Five Observations on Biosecurity for 2024
As biology matures as an engineering discipline (i.e. our relationship to nature keeps evolving in a new way), risks will increase with opportunities and there will be massive, unprecedented needs for biosecurity and biodefense. Every time in human history that scientific progress has yielded widespread technological advancement, we’ve had to grapple with developing new markets and new defenses at the same time.
This time last year, coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, we made predictions about the future of biosecurity to highlight the change in our collective approach. At that moment it still felt a bit philosophical. Holy cow, did it get practical fast! This past year has been a powerful reminder that we’re on the exponential tail of a technology change curve (see Tim Urban’s 2015 essay on AI). That means that even practitioners like us at Ginkgo, who live this day-to-day, are going to be surprised at the rate of change in technologies and markets year-to-year.
I’m fundamentally convinced that we are in a race to build defenses against a new category of risk that will emerge from the nexus of biology, AI, and geopolitical instability. The choice to act — or not — in this moment will change our collective history. Our team (and many others we interact with) are choosing to act, building real solutions and running around the world to deploy them. We are putting our life energy into this because we want a better future for our families and communities — it feels like a better bet than putting our heads in the sand, building a bunker, or trying to figure out how to live on Mars.
My big hope for 2024 is that more and more people get on board with the idea that we need a 1000x increase in our investment in building amazing systems to counter biological threats, wherever they emerge.
Anyway, as this gets practical, I thought we could all use a refresh on what’s to come as we head into 2024. Here’s how I see the next year:
1. AI will continue to be a key catalyst for biosecurity investment
Over the past few years, the COVID-19 pandemic and global response efforts showed us how quickly biotechnology was maturing, but the convergence of AI and biotechnology in the past year was a huge surprise moment. In biotech, AI makes room for all-but-limitless growth while also raising concerns about nefarious and careless uses that pose biosecurity risks. These concerns are going to put a lot more pressure on both AI platforms and the digital-to-physical interface for biological engineering, and they’re all the more reason to invest in the positive potential of AI-enabled innovation in biosecurity.
AI will enhance our ability to predict, detect, respond to, and prevent biological threats. As we teach a new generation of large language models to “speak DNA,” we’ll be able to identify anomalies more rapidly and reliably, get even better at picking out engineered threats and signs of foul play, forecast the trajectory of a biothreat under different response scenarios, and design more effective countermeasures more efficiently. The key to all of this is large amounts of high-quality data from our biological environment — making biological data a key asset for national security.
In 2024, you will see the AIxBio nexus driving both the AI risk conversation and the demand signal for biosecurity tools.
2. Biological radar deployment will accelerate and biological intelligence will emerge
There is a small group in the world today that has conviction about the biosecurity infrastructure that needs to be built to address this risk landscape. We need a global monitoring network for dangerous biology — a bioradar — coupled with a state-of-the-art data and analytics stack to generate actionable biological intelligence (BIOINT) for attribution and response.
With the UK’s announcement of a need for “Biothreats Radar” and the US BPR focus on biosurveillance, 2024 will be the year that governments start spending in a new way on early detection as they realize regulation and delayed response alone won’t be enough to deter bad actors.
Bioradar is our vision for the ultimate early warning system to get ahead of biological threats — it’s always on, it’s distributed in strategic locations where biological threats are most likely to emerge or spread, and it’ll keep getting sensitive to more targets until it’s fully threat-agnostic. We are already seeing strong support from the CDC, the European and African Unions, the WHO, and other global bodies for collaborative surveillance efforts. In 2024 we’re going to build on Ginkgo’s existing monitoring network at nine international airports with more airport nodes, expanded work in crisis zones like Ukraine, and new efforts in monitoring zoonotic (animal-to-human) spillover.
The real game-changer this year will be the ability to use this data to start to answer questions that were previously intractable — that’s the promise of biological intelligence (BIOINT). We’re on the cusp of unlocking this potential with innovative global data-sharing arrangements, new capabilities to meaningfully layer multiple types of data, and making big strides in AI-enabled forecasting and analytics. We’ll start to see a wide-scale understanding of BIOINT as a new technical collection methodology and a critical feature of all-source intelligence in the intelligence community. See point 1 — AI will play a huge part in this advance.
3. Biotechnology companies will form a collaborative defense tech industrial base
Technology companies have long been key innovation and implementation partners for national security and defense leaders in the U.S. and beyond. In the coming year, we will see the growth and evolution of the defense tech industry for biology, for biodefense purposes only.
“Ultimately, we find that biosecurity is an increasing priority. This brings several early and emerging opportunities for public and private sector partnership.”
National governments in the U.S. and beyond will seek to partner with the biosecurity and biodefense industry to accelerate their abilities to address the vulnerabilities exposed by COVID-19 and the multiple sources of increasing biorisk. That will require moving from traditional investments in individual countermeasures to building true collaborations for integrated, end-to-end solutions, whether through coalition efforts or platform companies (like Ginkgo). I’m excited and gratified to continue building such partnerships with national and international leaders to meet their diverse biosecurity needs.
4. We’ll make progress on lab and research safety
We’re increasingly sharpening our view not only of natural and intentional threats, but also accidental ones. Researchers and policymakers are paying renewed attention to lab safety and security concerns as we face a global boom in maximum containment biolabs and doubts about adequate guardrails. Debates on “gain-of-function” research, particularly enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPPs), have triggered new regulatory proposals at the federal level and proposed bans in several states.
As the heat rises on these policy decisions, commentators on all sides of the debate are digging their heels into the idea that scientific progress and research security are opposing forces. And while policymakers do have to negotiate tradeoffs in their imminent decisions on ePPP regulations, in the long term we have to start breaking away from binary thinking on science and security. This year will certainly bring more Congressional focus on this issue, and I’m hopeful that 2024 will also bring progress,whether through enhanced surveillance of biocontainment facilities or leveraging synthetic biology to de-risk research on pathogens.
5. Biology will be at the forefront of economic competition and national security
We need an expansive approach to biotechnology and biosecurity to meet 21st century challenges — and national leaders have taken notice. The 2022 Executive Order on biotechnology and biomanufacturing set an ambitious tone for U.S. leadership. The past year has started to reveal new trends of economic expansionism and high-stakes global competition in biotechnology, and we can expect to see vigorous debate in Congress about how to protect and strengthen both the global order and the U.S.’s economic and security position.
On the biosecurity side, US frameworks like the National Biodefense Strategy and Biodefense Posture Review (BPR), along with the UK Biological Security Strategy, have widened the aperture on understanding and mitigating biological risk. These documents mark a shift that will continue to pull biosecurity from beyond the domain of health security into a core operational priority in national security. The BPR also confirmed that offensive use of biology is far from a theoretical problem, with multiple countries maintaining active programs, and it’s likely to be deployed alongside information manipulation tactics to hinder attribution and response.
Thanks for reading and happy 2024!
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