and um... people who might otherwise have small voices get the megaphone of social media and can really start to so so uh... so fear uh... so one of the one of the recommendations that we make is that is that social media platforms in the fact-checking organizations in which they rely upon uh... that that uh... that they have those that are expert in life sciences which they don't currently right and uh... if they did you know that i mean i know that's a it's a bigger problem right with uh... the meddling elections and so on and so forth but even that uh... so these are simple fixes but the concrete options that could be used to not necessarily do the balancing uh... you know reduce some of the blind spots so that the benefits don't don't take such a hit from things that you know from occurrences that could otherwise be uh... mitigated or avoided i'd like to ask a question that's more related which is they're all sorts of some some aspects of the regulation like guidelines are technical and directed toward technical audiences of scientists like throughout this discussion in your report is this question of storytelling about this technology or narratives about this technology was great that you picked an example that that brings some of that up but i'm just curious if you can i mean to reflect on what you think are the more appropriate narrative directions for a broader public to make sense of these technologies on the one hand there's a lot of logic to to the dangerous narratives right they might provide one of the more powerful calming effect certainly that stripper chemical biological weapons those narratives are crisp in our minds and have helped motivate and enable the consistency of that regulatory process right for decades so but you there might be a sense of concern about negative narratives so what do you think ought to be the direction of public narratives about crisper technology moving forward think there's sometimes a human tendency to want to place value or make a value judgment on a technology when in fact we're trying to control it when in fact it's really more about the the intentions and purposes of those who seek to use them for whatever the range of possible outcomes and effects and so to me when we talk about applied research and as a biologist i'm inclined to say where we really need much greater understanding of behavioral science what is it that motivates those who would now be uh... in a position to use these technologies what are the incentives that might uh... change the way in which they they make decisions when they get up in the morning and decide to do this experiment or that or invest in this particular product or that one when we understand that better i think we will have a much greater ability to help uh... guide the beneficial uses and and use term that are that are more productive helping people understand what is it that we're all trying to do together rather than you know slapping a negative label on something which simply can't be labeled an organization like yours i think get back to your question is a really important one for helping to propagate the kind of discussion and focus incentive where awareness unfortunately we see this through pretty much all of the stories that are told about this field it's the same story in the nineteen seventies when you know genetic engineering first generation genetic engineering it was you know promise or peril and it's the very same one today my my colleague called this the that sort of half pipe of doom that bioengineers promised to you know save um... save ourselves from the the world that we're destroying right and um... and often that i think the story that's more appropriate is to say actually we're already hugely reliant upon biotechnologies in our in our economy and for our livelihood and the idea that's often the boring applications in in materials production in in the types of of fuels we might develop in our in our health care already and the idea that sort of biotechnology is here already and it's something that we need to protect and usher forward and and often boring is kind of best right the boring but essential applications um... that are the ones that perhaps are going to make our lives better and and save ourselves and so you're writing that story around boring is best i you know i need to i need to find a good news writer that will be able to make boring exciting um... but i i think that idea that it's already here it's not something that's already on the horizon i agree with that with all the percent that i can fathom i think there's there's such a tendency to sensationalize emerging biotechnology and i think that very positive change in the narrative would be for scientists to no longer talk about how crisp it is because when that narrative is out there it leads to uh... reactive assessments get the technology wrong that assume that any person can pick up a pipette and start engineering their own genomes which leads to reactive media and that will filter into policy makers which mean that the trajectory of the technology will ultimately be altered because of these concepts rather we should be very specific about which aspects of the technology are easier to use than other aspects of the same technology or older generations of the technology and i think we unfortunately find ourselves in a position now where this crisper craze the hype suggests that it will change everything in just a few short years and really what we will see big change of course but they're going to take a much longer time to materialize across all of society than is widely suggested i think maybe the information technologies analogy is good you know it is enabled a lot of a lot of things right connect us see what what we can do with it it's a platform