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Filippa Lentzos on Global Catastrophic Biological Risks
136 Plays3 years ago
Dr. Filippa Lentzos, Senior Lecturer in Science and International Security at King's College London, joins us to discuss the most pressing issues in biosecurity, big data in biology and life sciences, and governance in biological risk.
Topics discussed in this episode include:
- The most pressing issue in biosecurity
- Stories from when biosafety labs failed to contain dangerous pathogens
- The lethality of pathogens being worked on at biolaboratories
- Lessons from COVID-19
You can find the page for the podcast here:
https://futureoflife.org/2021/10/01/filippa-lentzos-on-emerging-threats-in-biosecurity/
Watch the video version of this episode here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6M34oQ4v4w
Have any feedback about the podcast? You can share your thoughts here:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/DRBFZCT
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
2:35 What are the least understood aspects of biological risk?
8:32 Which groups are interested biotechnologies that could be used for harm?
16:30 Why countries may pursue the development of dangerous pathogens
18:45 Dr. Lentzos' strands of research
25:41 Stories from when biosafety labs failed to contain dangerous pathogens
28:34 The most pressing issue in biosecurity
31:06 What is gain of function research? What are the risks?
34:57 Examples of gain of function research
36:14 What are the benefits of gain of function research?
37:54 The lethality of pathogens being worked on at biolaboratorie
40:25 Benefits and risks of big data in biology and the life sciences
45:03 Creating a bioweather map or using big data for biodefense
48:35 Lessons from COVID-19
53:46 How does governance fit in to biological risk?
55:59 Key takeaways from Dr. Lentzos
This podcast is possible because of the support of listeners like you. If you found this conversation to be meaningful or valuable, consider supporting it directly by donating at futureoflife.org/donate. Contributions like yours make these conversations possible.
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Transcript
Introduction to Dr. Felipe Lenzos
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Future of Life Institute podcast. I'm Lucas Perry. Today's episode is with Dr. Felipe Lenzos and explores increasing global security concerns from the use of the life sciences. As biotechnology continues to advance, the capacity for use of both the harmful and beneficial aspects of this technology is also increasing.
00:00:25
Speaker
in a world stressed by climate change, as well as an increasingly unstable political landscape, that is likely to include powerful new biotechnologies capable of killing millions. The challenges of biotech to global security are clearly significant. Dr. Lenzos joins us to explain the state of biotech and life sciences risk in the present day, as well as what's needed for mitigating the risk.
00:00:49
Speaker
Dr. Felipe Lenzos is a mixed methods social scientist with expertise in biosafety, biosecurity, bioresk assessment, and biological arms control. She works at King's College London as a senior lecturer in science and international security. Dr. Lenzos also serves as the co-director of the Center for Science and Security Studies, is an associate senior researcher at Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and is a columnist for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
00:01:19
Speaker
Her work focuses on transparency, confidence building, and compliance assessment of biodefense programs and high-risk bioscience. She also focuses on information warfare and deliberate disinformation related to global health security. And with that, I'm happy to present this interview with Dr. Felipe Lenzos.
COVID-19 and Pandemic Risks
00:01:49
Speaker
To start things off here, we've had COVID pretty much blindside humanity, at least the general public. People who have been interested in pandemics and biorisk have known about this risk coming for a long time now and have tried to raise the alarm bells about it. And it seems like this other very, very significant risk is the continued risk of synthetic bioagents
00:02:14
Speaker
engineered pandemics, and also the continued risk of natural pandemics. And it feels to me extremely significant and also difficult to convey the importance and urgency of this issue, especially when we pretty much didn't do anything about COVID and knew that a natural pandemic was coming.
00:02:35
Speaker
So, I'm curious if you could explain what you think are the least understood aspects of synthetic and natural biological risk by the general public and by governments around the world and what you would most like them to understand.
Secretive Biological Weapons Programs
00:02:50
Speaker
I guess one of the key things to understand is that security concerns of life science research is something that we must take seriously.
00:03:01
Speaker
There's this whole history of using the life sciences to cause harm of deliberately inflicting disease.
00:03:09
Speaker
biological weapons, but very few people know this history because it's a story that's suffused by secrecy. So in the 20th century, biological weapons were researched and developed in several national programs, all of which were top secret, including the U.S. one. These programs were concealed in labs at military sites that were not listed on ordinary maps.
00:03:34
Speaker
special code names and exceptionally high classification categories were assigned to biological agents and the projects that were devised to weaponize them. And bioweaponiers were sworn to secrecy and under constant surveillance. So a lot of that just hasn't become publicly available. Much of the documentation and other evidence of past programs has been destroyed. And there were these concerted efforts to
00:04:03
Speaker
bring war crimes and human rights abuses to public light. Information about biological weapons programs tended to be suppressed. So one example of this is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa that followed the apartheid
00:04:21
Speaker
So when the commission hearings began to uncover details about South Africa's biological weapons program that was called Project Coast, they were faced with delays and they were faced with legal challenges. And the hearings were eventually shut down before the investigators could complete their work. Now, the head of that program became obvious to the investigators at the time who that was.
