The New Bioweapons: How Synthetic Biology Could Destabilize the World

In cybersecurity, a penetration test is a simulated attack on a computer system’s defenses that uses the tools and techniques an adversary would employ. Such tests are used by all kinds of governments and companies. Banks, for example, regularly hire computer experts to break into their systems and transfer money to unauthorized accounts, often by phishing for login credentials from employees. After the testers succeed, they present their findings to the institutions and make recommendations about how to improve security.

At the end of the last decade and the beginning of this one, human society itself was subject to a kind of penetration test: COVID-19. The virus, an unthinking adversary, probed the world’s ability to defend against new pathogens. And by the end of the test, it was clear that humanity had failed. COVID-19 went everywhere, from remote Antarctic research stations to isolated Amazonian tribes. It raged through nursing homes and aircraft carriers. As it spread, it leveled the vulnerable and the powerful—frontline workers and heads of state alike. The draconian lockdowns imposed by autocracies and the miraculous vaccines developed by democracies slowed, but did not halt, the virus’s spread. By the end of 2022, three of every four Americans had been infected at least once. In the six weeks after China ended its “zero COVID” restrictions in December, over one billion of the country’s people were infected. The primary reason for the pandemic’s relatively modest death toll was not that society had controlled the disease. It was the fact that viral infection proved to be only modestly lethal. In the end, COVID-19 mostly burned itself out.

Humanity’s failure against COVID-19 is sobering, because the world is facing a growing number of biological threats. Some of them, such as avian flu, come from nature. But plenty come from scientific advances. Over the past 60 years, researchers have developed sophisticated understandings of both molecular and human biology, allowing for the development of remarkably deadly and effective pathogens. They have figured out how to create viruses that can evade immunity. They have learned how to evolve existing viruses to spread more easily through the air, and how to engineer viruses to make them more deadly. It remains unclear whether COVID-19 arose from such activities or entered the human population via interaction with wildlife. Either way, it is clear that biological technology, now boosted by artificial intelligence, has made it simpler than ever to produce diseases.

Should a human-made or human-improved pathogen escape or be released from a lab, the consequences could be catastrophic. Some synthetic pathogens might be capable of killing many more people and causing much more economic devastation than the novel coronavirus did. In a worst-case scenario, the worldwide death toll might exceed that of the Black Death, which killed one of every three people in Europe.

Averting such a disaster must be a priority for world leaders. It is a problem that is at least as complex as other grand challenges of the early Anthropocene, including mitigating and managing the threat of nuclear weapons and the planetary consequences of climate change. To handle this danger, states will need to start hardening their societies to protect against human-made pathogens. They will, for example, have to develop warning systems that can detect engineered diseases. They must learn how to surge the production of personal protective equipment and how to make it far more effective. They will need to cut the amount of time required to develop and distribute vaccines and antiviral drugs to days, instead of months. They will need to govern the technologies used to create and manipulate viruses. And they must do all this as fast as they can.