Ariel: Hello. I'm Ariel Conn with the Future of Life Institute. Now I've been planning to do something about biotechnology this month anyways since it would go along so nicely with the new resource we just released which highlights the benefits and risks of biotech. I was very pleased when Catherine Rhodes agreed to be on the show. Catherine is a senior research associate and deputy director of the Center for the Study of Existential Risk. Her work has broadly focused on understanding the intersection and combination of risks stemming from technologies and risks stemming from governance, or a lack of it.

But she has particular expertise in international governance of biotechnology, including biosecurity and broader risk management issues. The timing of Catherine as a guest is also especially fitting given that just this week the science world was shocked to learn that a researcher out of China is claiming to have created the world's first genetically edited babies.

Now neither she nor I have had much of a chance to look at this case too deeply but I think it provides a very nice jumping-off point to consider regulations, ethics, and risks, as they pertain to biology and all emerging sciences. So Catherine, thank you so much for being here.

Catherine: Thank you.

Ariel: I also want to add that we did have another guest scheduled to join us today who is unfortunately ill, and unable to participate, so Catherine, I am doubly grateful to you for being here today.

Before we get too far into any discussions, I was hoping to just go over some basics to make sure we're all on the same page. In my readings of your work, you talk a lot about biorisk and biosecurity, and I was hoping you could just quickly define what both of those words mean.

Catherine: Yes, in terms of thinking about both biological risk and biological security, I think about the objects that we're trying to protect. It's about the protection of human, animal, and plant life and health, in particular. Some of that extends to protection of the environment. The risks are the risks to those objects and security is securing and protecting those.

Ariel: Okay. I'd like to start this discussion where we'll talk about ethics and policy, looking first at the example of the gain-of-function experiments that caused another stir in the science community a few years ago. That was research which was made, I believe, on the H5N1 virus, also known as the avian flu, and I believe it made the virus more virulent. First, can you just explain what gain-of-function means? And then I was hoping you could talk a bit about what that research was, and what the scientific community's reaction to it was.

Catherine: Gain-of-function's actually quite a controversial term to have selected to describe this work, because a lot of what biologists do is work that would add a function to the organism that they're working on, without that actually posing any security risk. In this context, it was a gain of a function that would make it perhaps more desirable for use as a biological weapon.

In this case, it was things like an increase in its ability to transmit between mammals, so in particular, they were getting it tracked to be transmittable between ferrets in a laboratory, and ferrets are a model for transmission between humans.

Ariel: You actually bring up an interesting point that I hadn't thought about. To what extent does our choice of terminology affect how we perceive the ethics of some of these projects?

Catherine: I think it was perhaps in this case, it was more that the use of that term which was more done from perhaps the security and policy community side, made the conversation with scientists more difficult, as it was felt this was mislabeling our research, it's affecting research that shouldn't really come into this kind of conversation about security. So I think that was where it maybe caused some difficulties.

But I think also there's understanding that needs to be the other way as well, that this isn't not necessarily that all policymakers are going to have that level of detail about what they mean when they're talking about science.

Ariel: Right. What was the reaction then that we saw from the scientific community and the policymakers when this research was published?

Catherine: There was firstly a stage of debate about whether those papers should be published or not. There was some guidance given by what's called the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity in the US, that those papers should not be published in full. So, actually, the first part of the debate was about that stage of ‘should you publish this sort of research where it might have a high risk of misuse?’

That was something that the security community had been discussing for at least a decade, that there were certain experiments where they felt that they would meet a threshold of risk, where they shouldn't be openly published or shouldn't be published with their methodological details in full. I think for the policy and security community, it was expected that these cases would arise, but this hadn't perhaps been communicated to the scientific community particularly well, and so I think it came as a shock to some of those researchers, particularly because the research had been approved initially, so they were able to conduct the research, but suddenly they would find that they can't publish the research that they've done. I think that was where this initial point of contention came about.

It then became a broader issue. More generally, how do we handle these sorts of cases? Are there times when we should restrict publication? Or, is publication actually open publication, going to be a better way of protecting ourselves, because we'll all know about the risks as well?