00:04:50
Speaker
but he was never brought to justice. And unbelievably, he remained a practicing medical doctor for many, many years afterwards, possibly even to this day. And what hasn't been concealed or destroyed or silenced from past biological weapons programs often remains highly classified. So the secrecy surrounding past programs
00:05:19
Speaker
mean that they're not well known.
Synthetic Biology and Weaponization
00:05:21
Speaker
But there's also a new contemporary context that shapes security concerns about life science research that we need to be conscious of and that I think relates back to what I think is important to know about synthetic and natural virus today. And that is that advances in science and technology
00:05:45
Speaker
may enable biological weapons to emerge that are actually more capable and more accessible with attacks that can be more precisely targeted and are harder to attribute. So synthetic biology, for example, which is one of the currently cutting edge areas of life science research,
00:06:08
Speaker
That is accelerating our abilities to manipulate genes in biological systems. And that will have all kinds of wonderful and beneficial applications. But if the intent was there, it could also have significant downsides. So it could, for instance, identify harmful genes and DNA sequences in a much quicker way than we've been able to so far. As a result of that, we could, for instance, see greater potential to make
00:06:38
Speaker
pathogens or disease-causing biological agents even more dangerous, or we could see greater potential to convert low-risk pathogens into high-risk pathogens. We could potentially even recreate extinct pathogens like the variola virus that causes smallpox, or way further out, we could engineer entirely new pathogens.
00:07:07
Speaker
Now pathogens in and of themselves are not biological weapons. You need to add some kind of delivery mechanism to have a weapon.
Pathogen Delivery Methods
00:07:15
Speaker
The possibilities to manipulate genes and biological systems are coming at a time when new delivery mechanisms for transporting pathogens into our bodies, into human bodies or animal bodies are also being developed.
00:07:29
Speaker
So in addition to the bombs and the missiles, the cluster bombs, the sprayers and all kinds of injection devices of past biological warfare programs, it could now also be possible to use other delivery mechanisms. So things like drones or nanorobots, these incredibly tiny robots that can be inserted into our
00:07:52
Speaker
blood streams, for instance, even insects could be used as vehicles to disperse dangerous pathogens. So I guess to get to the bottom of your question, what I'm keen for people to understand, scientists, government officials, the general public, is that current developments in science and technology, in the life sciences more specifically, are lowering barriers to inadvertent harms.
00:08:21
Speaker
as well as to deliberate use and development of biological weapons. And that there is this whole history to deliberate attempts to use the life sciences to cause harm. So it seems like there's three main groups of people that are interested in such technology. So there's something like lone wolves or isolated individuals who are
00:08:49
Speaker
interested in creating a lot of harm to humanity in the same way that mass shooters are. There are also small groups of people who may be interested in the same sort of thing. And then there's this history of governments pursuing biological weapons. Could you offer some perspective about the risks of these three groups and
00:09:09
Speaker
how you would compare the current technology used for the creating of synthetic pathogens to how strong it was historically? Sure. Are we heading towards a future where anyone with a PhD in bioengineering could create a pandemic and kill millions? Is that what you mean? Well, a pathogen, even a bioengineered one, does not on its own constitute a biological weapon.
00:09:35
Speaker
So you will still face issues like agent stability and dealing with large scale production and importantly dealing with efficient delivery, which is much easier said than done. In fact, what the history of bioterrorism has taught us is that the skills required to undertake even the most basic of bioterrorism attacks are often much greater than.
00:10:00
Speaker
There are various technical barriers to using biological agents to cause harm, even beyond the barriers that are being reduced from advances in science and technology.
00:10:15
Speaker
The data that is available to us from past incidents of biological terrorism indicates that a bioterrorism attack is more likely to be crude, more likely to be amateurish and small scale, where you'd have casualty levels in single or double digits and not in their hundreds or thousands and certainly not in their millions.
00:10:39
Speaker
Now, my own concern is actually less about lone actors, where I see real potential for sophisticated biological weapons and strategic surprise in the biological field is in one of those other categories that you mentioned. So it's at the state or the state-sponsored level.
00:11:01
Speaker
Let me explain. Well, I already told you a little bit about how we've recently seen significant advances in genetic manipulation and delivery mechanisms. So these developments are lowering barriers to biological weapons development. But that's really only part of the picture, because in making threat assessments, it's also important to look at the social context in which these technical developments are taking place.
00:11:26
Speaker
And one of the things we're seeing is there in that social context is a buildup into we use capacities. So what we're seeing is that high containment labs that are working with the most dangerous pathogens are rapidly being constructed all over the globe. So there are now more people and more research projects than ever before working with and manipulating very dangerous pathogens.
00:11:53
Speaker
And there are more countries than ever before that have biodefense programs. There's around 30 biodefense programs that are openly declared.
