Greg Koblentz, member of the Center’s Scientists Working Group of Chemical and Biological Threats, spoke with Undark about the ramifications of synthesizing strands of DNA.
“It’s not that I’m worried about something happening tomorrow. But the reality is, this capability is increasingly powerful in terms of how long the DNA fragments can be, what you can create with them, the ability of recipients to then assemble the DNA fragments into a new virus,” said Gregory Koblentz, a biodefense researcher at George Mason University. “This is the kind of thing that we really should be more proactive on — and try to get ahead of the curve.”
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Consortium members agree to screen their customers. (They won’t ship, for example, to P.O. boxes.) And they agree to screen orders, too, following standards that Koblentz says are actually stricter than the federal guidelines.
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“This is the first legal requirement in the U.S. for a user of synthetic DNA to pay attention to the security safeguards that are in place for what they’re ordering,” said Koblentz, the George Mason University expert, who consulted on the bill.
Ultimately, Koblentz said, the federal government should do more to incentivize good screening. For example, major federal science funders could give grants on the condition that institutions buy their DNA from more secure providers, using their market power, he said, “to require researchers to use biosecurity safeguards.”
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Mid other pressing global concerns, biosecurity experts have sometimes struggled to draw attention to the issue. A 2020 essay Koblentz wrote for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is titled “A biotech firm made a smallpox-like virus on purpose. Nobody seems to care.” Read More
