Parsing the Digital Biosecurity Landscape

The late twentieth century ushered in a new Digital Age, in which the world began to transition from the remnants of the industrial revolution into a new era of information technology. One benefit of this transformational change has been the convergence of digital technology with biotechnology. The genomes of entire organisms are being encoded into digital knowledge constructs, enabling the purposeful biological engineering of those organisms. Biologists and nonbiologists alike now have access to digital modeling tools—as well as traditional laboratory tools—for reading, writing, and editing DNA, and this is enhancing biological discovery, innovation, creation, and manipulation. We have already witnessed the evolution of gene edited medicines, "impossible meats," spider silk clothing, and concrete made from microorganisms, just to name a few.¹ While these advances in biological innovation offer an exciting glimpse toward a sustainable future, they have also necessarily spurred concerns about how these new capabilities could contribute to biosecurity risks and define a new era of economic competition for global dominance in biotechnology, or the "bioeconomy." The traditional biosecurity community is just beginning to recognize these novel dimensions of risk. This paper provides a description of two distinct components of digital biosecurity that should be considered in the context of US competition in the global bioeconomy.

The Need for Digital Biosecurity

The engineering of biology has fueled excitement for its potential benefits to health, medicine, food, agriculture, and energy. Simultaneously, the expanding capability to engineer biology has fueled concerns of potential security risks and whether new biotech tools could speed or simplify the creation or use of physical biological entities for harm. Prior studies focused on the different types of biological data ("biodata") and whether the digitization of biology increased the risk of perpetrated biothreats.²

While biodata alone does not directly create biothreats, the growing accessibility of gene editing tools, experimentation, and learning algorithms that can be used on biodata is continuously expanding the knowledge base about biology that could be used to develop bioweapons. Human genomic data along with health and medical records are key assets in driving precision medicine treatments, so these datasets are of extremely high value—theft and hacking are already prevalent in this sector.³ Additionally, access to human genomic data could enable physical harms to someone based on known genomic vulnerabilities, and tampering with human health data could lead to harmful medical outcomes.⁴ Biodata associated with biotechnological manufacturing is a primary driver of the bioeconomy and as such represents a strategic asset for its growth, along with software tools and algorithms to engineer biodata. Finally, as fundamental biological research and biotechnological manufacturing becomes increasingly automated, cyber systems are operating machinery or other systems which generate or control biological processes. Disruption of the cyber systems involved in these sec-tors and their supply chains could lead to harmful biological outcomes. Clearly, the ever-growing compilation of digital biological assets that drive capabilities for biotechnology and the subsequent implementation of those capabilities through automation require careful analysis from a digital, as well as biosecurity, perspective.

Global Competition for Digital Biological Assets

As countries around the world create strategies for growing their own bioeconomies, the value and pursuit of biodata is growing.⁵ The People's Republic of China (PRC), in particular, has aggressively advanced the country's biotechnology sector—in part due to unmet health care needs and a growing aging population—but also because China wants to lead the world in biotech.⁶ The PRC's national strategy "Made in China 2025" prioritizes investments in life science research parks throughout China and workforce talent programs.⁷ Central to this effort is the acquisition of biodata and DNA sequencing capabilities, both of which have

been aided by the long-held US commitment to open international data sharing.⁸ This openness is not reciprocated by China and a growing list of other nations.⁹ The PRC's more organized effort to bolster its own biotech industry includes acquisitions of genetic data and American companies and startups.¹⁰ Furthermore, China and other actors have demonstrated a willingness to utilize illicit methods of gaining an advantage in biotech. In addition to...