Geopolitical Shifts and Bioweapons
00:12:01
Speaker
And the trends we're seeing is that these numbers are increasing. It's entirely legitimate to have biodefense programs and they do a lot of good, but
00:12:12
Speaker
A side effect of increasing biopreparedness and biodefense capacities is that capacities for causing harm, should the intent be there, and that's the crucial part, also increase.
00:12:25
Speaker
So you may be doing, one person may be doing, setting up all this stuff for good, but if somebody else comes in with different intent, with intent to do harm, that same infrastructure, that same material, that same equipment, that same knowledge can be turned towards causing harm or creating biological weapons. Now, another thing we're seeing that won't have escaped your notice is the increasingly unstable and uncertain geopolitical landscape.
00:12:53
Speaker
The world that many of us grew up in and know is one in which America was a clear, dominant power. We're now moving away from that, away from this hegemonic or unipolar power structure towards an international system that is increasingly multipolar. The most clearly rising power today is, of course, China. But there are others, too. There's Russia still there. There's India. There's Brazil, to name a few.
00:13:22
Speaker
So those are things in the social context that we need to pay attention to. We're also seeing rapidly evolving nature of conflict and warfare themselves.
00:13:34
Speaker
are changing, and that's changing the character of military challenges that are confronting states. Hybrid warfare, for instance, which blends conventional warfare with irregular warfare and cyber warfare, is increasingly likely to complement classical military confrontation.
00:13:54
Speaker
So, states that are increasingly outmatched by conventional weapons may, for instance, start to view novel biological weapons as offering some kind of advantage, some kind of asymmetric advantage, and a possible way to outweigh strategic imbalances. So, states in this kind of new form of conflict, new form of warfare may
00:14:19
Speaker
see biological weapons as somehow providing an edge or a military advantage. We are also seeing the defense programs of some states heavily investing in the biological sciences. Again, could well be for entirely legitimate purposes, but it does also raise concerns that adversaries may be looking at those kinds of investments and hedging their bets, and similarly,
00:14:49
Speaker
investing in more biological programs. These investments, I think, are also an indication that there are some real concerns that adversaries are harnessing or trying to harness biotechnology for nefarious purposes. And we've seen some political language to that effect, too. But a lot of this is going under the radar.
00:15:11
Speaker
So all of these things, and there are more, you know, the flagrant breach of the chemical weapons convention, or continuous flagrant breaches of the chemical weapons convention, for example, the use of chemical weapons in Syria, or the use of very sophisticated chemicals like Novichok in the UK, on the Scrippold.
00:15:34
Speaker
the Russian, as well as other cases, is one other sort of context that plays in or even our recent experiences of natural disease outbreaks. And here, you know, COVID is obviously a key example, but it's not so long ago. We've had all kinds of other outbreaks. Ebola just a few years ago, there's Zika, there's MERS, there's all kinds of other emerging diseases. So all of these could serve to focus attention on deliberate outbreaks.
00:16:03
Speaker
And all of these various elements of the social context, as well as these technical developments, could produce an environment in which a potential military or political utility for biological weapons emerges that alters the balance of incentives and disincentives to comply with the international treaty that prohibits biological weapons.
00:16:31
Speaker
Could you explain the incentives of why a country would be interested in creating a synthetic pathogen when inevitably it would seem like it would come back and harm itself? Well, it doesn't have to be an infectious pathogen. What we're seeing today with COVID, for instance, is an infectious pathogen that spreads uncontrollably throughout the world, but states don't have to.
00:16:56
Speaker
Not all dangerous pathogens are infectious in that way. Anthrax, for instance, doesn't spread from person to person through the air. So there are different kinds of pathogens and states and non-state actors will have different motivations for using biological weapons or biological agents. One of those which I mentioned earlier is, for instance, if
00:17:25
Speaker
you feel that another country, you are outmatched conventionally by conventional weapons, you may want to start to develop asymmetric weapons. So that would be an example where a state might want to explore developing biological weapons. But of course, we should probably mention that there is this thing called the biological weapons, this international treaty, which completely prohibits this class of weaponry.
00:17:55
Speaker
And historically, there's really only been two major powers that have developed sophisticated biological weapons programs, and that is the United States and the Soviet Union.
00:18:08
Speaker
Today, there are no publicly available documents or any policy statements suggesting that anyone has an offensive biological weapons program. There are many countries who have defensive programs, and that's entirely legitimate. There is no indication that there are states that have offensive programs to date.
00:18:34
Speaker
The real concern is about capacities that are building up through bio defense programs, but also through regular bio preparedness programs. And that's something that's just going to increase in
Biocontainment Labs Worldwide
00:18:45
Speaker
future. So I'm curious here if you could also explain and expand upon the particular strands of your research efforts in this space.
00:18:55
Speaker
Sure. I mean, it's very much related to the sorts of things we've been talking about. So one strand that I focus on relates to transparency, confidence building and compliance assessment of biodefense programs, where I look at how we can build trust between different countries with biodefense programs to trust that they are complying with the biological weapons convention.
00:19:19
Speaker
I'm also looking at transparency around particular high-risk bioscience, so things or projects like or research involving genome editing, for example, or potentially pandemic pathogens like influenza or coronaviruses.