Ariel: Like you said, these scientists had gotten permission to pursue this research, so it's not like it was questionable, or they had no reason to think it was too questionable to begin with. And yet, I guess there is that issue of how can scientists think about some of these questions more long term and maybe recognize in advance that the public or policymakers might find their research concerning? Is that something that scientists should be trying to do more of?

Catherine: Yes, and I think that's part of this point about the communication between the scientific and policy communities, so that these things don't come as a surprise or a shock. Yes, I think there was something in this. If we're allowed to do the research, should we not have had more conversation at the earlier stages? I think in general I would say that's where we need to get to, because if you're trying to intervene at the stage of publication, it's probably already too late to really contain the risk of publication, because for example, if you've submitted a journal article online, that information's already out there.

So yes, trying to take it further back in the process, so that the beginning stages of designing research projects these things are considered, is important. That has been pushed forward by funders, so there are now some clauses about ‘have you reviewed the potential consequences of your research?’ That is one way of triggering that thinking about it. But I think there's been a broader question further back about education and awareness.

It's all right if you're being asked that question, but do you actually have information that helps you know what would be a security risk? And what elements might you be looking for in your work? So, there's this case more generally in how do we build awareness amongst the scientific community that these issues might arise, and train them to be able to spot some of the security concerns that may be there?

Ariel: Are we taking steps in that direction to try to help educate both budding scientists and also researchers who have been in the field for a while?

Catherine: Yes, there have been quite a lot of efforts in that area. Again, probably over the last decade or so, done by academic groups in civil society. It's been something that's been encouraged by states-parties to the Biological Weapons Convention have been encouraging education and awareness raising, and also the World Health Organization. It's got a document on responsible life sciences research, and it also encourages education and awareness-raising efforts.

I think that those have further to go, and I think some of the barriers to those being taken up are the familiar things that it's very hard to find space in a scientific curriculum to have that teaching, that more resources are needed in terms of where are the materials that you would go to. That is being built up.

I think also then talking about the scientific curriculums at maybe the undergraduate, postgraduate level, but how do you extend this throughout scientific careers as well? There needs to be a way of reaching scientists at all levels.

Ariel: We're talking a lot about the scientists right now, but in your writings, you mention that there are three groups who have responsibility for ensuring that science is safe and ethical. Those are one, obviously the scientists, but then also you mention policymakers, and you mention the public and society. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about how you see the roles for each of those three groups playing out.

Catherine: I think these sorts of issues, they're never going to be just the responsibility of one group, because there are interactions going on. Some of those interactions are important in terms of maybe incentives. So we talked about publication. Publication is of such importance within the scientific community and within their incentive structures. It's so important to publish, that again, trying to intervene just at that stage, and suddenly saying, "No, you can't publish your research" is always going to be a big problem.

It's to do with the norms and the practices of science, but some of that, again, comes from the outside. Are there ways we can reshape those sorts of structures that would be more useful? Is one way of thinking about it. I think we need clear signals from policymakers as well, about when to take threats seriously or not. If we're not hearing from policymakers that there are significant security concerns around some forms of research, then why should we expect the scientist to be aware of it?

Yes, also policy does have a control and governance mechanisms within it, so it can be very useful. In forms of deciding what research can be done, that's often done by funders and government bodies, and not by the research community themselves. Trying to think how more broadly, to bring in the public dimension. I think what I mean there is that it's about all of us being aware of this. It shouldn't be isolating one particular community and saying, "Well, if things go wrong, it was you."

Socially, we've got decisions to make about how we feel about certain risks and benefits and how we want to manage them. In the gain-of-function case, the research that was done had the potential for real benefits for understanding avian influenza, which could produce a human pandemic, and therefore there could be great public health benefits associated with some of this research that also poses great risks.

Again, when we're dealing with something that for society, could bring both risks and benefits, society should play a role in deciding what balance it wants to achieve.