that enables many things you know when it spreads it has some unintended effects that we have a difficult time control i would say that uh... yes hard to write a good story but so so that's that's was one of the real challenges of of writing this report is that uh... it doesn't make for good whole quotes to do kind of boring is best in terms of it it's not very it's hard to tell a good story when if you want to talk about what is faster cheaper than you have to qualify it and explain how well it's faster compared to x y and z and all of these conditionals i think what makes that makes a good story is uh... is when the tech is right and it's and it's real and it's described in a way that is approachable plausible you know one of the one of the stories that we assiduously avoided was that of the kind of the super soldier right just uh... breeding generation upon generation of of soldiers and you know pushing genes through them it's like it's a great story for science fiction uh... but it's a bad story to kind of spotlight the issues and concerns that we want to be thinking about so i think that you know we've uh... we didn't get it perfect but you know the criteria that we laid out for for storytelling i think was was uh... you know it was to me satisfying i mean that there were some areas that were wanting but yes i would say that it needs to be it needs to be probable uh... the actors involved need to need to also be you know also need to be real and i would say that that the types of stories you want to tell are stories across a a wide range of spectrum that that indicate you know potential risks and concerns and anxieties but then also the benefits as well edu from the fb i what the mass destruction director it uh... more of a comment than anything else uh... i just want to applaud you all for the the completion of this project and if anything uh... you help me come away by cloning a phrase today it's uh... mind the policy gap because at the end of the day uh... you know chris percats nine is just a tool this is probably give me the hot water but it is just a tool and i think what you all are we're able to highlight is that this is so much more than just looking at pathogens and the trip what i would say the traditional this debate about do use research concern that they're going to be other applications and it's going to be very much contextual beyond just the health aspect of it and so there's gonna be the commercial is going to be the foreign policy that the foreign diplomacy the foreign trade elements and if anything the real highlight for me uh... is that the the group of experts that you brought together would be a fantastic i b c of the future i mean that's what the makeup is gonna have to look like you're gonna have to have ethicists for international policy experts as well as a scientist uh... in the security experts all combined because that's where by technologies taking us and if anything you know we're talking about a designer baby event that that launched this new round of of conversations not the modification of a pathogen that causes a pandemic so i think that's really something that uh... should really hit home to a lot of people when it comes to the biosecurity discussion that this this is a different take and um... applaud you all for develop you know convening uh... really good an important diverse group yeah my name is khalil i report for uh... different viewers middle-east broadcasting network so this topic is a kind of new for them so uh... it's just does this debate look like the same one as the one before uh... the starting of using the nuclear uh... or the atomic energy and then they created uh... agency the international atomic and agency under the umbrella of the united nations and now and and the second question is about uh... what's the current uh... mechanism to deal with as such uh... in case let's say something happened in taiwan or in vietnam on south africa somebody like use this technology the crisper for uh... a political use inside that country is now is that in this right now is that in the system that and make the international community dealing past and uh... we in a way that they can stop this kind of misuse i mean efficiently that you're asking about the kind of parallel between the the birth of the atomic energy nuclear weapons and uh... and the birth of of christmas you know editing um... they're radically different uh... atomic energy nuclear weapon toward a were government or get you know program that were that was uh... done uh... uh... you know as part of a national security uh... emergency for military purposes uh... genealogy and increase for general is being run mostly out of the private sector and coming from universities it's being done for peaceful uh... applications for you know for health for agriculture uh... and uh... but also designed to uh... it's been created an institution environment where it is spreading globally without the kind of restrictions we had back in the nineteen forties and fifties on physical material and nuclear technology so that they're they're completely different uh... uh... types of technologies and the way they've been born is is is completely different uh... and and to that the second point about misuse i mean right now the you know that the focus is on is on prevention of this kind of uh... event that there's no kind of mechanism or organization to respond to uh... attack of the sort this gets back to the role of some of the biologic weapons convention and some of the norms that make even using uh... you know a genetic weapon to make that unthinkable to make it not something that maybe countries could do it they have the capability but you make it unthinkable you make it uh... viewed as such a any uh... perversion of science