00:19:37
Speaker
Another strand that I'm interested in or that I'm looking at focuses on emerging technologies and on governance around these emerging technologies and on responsible innovation. And there I look particularly at synthetic biology. I'm also a little bit at artificial intelligence, deep learning and robotics, how this is these
00:20:00
Speaker
other emerging areas are coming into the life sciences and affecting their development and the direction they're taking, the capacities that are emerging from this kind of convergence between emerging technologies and how we can govern that better, how we can provide better oversight. Now, one of the projects that I've been involved in that has got a lot of press recently is a study that I carried out with Greg Koblenz at George Mason University.
00:20:30
Speaker
where we mapped high biocontainment laboratories globally. So I mentioned earlier that countries around the world are investing in these kinds of labs to study lethal viruses and to prepare against unknown pathogens. Well, that construction boom has to date resulted in dozens of these commonly called BSL4 labs around the world.
00:20:54
Speaker
Now significantly more countries are expected to build these kinds of labs in the wake of COVID-19 as part of a renewed emphasis on pandemic preparedness and response.
00:21:06
Speaker
In addition, gain of function research with coronaviruses and other zoonotic pathogens with pandemic potential is also likely to increase as scientists are seeking to better understand these viruses and to assess the sorts of risks that they pose of jumping from animals to humans or becoming transmissible between humans.
00:21:28
Speaker
Now, of course, clinical work and scientific studies on pathogens are really important for public health and for disease prevention. But some of these activities pose really significant risks and surges in the number of labs and expansion the high risk research that's carried out within them exacerbate safety and security risks.
00:21:53
Speaker
But there is no authoritative international resource tracking the number of labs of these kinds of labs out there as they're being built. So there is no international body that has an authoritative
00:22:09
Speaker
figure on the number of BSL-4 labs that exist in the world or that have been established. And equally, there is no real international oversight of the sort of research that's going on in these labs or the sorts of biosafety and biosecurity measures that they have implemented.
00:22:27
Speaker
So what our study did was to provide a detailed interactive map of BSL4 labs worldwide that contains basic information on when they were established, on the size of the labs, and some indicators of virus management oversight. That map is publicly available online at globalbiolabs.org. So you can go and see for yourself. And it's basically a very large Google map.
00:22:56
Speaker
where the labs are indicated and you can scroll over the labs and then up pops information about when it was established, how big it is, what sorts of virus management indicators there are. So are they members of national biosafety associations? Do they have regulations?
00:23:18
Speaker
related to by safety, do they have codes of conduct, et cetera, those kinds of things. That all comes up there so you can go and see for yourself. That's a resource that we've made publicly available on the basis of our project. And looking at the data we then collated, this was really the first time this kind of concerted effort was made to identify these various labs and bring all that information together.
00:23:46
Speaker
and some of our key findings from looking at that data where that, well, a first thing is.
00:23:52
Speaker
BSL-4 labs are booming. We can see a really quite steep increase in the number of labs that have been built over the last few years. We found that there are now, that there are many more public health labs than there are biodefense labs. So about 60% of the labs are public health labs, not focused on defense, but on resourced out of health budgets.
00:24:19
Speaker
We also found that there are many smaller labs and larger labs. So in the newspapers and on TV, we keep seeing photos of the Wuhan Institute of Virology's BSL4 lab. That's very much tied up into the origins debate and constantly featured in the media. So that is the sort of lab that we're talking about. And that image will often be the one that pops into people's head when you're talking about biosafety by high biocontainment labs or BSL4 labs.
00:24:50
Speaker
In terms of oversight, some of our other findings were that sound biosafety and biosecurity practices do exist, but they're not widely adopted. So there's a lot of difference in between the kinds of biosafety and biosecurity measures that labs adopt and implement. We also found that assessments to identify life science research
00:25:13
Speaker
that could harm health safety or security are lacking in the vast majority of countries that have these BSL-4 labs. So as I said, that's one of the studies that's get a lot of press recently. And part of that is because of its relationship to the current pandemic and the lack of some solid information, some solid data on the sort of labs that are out there and on the sorts of research that's being done.
00:25:42
Speaker
Do you have a favorite story of a particular time that a BSL lab failed to contain some important pathogen? Well, there are all kinds of examples of accidental releases. In the UK, for instance, where I'm based a very long time ago, there was a work with variola virus.
00:26:07
Speaker
that causes smallpox was worked at in a sort of high rise building that had multiple floors. And the variola virus escaped into the floor above and infected somebody there. So that was the very last time that was, I think, at the end of the 70s. So that was the very last time that someone was infected by smallpox in the UK, more recently in the UK.
00:26:36
Speaker
There's also been the escape of the foot and mouth virus from a lab. Now, this was not the very large foot and mouth outbreak that we had in the early 2000s, but it came, which killed millions of animals. And I still remember
00:26:57
Speaker
the pyres of animal corpses dotted around the country. And you could still smell the burning carcasses on the motorway as you drove past, etc. So that was not caused by a lab leak. But just a few, two, three, four years later, there was a foot and mouth disease virus that escaped from a lab through a leaking pipe.