Ariel: I guess I want to touch on this idea of how we can make sure that policymakers and the public - this comes down to a three way communication. I guess my question is, how do we get scientists more involved in policy, so that policymakers are informed and there is more of that communication? I guess maybe part of the reason I'm fumbling over this question is it's not clear to me how much responsibility we should be putting specifically on scientists for this, versus how much responsibility does go to the other groups.

Catherine: About science, it's becoming more involved in policy. That's another part of thinking of the relationship between science and policy, and science and society, is that we've got an expectation that part of what policymakers will consider is how to have regulation and governance that's appropriate to scientific practice, and to emerging technologies, science and technology advances, then they need information from the scientific community about those things. There's a responsibility of policymakers to seek some of that information, but also for scientists to be willing to engage in the other direction.

I think that’s the main answer to how they could be more informed, and what other ways there could be more communication? I think some of the useful ways that's done at the moment is by having, say, meetings where there might be a horizon scanning element, so that scientists can have input on where we might see advances going. But if you also have within the participation, policymakers, and maybe people who know more about things like technology transfer, and startups, investments, so they can see what's going on in terms of where the money's going. Bringing those groups together to look at where the future might be going is quite a good way of capturing some of those advances.

And it helps inform the whole group, so I think those sorts of processes are good, and there are some examples of those, and there are some examples where the international science academies come together to do some of that sort of work as well, so that they would provide information and reports that can go forward to international policy processes. They do that for meetings at the Biological Weapons Convention, for example.

Ariel: Okay, so I want to come back to this broadly in a little bit, but first I want to touch on biologists and ethics and regulation a little bit more generally. Because I guess I keep thinking of the famous Asilomar meeting from I think it was in the late '70s, in which biologists got together, recognized some of the risks in their field, and chose to pause the work that they were doing, because there were ethical issues. I tend to credit them with being more ethically aware than a lot of other scientific fields.

But it sounds like maybe that's not the case. Was that just a special example in which scientists were unusually proactive? I guess, should we be worried about scientists and biosecurity, or is it just a few bad apples like we saw with this recent Chinese researcher?

Catherine: I think in terms of ethical awareness, it's not that I don't think biologists are ethically aware, but it is that there can be a lot of different things coming onto their agendas in that, and again, those can be pushed out by other practices within your daily work. So, I think for example, one of the things in biology, often it's quite close to medicine, and there's been a lot over the last few decades about how we treat humans and animals in research.

There's ethics and biomedical ethics, there's practices to do with consent and participation of human subjects, that people are aware of. It's just that sometimes you've got such an overload of all these different issues you're supposed to be aware of and responding to, so sustainable development and environmental protection is another one, that I think it's going to be the case that often things will fall off the agenda or knowing which you should prioritize perhaps can be difficult.

I do think there's this lack of awareness of the past history of biological warfare programs, and the fact that scientists have always been involved with them, and then looking forward to know how much more easy, because of the trends in technology, it may be for more actors to have access to such technologies and the implications that might have.

I think that picks up on what you were saying about, are we just concerned about the bad apples? Are there some rogue people out there that we should be worried about? I think there's two parts to that, because there may be some things that are more obvious, where you can spot, "Yeah, that person's really up to something they shouldn't be." I think there are probably mechanisms where people do tend to be aware of what's going on in their laboratories.

Although, as you mentioned, the recent Chinese case, potentially CRISPR gene edited babies, it seems clear that people within that person's laboratory didn't know what was going on, the funders didn't know what was going on, the government didn't know what was going on, so yes, there will be some cases where there's something very obvious that someone is doing bad.

I think that's probably an easier thing to handle and to conceptualize, but when we're now getting these questions about you can be doing the stuff, scientific work, and research, that's for clear benefits, and you're doing it for those beneficial purposes, but how do you work out whether the results of that could be misused by someone else? How do you frame whether you have any responsibility for how someone else would use it when they may well not be anywhere near you in a laboratory? They may be very remote, you probably have no contact with them at all, so how can you judge and assess how your work may be misused, and then try and make some decision about how you should proceed with it? I think that's a more complex issue.