that no government no scientist would be willing to go down that road uh... and uses any kind of way to cause harm that's kind of the real goal is to make it so that all the scientists all the companies are working on this technology with this technology they're devoted to peaceful applications of it and they are aware of the pension risks and that they're doing things to mitigate them whether it's you know i see something say something whether it is codes of conduct it is you know accepting oversight by regulatory authorities but really though the goal is to uh... have a kind of a common view that this technology is incredible uh... applications for human health and economy and we need to safeguard that and develop it for those purposes uh... in ways that it doesn't get uh... derailed or sidetracked by misuse let's just take one or two more questions we'll take them together if there's more than one hi i'm wendy i'm with a government agency but i'm asking the question on my own behalf on page sixty four i was surprised to see a recommendation potentially for legislation uh... do you have any thoughts about how legislation could be accomplished that would still be adaptive and david roman's phrasey ology uh... and what committee would be the best one to optimize both the positive benefits and the national security risks let's hold that and see if there's one other question that was a nice clear one now we'll just go to that one okay so so there was a recognition that uh... legislation involves hard law which can be very rigid and uh... difficult to change and you're relying on non experts to uh... craft craft the language uh... so the goal would not be to dictate exactly what is and this is the context of duly's research oversight uh... the goal would not be to dictate the exact nature of what experiments are being uh... judges being acceptable unacceptable or needing oversight uh... but instead that the core is that uh... right now that the way our duly's research oversight system operate it can only oversee research that is federally funded that organizations or individuals with the federal funding then they're subject to oversight or to uh... complying with certain with certain rules now the last two years uh... there's been a sea change where now more than fifty percent of the spending in the u.s. on life sciences research developments coming from the private sector not from the government uh... we've seen in the case of uh... the synthesis of horse box virus uh... that private funding was uh... responsible for that for that project uh... i don't think we yet know where the funding came from for the research uh... by professor he in china uh... but it's not that he did have two companies that he was running uh... maybe to commercialize technology again you see private funding being increasingly important source for life sciences research our current uh... voluntary kind of uh... system doesn't capture that so you would need the legislation to uh... capture uh... research across the life sciences enterprise whether it's been done by uh... universities or government labs or in uh... uh... government or in garages or in the private sector uh... and it would just be mandating that is a national comprehensive system but i would uh... you know argue that you obviously want the details left uh... to be designed uh... by experts operating on a more flexible uh... basis but they need to have a legislative authority in order to uh... have that kind of nationwide comprehensive uh... i think if it's done right i think that's one of the answers to not patronizing the public you know all well chrispers basically always going to be used for good i think the fact that there are rogue actors it's much more credible to go to the public and say well we're proposing you know let's science do science however we're going to also propose some legislative oversight because i'm page i think it's the graphic on forty nine like two or three of the top risks people creating things that are worse than anthrax and smallpox and i think the public likes that people have to get a background check before they get access to anthrax or smallpox and we know where those labs are inside the u s and just talking about the u s environment so i think it's really credible to go back to the public and say yeah but if anybody uses chrisper to make things worse than anthrax or smallpox we're going to still recommend coverage under a regime whether it's an existing one or a different one but to so the legislative approach of some kind of oversight where everybody's party to it i think actually could help strengthen the use of chrisper and advanced biotechnologies by creating trust with the public just one other comment to a couple to that a particular interest has been how do you actually you know how do you design these types of policies to also be able to have some sort of time scale by which you can revisit the initial assumptions that were laid out in terms of what the appropriate scope of coverage would be but also critically coupled to that how do you use those to collect the types of of systematic data that you need uh... to inform where where the gaps are so in this case even uh... you know the early examples we've seen around trying to do very systematic and rigorous uh... risk assessments uh... have have come up to this problem that we actually just don't have the data not just on incidents but especially uh... the types of of uh... near misses uh... accidents sort of behavioral issues and so it really does require uh... what is it often difficult to achieve but careful uh... policy design that build in the inherent uncertainties of the new technology let's thank our panel for excellent presentation and thanks to all of you for joining us today