00:27:23
Speaker
that did go on to cause some infections. But at that stage, everyone was very primed to look out for in these kinds of infections and to respond to them quickly. So that outbreak was contained fairly rapidly. I mean, there are also many examples elsewhere also in the United States. I mean, the
00:27:46
Speaker
There's the one example where you had a variola virus found in a disused closet at the NIH after many years, and they were still viable. I think that's one of the ones that rank pretty highly in the biosafety community's memory, and maybe even in your own. It was not that long ago, half a dozen years ago or so.
00:28:12
Speaker
What do you think all these examples illustrate of how humans should deal with natural and synthetic pathogens? Well, I think it illustrates that we need better oversight, we need better governance to ensure that the life science research that is done is done safely, it's done securely, and it's done responsibly.
00:28:34
Speaker
Overviewing all of these BSL safety labs and all of these different research threads that you're exploring, what do you think is the most pressing issue in biosecurity right now, something that you'd really like the government or the public to be aware of and take action on?
00:28:52
Speaker
Well, I think there's a really pressing need to shore up international norms and treaties that prohibit biological weapons.
Reinforcing Norms Against Bioweapons
00:29:01
Speaker
I mentioned the Biological Weapons Convention, and that is the key international instrument for prohibiting biological weapons. But there are also others, and the arms control communities is not in great shape at the moment. It needs more
00:29:19
Speaker
high profile political attention, it needs more resources. And I think with more and more breaches that we're seeing, not on the biological side, but on other sides, breaches of international treaties, I think we need to make sure there is this renewed effort and commitment to these treaties. So I think that's one thing, one issue that's really pressing in biosecurity right now.
00:29:48
Speaker
Another is really raising awareness and increasing sensitivities in scientific communities to potentially accidental or inadvertent or deliberate risks of the life sciences. And we see that very clearly in the data that's coming out of the BSL-4 study that I talked to you about, that that's something that's needed.
00:30:11
Speaker
not just what we saw there as actually looking at, do they have any laws in the books, or do they have any guidance on paper, or do they have any written-down codes of conduct or codes of practice?
00:30:26
Speaker
And that's really important. It's really important to have these kinds of instruments in place, but it's equally important to make sure that these are implemented and adopted and that there is this culture of safe, secure and responsible science. And that's not that's something that we didn't cover in that specific project, but it's something that some of my other work has drawn attention to and the work of many others as well. So so we do need to have this
00:30:52
Speaker
regulatory oversight governance framework in place, but we also need to make sure that that is reflected or echoed in the culture of the scientists and the labs that are carrying out life science research.
00:31:07
Speaker
One other significant thing going on in the life sciences in terms of biological risk is gain of function research.
Gain-of-Function Research Risks and Benefits
00:31:16
Speaker
So I'm curious if you could explain what gain of function research is and how you see the debate around the benefits and risks of it. Well, gain of function is actually a very good example of life science research that could be accidentally, inadvertently, or deliberately misused.
00:31:34
Speaker
Gain of function means different things to different people. So to virologists, it generally just means genetic manipulation that results in some sort of gained function. Most of the time, you know, these manipulations result in loss of function. But sometimes different kinds of functions of pathogens can be gained.
00:32:02
Speaker
Gainofunction has got a lot of media coverage in relation to the discussion around the origins of the pandemic or of COVID. And here, Gainofunction is generally taking the mean, deliberately making a very dangerous pathogen like influenza or coronavirus.
00:32:21
Speaker
even more dangerous. So what you're trying to do is you're trying to make it spread more easily, for example, or you're trying to change its lethality. I don't think gain of function research in and of itself should be banned. But I do think we need better national and international oversight of function experiments. And I do think that a wider group of stakeholders beyond just the scientists doing the research themselves and their funders,
00:32:51
Speaker
I think that a wider group of stakeholders should be involved in assessing what is safe, what is secure, and what is responsible gain of function research. It seems very significant, especially with all these examples that you illustrated of the fallibility of BSL labs. The gain of function research seems incredibly risky relative to the potential payoffs. Yeah, I think that's right.
00:33:18
Speaker
considered one of the extra examples of what has been called dual use research of concern or experiments that have
00:33:31
Speaker
a higher potential to be misused. And by that, I mean deliberately, but also in terms of inadvertently or even accidentally, because the repercussions, the consequences have the potential to be so large. And that's also why we saw when
00:33:49
Speaker
Some of the early gain of function experiments gained media attention back in 2011, 2012, that the scientific community itself reacted and said, well, we need to have a moratorium, we need to have a pause on this kind of research to think about how we govern.