That does probably, as you say, speak to ‘are there things in scientific cultures, working practices, that might assist with dealing with that? Or might make it problematic?’ Again, I think I've picked up a few times, but there's a lot going on in terms of the sorts of incentive structures that scientists are working in, which do more broadly meet up with global economic incentives. Again, not knowing the full details of the recent Chinese CRISPR case, there can often be almost racing dynamics between countries to have done some of this research and to be ahead in it.

I think that did happen with the gain-of-function experiments so that when the US had a moratorium on doing them, that China wrapped up its experiments in the same area. There's all these kind of incentive structures that are going on as well, and I think those do affect wider scientific and societal practices.

Ariel: Okay. Quickly touching on some of what you were talking about, in terms of researchers who are doing things right, in most cases I think what happens is this case of dual use, where the research could go either way. I think I'm going to give scientists the benefit of the doubt and say most of them are actually trying to do good with their research. That doesn't mean that someone else can't come along later and then do something bad with it.

This is I think especially a threat with biosecurity, and so I guess, I don't know that I have a specific question that you haven't really gotten into already, but I am curious if you have ideas for how scientists can deal with the dual use nature of their research. Maybe to what extent does more open communication help them deal with it, or is open communication possibly bad?

Catherine: Yes. I think yes it's possibly good and possibly bad. I think again, yeah, it's a difficult question without putting their practice into context. Again, it shouldn't be that just the scientist has to think through these issues of dual use and can it be misused. If there's not really any new information coming out about how serious a threat this might be, so do we know that this is being pursued by any terrorist group? Do we know why that might be of a particular concern?

I think another interesting thing is that you might get combinations of technology that have developed in different areas, so you might get someone who does something that helps with the dispersal of an agent, that's entirely disconnected from someone who might be working on an agent, that would be useful to disperse. Knowing about the context of what else is going on in technological development, and not just within your own work is also important.

Ariel: Just to clarify, what are you referring to when you say agent here?

Catherine: In this case, again, thinking of biology, so that might be a microorganism. If you were to be developing a biological weapon, you don't just need to have a nasty pathogen. You would need some way of dispersing, disseminating that, for it to be weaponized. Those components may be for beneficial reasons going on in very different places. How would scientists be able to predict where those might combine and come together, and create a bigger risk than just their own work?

Ariel: Okay. And then I really want to ask you about the idea of the races, but I don't have a specific question to be honest. It's a concerning idea, and it's something that we look at in artificial intelligence, and it's clearly a problem with nuclear weapons. I guess what are concerns we have when we look at biological races?

Catherine: It may not even be necessarily specific to looking at biological races, but it is this thing, and again, not even thinking of maybe military science uses of technology, but about how we have very strong drivers for economic growth, and that technology advances will be really important to innovation and economic growth.

So, I think this does provide a real barrier to collective state action against some of these threats, because if a country can see an advantage of not regulating an area of technology as strongly, then they've got a very strong incentive to go for that. It's working out how you might maybe overcome some of those economic incentives, and try and slow down some of the development of technology, or application of technology perhaps, to a pace where we can actually start doing these things like working out what's going on, what the risks might be, how we might manage those risks.

But that is a hugely controversial kind of thing to put forward, because the idea of slowing down technology, which is clearly going to bring us these great benefits and is linked to progress and economic progress is a difficult sell to many states.

Ariel: Yeah, that makes sense. I think I want to turn back to the Chinese case very quickly. I think this is an example of what a lot of people fear, in that you have this scientist who isn't being open with the university that he's working with, isn't being open with his government about the work he's doing. It sounds like even the people who are working for him in the lab, and possibly even the parents of the babies that are involved may not have been fully aware of what he was doing.

We don't have all the information, but at the moment, at least what little we have sounds like an example of a scientist gone rogue. How do we deal with that? What policies are in place? What policies should we be considering?

Catherine: I think I share where the concerns in this are coming from, because it looks like there's multiple failures of the types of layers of systems that should have maybe been able to pick this up and stop it, so yes, we would usually expect that a funder of the research, or the institution the person's working in, the government through regulation, the colleagues of a scientist would be able to pick up on what's happening, have some ability to intervene, and that doesn't seem to have happened.