00:34:13
Speaker
that how we provide sufficient oversight over the sorts of work that's being done so that the risk-benefit assessments are better, essentially. I think there will be many who argue that, myself among them, that the discussion that was had around gain of function at that time were not extensive enough, they were not inclusive enough, they were not enough voices being heard or
00:34:42
Speaker
part of the decision-making process in terms of the policies that came out of this in the United States. And to some extent, I think that's why we're again back at the table now with the discussions around the pandemic origins. Do you have any particular examples of gain-of-function research you'd be interested in sharing? It seemed like a really significant example was what was happening in Wisconsin. Sure. And that was the one that was
00:35:12
Speaker
the work in Wisconsin and at the Erasmus University in the Netherlands, what they were trying to do there was to, they were working with influenza or avian flu, and they were seeing if they were able to give that virus a new function, so enable it to spread not just among birds, but also from birds to mammals.
00:35:39
Speaker
including humans, including ourselves. So they were actively trying to make it not just affect birds, but also to affect humans. And they did so successfully, which made that virus more dangerous. And that was what that media furore was about. And the, you know, the discussions at the time were that many felt
00:36:02
Speaker
that the benefits of that research did not outweigh the very significant potential risks that that research involved. What are the benefits of that sort of gain-of-function research?
00:36:19
Speaker
Well, the ones that carry it out, that sort of research, both at the time, but also the sorts of gain of function research that's been going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, that's been some of it, which has been funded by American Money, some of it, which has been done in collaboration with American Institute, argues that in order to prepare for pandemics, we need to know
00:36:47
Speaker
what kind of viruses are going to hit us. And so new and emerging viruses generally come, spill over from the animal kingdom into humans. So they actively go and look for viruses in the animal kingdom. In this case, in the coronavirus case, the one instead of RLG, they were actively looking in that populations to see what sort of viruses
00:37:15
Speaker
exist there and what their potentials are for spilling over into humans. So that's their justification for doing that. My own view is that that's incredibly risky research and I'm not sure and I don't feel that that sort of justification really outweighs the very significant risks that it involves.
00:37:36
Speaker
It's like finding a needle in a haystack. How can you possibly hit upon the right virus into thousands and thousands of viruses that are out there and know how that will then mutate and get modified as it hits the human population?
00:37:54
Speaker
These are really significant and quite serious viruses. So you explained an example earlier about this UK case, right, where the final people to die from smallpox was actually from a BSL lab leak. And so there's also this research in Wisconsin on avian flu.
00:38:12
Speaker
So could you provide a little bit of perspective on, for example, the infection rate and case fatality rate of these kinds of viruses that they're working on at BSL labs or that they have at BSL labs that they might be pursuing gain of function research on? Yeah, I mean, certainly in terms of the coronavirus, what we've seen there is that that is clearly many people have died, many people have got infected, but that's not
00:38:39
Speaker
considered a particularly infectious or particularly lethal pathogen when it comes to pandemics. So we've seen much more dangerous pathogens that could create pandemics or that are being worked with in laboratories.
00:38:57
Speaker
Yeah, because some of these diseases, it seems, the case fatality rate gets up to between 10% and 30%. And so if you're doing gain-of-function research on something that's already that lethal and that has killed hundreds of millions of people in the history of life on Earth, with the history of lab leaks and with something so infectious and spreadable, it seems like one of the most risky things humanity is doing on the planet currently.
00:39:26
Speaker
Yes, I mean, one of the things that gain of function is doing is looking at lethality and how to increase lethality of pathogens. There are also other things that gain of function is doing.
00:39:38
Speaker
But that is kind of taking out a large part of the equation, which is the social context of how viruses spread and mutate. There are, for instance, things we can do to make viruses spread less and be less lethal. There are active measures we can take. Equally, there are responses that could increase the effect of viruses and how they spread. And so lethality is one aspect
00:40:07
Speaker
a potential pandemic, but it is only one aspect, right? There are these many other aspects too, so we need to think of ourselves much more as active players, that we also have a role to play in how these viruses spread and mutate.
00:40:25
Speaker
One thing that the digital revolution has brought in is the increase and the birth of big data.
Big Data in Health: Opportunities and Threats
00:40:33
Speaker
Big data can be used to detect the beginning of outbreaks, to detect novel diseases, and to come up with cures and
00:40:44
Speaker
treatments for novel and existing diseases. So I'm curious what your perspective is on the benefits and risks of the increase of big data in biology, both to health and society as well as privacy and the like.
00:41:02
Speaker
Well, you pointed to many of the benefits that the big data has. And there certainly are benefits. But as with most things, there are also a number of downsides. And I do believe that big data combined with the advances that we're seeing in genomic technologies, as well as with other areas of emerging technologies, so machine learning or AI, this poses a significant threat.
00:41:30
Speaker
It will allow an ever more refined record of our biometrics, so our fingerprints, our iris scans, our face recognition, our
00:41:43
Speaker
you know, CCTV cameras that can pick up individuals based on how they walk, all these kinds of biometrics. It will also allow a more refined record of our emotions and behaviors to be captured and to be analyzed. I mean, you will have heard of companies that are now using facial recognition on their employees to see whether they're
00:42:10
Speaker
what kind of mood they're in and how they engage with clients, et cetera. So governments are gaining incredible powers here, but increasingly it's private companies that are gaining this sort of power. So what I mean by that is that governments, but as I said, increasingly private companies will be able to sort, to categorize, to trade and to use
00:42:38
Speaker
biological data far more precisely than they have ever been able to do before. And that will create unprecedented possibilities for social and biological control, particularly through individual surveillance, if you like.
00:42:56
Speaker
So these game changing developments will deeply impact how we view health, how we treat disease, how long we live and how more generally we consider our place on the biological continuum. I think they'll also radically transform the joyous nature of biological research, of medicine, of health care. And in terms of my own field of biosecurity, they will create the possibility of novel biological weapons that target
00:43:25
Speaker
particular groups of people and even individuals. Now, I don't mean they will target Americans or they will target Brits or they will target Protestants or they will target Jews or they will target Muslims. That's not how biology works. Genes don't understand these social categories that we put onto people. That's how we socially divide people up. But that's not how
00:43:53
Speaker
genetics divides people up, but there are groupings also genetically that go across cultures, nations, beliefs, et cetera. So as we come to have more and more precise biological data on these different groups, the possibility of targeting these groups for harm will also be realized.
00:44:20
Speaker
So in the coming decade, managing the fast and broad technological advances that are now underway will require new kinds of governance structures that we need to put in place. And these new structures need to draw on individuals and groups with cross sectoral experience. So from business, from academia, from politics, from defense, from intelligence and so on to identify
00:44:47
Speaker
emerging security risks and to make recommendations for dealing with them. So we need new kinds of governance structures, new kinds of advisory bodies that have different kinds of stakeholders on them to the ones that we have traditionally had.
00:45:04
Speaker
So in terms of big data and the international community, with the continued risks of natural pandemics as well as synthetic pandemics or other kinds of biological agents and warfare, it's been proposed, for example, to create something like a bio-weather map.
00:45:23
Speaker
where we have a widespread globally distributed early warning detection system for biological agents that is based off of big data or is itself big data. So I'm curious if you have any perspective and thoughts on the importance of big data in particular for defenses against the modern risks of engineered and natural pandemics.
00:45:50
Speaker
Yes I do think there is a role to play here for data analysis tools of big data. We are I think already using some tools in this area where you have for instance analysis of social media usage and words that pop up on social media uses or you have analysis of
00:46:12
Speaker
the sorts of products that people are buying in pharmaceutical companies. So if there is some kind of disease spreading, people are getting sick and they're talking about different kinds of symptoms, you're able to kind of start tracking that. You're able to start mapping that. All of a sudden, all kinds of people in, say, Nebraska are going to the pharmacy to buy cough medicine, or something to reduce temperature, or there's a big spike, for instance.
00:46:42
Speaker
you might want to look into that more. That's an indicator that you that's a signal that you might want to look at that more or if you're picking up keywords on internet searches or on social media where people are asking about you know stomach cramps or you know more specific kinds of symptoms that again is another kind of signal you might want to look more into that or if there is a
00:47:07
Speaker
So I think some of these tools are definitely already being developed. Some are already in use. And I think they will have advantages and benefits in terms of preparing for both natural but also inadvertent accidental or deliberate outbreaks of disease. We're hopefully in the final stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
00:47:36
Speaker
Well, you know, when we reflect back upon it, it seems like it can be understood as a kind of almost like a minimally viable global catastrophe or minimally viable pandemic because there's been far worse pandemics, for example, in the past.
00:47:54
Speaker
And it's tragically taken the lives of many, many people. But at the same time, the fatality rate is just a bit more than the flu and a lot less than many of the other pandemics that humanity has seen in the past few hundred thousand years. So I'm curious what your perspective is on what we can learn in the areas of scientific, social, political and global life.
Lessons from COVID-19
00:48:23
Speaker
from our experience with the COVID-19 pandemic to be better prepared for something that's more serious in the future, something that's more infectious and has a higher case fatality rate.
00:48:35
Speaker
Well, I think, as you said, in the past, disease has been much more present in our societies. It's really with the rise of antibiotics and the rise of modern health care that we've been able to suppress disease to the extent that it's no longer such a pressing feature in our daily lives.
00:49:01
Speaker
I think what the pandemic have done to a whole generation is really just it has been a shot across the bow, really crystallized the incredibly damaging effects that disease can have on society. It's been this wake up call or this reality check.
00:49:19
Speaker
And I think we've seen that reflected also politically. So international developments like the UN's BioRisk Working Group that's been established by the Secretary General or efforts by states to develop a new international treaty on pandemics are concrete evidence of increasing awareness of the challenges that diseases pose to humankind.
00:49:43
Speaker
But clearly, that's not enough. It hasn't been enough what we've had in place. So clearly, we need to be better prepared. And I guess for me, that's one of the bigger takeaways from the pandemic. Equally, what the pandemic origin debate has done is to show that whether or not the pandemic resulted from a lab leak, it could have resulted from a lab leak. It could.