Knowing that these multiple things can all fall down is worrying. I think actually an interesting thing about how we deal with this that there seems to be a very strong reaction from the scientific community working around those areas of gene editing, to all come together and collectively say, "This was the wrong thing to do, this was irresponsible, this is unethical. You shouldn't have done this without communicating more openly about what you were doing, what you were thinking of doing."

I think that's really interesting to see that community push back which I think in those cases to me, where scientists are working in similar areas, I'd be really put off by that, thinking, "Okay, I should stay in line with what the community expects me to do." I think that is important.

Where it also is going to kick in from the more top-down regulatory side as well, so whether China will now get some new regulation in place, do some more checks down through the institutional levels, I don't know. Likewise, I don't know whether internationally it will bring a further push for coordination on how we want to regulate those experiments.

Ariel: I guess this also brings up the question of international standards. It does look like we're getting very broad international agreement that this research shouldn't have happened. But how do we deal with cases where maybe most countries are opposed to some type of research and another country says, "No, we think it could be possibly ethical so we're going to allow it?"

Catherine: I think this is again, the challenging situation. It's interesting to me, this picks up, I'm trying to think whether this is maybe 15-20 years ago, but the debates about human cloning internationally, whether there should be a ban on human cloning. There was a declaration made, there's a UN declaration against human cloning, but it fell down in terms of actually being more than a declaration, having something stronger in terms of an international law on this, because basically in that case, it was the differences between states' views of the status of the embryo.

Regulating human reproductive research at the international level is very difficult because of some of those issues where like you say, there can be quite significant differences in ethical approaches taken by different countries. Again, in this case, I think what's been interesting is, "Okay, if we're going to come across a difficulty in getting an agreement between states and the governmental level, is there things that the scientific community or other groups can do to make sure those debates are happening, and that some common ground is being found to how we should pursue research in these areas, when we should decide it's maybe safe enough to go down some of these lines?"

I think another point about this case in China was that it's just not known whether it's safe to be doing gene editing on humans yet. That's actually one of the reasons why people shouldn't be doing it regardless. I hope that gets some way to the answer. I think it is very problematic that we often will find that we can't get broad international agreement on things, even when there seems to be some level of consensus.

Ariel: We've been talking a lot about all of these issues from the perspective of biological sciences, but I want to step back and also look at some of these questions more broadly. There's two sides that I want to look at. One is just this question of how do we enable scientists to basically get into policy more? I mean, how can we help scientists understand how policymaking works and help them recognize that their voices in policy can actually be helpful? Or, do you think that we are already at a good level there?

Catherine: I would say we're certainly not at an ideal level yet of science and policy. It does vary across different areas of course, so the thing that was coming up into my mind is in climate change, for example, having the intergovernmental panel doing their reports every few years. There's a good, collaborative, international evidence base and good science policy process in that area.

But in other areas there's a big deficit I would say. I'm most familiar with that internationally, but I think some of this scales down to the national level as well. Part of it is going in the other direction almost. When I spoke earlier about needs perhaps for education and awareness raising among scientists about some of these issues around how their research may be used, I think there's also a need for people in policy to become more informed about science.

That is important. I'm trying to think what are the ways maybe scientists can do that? I think there's some attempts, so when there's international negotiations going on, to have ... I think I’ve heard them described as mini universities, so maybe a week's worth of quick updates on where the science is at before a negotiation goes on that's relevant to that science.

I think one of the key things to say is that there are ways for scientists and the scientific community to have influence both on how policy develops and how it's implemented, and a lot of this will go through intermediary bodies. In particular, the professional associations and academies that represent scientific communities. They will know, for example, thinking in the UK context, but I think this is similar in the US, there may be a consultation by parliament on how should we address a particular issue?

There was one in the UK a couple of years ago, how should we be regulating genetically modified insects? If a consultation like that's going on and they're asking for advice and evidence, there's often ways of channeling that through academies. They can present statements that represent broader scientific consensus within their communities and input that.