00:50:13
Speaker
ironically, or tragically, have been the result of scientific research actually aimed at preventing future pandemics. So clearly, for me, a huge takeaway is that we need better oversight. We need better governance structures to ensure safe, secure, and responsible life science research. Potentially,
00:50:38
Speaker
We also need to rethink some of our preparedness strategies, you know, maybe actively hunting for viruses in the wild, mutating them in the lab to see if that single virus might be the one that hits us next, the one that spills over, isn't the best strategy for preparing for pandemics in the future.
00:51:04
Speaker
But COVID has also highlighted a more general problem, one I think that's faced by all governments, and that is how can we successfully predict and prepare for the wide range of threats that there are to citizens and to national security. And some threats like COVID-19 are largely anticipated, actually, but they're not adequately planned for, as we've seen. Other threats are not anticipated at all, and for the most part are not planned for.
00:51:34
Speaker
The other side, some threats are planned for, but they fail to materialize as predicted because of errors and biases in the analytic process. So we know that governments have long tried to forecast or to employ a set of futures approaches to ensure they are ready for the next crisis.
00:51:54
Speaker
In practice, these are often general. They're ad hoc, they're unreliable, they're methodologically and intellectually weak, and they lack academic insight. And the result is that governments are wary of building on the recommendations of much of this futures work. They avoid it in policy planning, in real terms funding, and ultimately in practice and institutionalization.
00:52:19
Speaker
So what I and many of my colleagues believe is that we need a new vision of strategic awareness that goes beyond the simple idea of just providing a long term appreciation of the range of possibilities that the future might hold.
00:52:36
Speaker
to one that includes communication with governments about their receptivity to intelligence, how they understand intelligence, how they absorb other kinds of intelligence from private corporations, from academia, etc., as well as the manner in which the government acts as a result. So strategic awareness to my mind and to that of many others should
00:53:03
Speaker
should therefore be conceptualized in three ways. You should first look more seriously and closely at threats. Second, you should invest in prevention and four-sided action. And third, you should prepare for mitigation, crisis management, and bounce back in case a threat can't be fully prevented or deterred.
00:53:28
Speaker
This kind of thinking about strategic awareness will require a paradigm shift in how government practices strategic awareness today. And my view is that the academic community must play an integral part in that. Do you have any particular governance solutions that you're really excited about right now?
00:53:52
Speaker
I don't think there's a magic bullet. I don't think there's one magic solution to ensuring that life science research is safe, that it's secure and that it's carried out responsibly. I think in terms of governance, we need to work both from the top down and from the bottom up. So we need to have in place both
00:54:15
Speaker
national laws and regulations, statutory laws and regulations. We need to have in place institutional guidance. We need to have in place best practices. But we also need a lot of the commitment. We also need a lot of awareness coming from the bottom up. So we need
00:54:35
Speaker
individual scientists, groups of scientists, to think about how their work can best be carried out safely so they can make codes of ethics or codes of practice themselves. They can educate others. They can think through who needs to be involved
00:54:56
Speaker
beyond their own expert community in risk assessing the kinds of research that they're interested in carrying out. So we need both this top-down, government-enforced, institutionally-enforced governance as well as grassroots governance, and only by having
00:55:17
Speaker
both of these aspects, both of these kinds of governance measures, can we really start to address the potential downsides of life science research? All right. Just to wrap things up, I'm curious if you have any final words or thoughts for the audience or anyone that might be listening, anything that you feel is sort of a crucial takeaway on this issue. I generally feel that it's really difficult to convey the
00:55:46
Speaker
the significance and gravitas and, you know, importance of this. So I'm curious if you have any, you know, any final words about about this issue or a really central key takeaway you'd like listeners to have. I think when we're looking at our current century, this will be the century not of chemistry or physics or engineering.
Biology and AI in the 21st Century
00:56:08
Speaker
That was last century. This will be the century of biology and it will be the century of
00:56:15
Speaker
digital information and of AI. And I think this combination, which we talked about earlier, when you combine biological data with machine learning, with AI, with genomic technologies, you get incredible potential of precise information about individuals. And I think that is something we are going to struggle with in the years to come. And we need to make sure
00:56:45
Speaker
that we are aware of what is happening, that we are aware that when we go by a phone and we use the face recognition software, which is brilliant, that it can also have downsides and all these little individuals' actions, all these
00:57:01
Speaker
and technologies that we just readily accept because they do have upsides in our life, they can also have potential downsides. And I do think we need to make sure we also develop this critical sense or this ability to be critical, think critically about what these technologies are doing to us as individuals and to us as societies. So I guess that is the things I would like people to take away from our discussion.
00:57:30
Speaker
All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really can't think of too many other issues that are as important as this. It's certainly top three for me. Thank you very much for all of your work on this, Dr. Lenzos, and for all of your time here on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Lucas.
00:57:53
Speaker
Thanks for joining us. If you found this podcast interesting or useful, consider sharing it on social media with friends and subscribing on your preferred podcasting platform. We'll be back again soon with another episode in the FLI podcast.