The reason for mentioning them as intermediaries, again, it's a lot of a burden to put on individual scientists to say, "You should all be getting involved in policy and informing policy. Another part of what you should be doing as part of your role," but yes, realizing that you can do that as a collective, rather than it just having to be an individual thing I think is valuable.

Ariel: Yeah, there is the issue of, "Hey, in your free time, can you also be doing this?" It's not like scientists have lots of free time. But one of the things that I get the impression is that scientists are sometimes a little concerned about getting involved with policymaking because they fear overregulation, and that it could harm their research and the good that they're trying to do with their research. Is this fear justified? Are scientists hampered by policies? Are they helped by policies?

Catherine: Yeah, so it's both. It's important to know that the mechanisms of policy can play facilitative roles, they can promote science, as well as setting constraints and limits on it. Again, most governments are recognizing that the life sciences and biology and artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies are going to be really key for their economic growth.

They are doing things to facilitate and support that, and fund it, so it isn't only about the constraints. However, I guess for a lot of scientists, the way you come across regulation, you're coming across the bits that are the constraints on your work, or there are things that make you fill in a lot of forms, so it can just be perceived as something that's burdensome.

But I would also say that certainly something I've noticed in recent years is that we shouldn't think that scientists and technology communities aren't sometimes asking for areas to be regulated, asking for some guidance on how they should be managing risks. Switching back to a biology example, but with gene drive technologies, the communities working on those have been quite proactive in asking for some forms of, “How do we govern the risks? How should we be assessing things?" Saying, "These don't quite fit with the current regulatory arrangements, we'd like some further guidance on what we should be doing."

I can understand that there might be this fear about regulation, but I also think something you said, could this be the source of the reluctance to engage with policy, and I think an important thing to say there is that actually if you're not engaging with policy, it's more likely that the regulation is going to be working in ways that are not intentionally, but could be restricting scientific practice. I think that's really important as well, that maybe the regulation is created in a very well intended way, and it just doesn't match up with scientific practice.

I think at the moment, internationally this is becoming a discussion around how we might handle the digital nature of biology now, when most regulation is to do with materials. But if we're going to start regulating the digital versions of biology, so gene sequencing information, that sort of thing, then we need to have a good understanding of what the flows of information are, in which ways they have value within the scientific community, whether it's fundamentally important to have some of that information open, and we should be very wary of new rules that might enclose it.

I think that's something again, if you're not engaging with the processes of regulation and policymaking, things are more likely to go wrong.

Ariel: Okay. We've been looking a lot about how scientists deal with the risks of their research, how policymakers can help scientists deal with the risks of their research, et cetera, but it's all about the risks coming from the research and from the technology, and from the advances. Something that you brought up in a separate conversation before the podcast is to what extent does risk stem from technology, and to what extent can it stem from how we govern it? I was hoping we could end with that question.

Catherine: That's a really interesting question to me, and I’m trying to work that out in my own research. One of the interesting and perhaps obvious things to say is it's never down to the technology. It's down to how we develop it, use it, implement it. The human is always playing a big role in this anyway.

But yes, I think a lot of the time governance mechanisms are perhaps lagging behind the development of science and technology, and I think some of the risk is coming from the fact that we may just not be governing something properly. I think this comes down to things we've been mentioning earlier. We need collectively both in policy, in the science communities, technology communities, and society, just to be able to get a better grasp on what is happening in the directions of emerging technologies that could have both these very beneficial and very destructive potentials, and what is it we might need to do in terms of really rethinking how we govern these things?

Yeah, I don't have any answer for where the sources of risk are coming from, but I think it's an interesting place to look, is that intersection between the technology development, and the development of regulation and governance.

Ariel: All right, well yeah, I agree. I think that is a really great question to end on, for the audience to start considering as well. Catherine, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been a really interesting conversation.

Catherine: Thank you.

Ariel: As always, if you've been enjoying the show, please take a moment to like it, share it, and follow us on your preferred podcast platform.