Doris Cruz is working on a sample in the laboratories of Ring Therapeutics, a biotechnology company that conducts important research on anelloviruses. Credit – John Tlumacki-Boston Globe via Getty Images
IImagine a world where everything from plastic to concrete is produced from biomass. Personalized cell and gene therapies prevent pandemics and treat previously incurable genetic diseases. Meat is grown in a laboratory; Cereals with increased nutritional value are climate resistant. This is what the future may look like in the coming years.
The next big game-changing revolution is in biology. It will allow us to fight diseases more effectively, feed the planet, produce energy and capture carbon. We are already on the threshold of these opportunities. Last year saw some major milestones: The United States approved the production and sale of laboratory-grown meat for the first time; Google DeepMind’s AI has predicted the structure of more than 2 million new materials that could potentially be used for chips and batteries; Casgevy became the first commercial gene editing therapy approved using CRISPR. If I were a young person today, biology would truly be one of the most fascinating things to study.
Like the digital revolution, the biotechnology revolution will transform the American economy as we know it, and it is happening faster than we expected, powered by artificial intelligence. Recent advances in biotechnology are unlocking our ability to program biology just like we program computers. Just as OpenAI’s ChatGPT trains human language input to generate new text, AI models trained on biological sequences can design new proteins, predict cancer growth, and create other useful consumables. In the future, AI will be able to help us perform millions of theoretical and real biological experiments, predict results more accurately without laborious trial-and-error, and greatly accelerate the pace of new discoveries.
We are now on the verge of a “ChatGPT moment” in biology, with significant technological innovations and widespread adoption on the horizon. So how ready is America to do what is necessary to make this happen? I’m incredibly excited about this upcoming groundbreaking moment, but it’s so important to make sure it happens on our shores. That’s why I serve on the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. As the commission recently wrote in its latest interim report, “U.S. leadership in biotechnology development is not guaranteed to continue.”
America has a history of being a first mover in an emerging industry, before losing its lead as it outsourced production to other parts of the world. This pattern has repeated itself in high-tech sectors such as passenger cars, consumer electronics, solar panels and, most importantly, semiconductors. To avoid the same mistake, it is crucial that we ensure a reliable supply chain at home and abroad, covering everything from raw material extraction to data storage, while building the necessary talent pipeline. Relying on other countries for key ingredients in biotechnology carries enormous economic and national security risks. For example, leaving our genetic information in the hands of our enemies could potentially help them develop a bioweapon that would be used to target a specific genetic profile. President Biden’s latest executive order aims to prevent such sensitive personal data from being sold to China and other hostile countries.
Investment in both human capital and physical infrastructure will be critical to maintaining U.S. leadership in biotechnology. Such investments need not come solely from the government; It should also provide incentives to encourage more private funding, as with CHIPS and the Science Act. There is no need to exaggerate how central a role the bioeconomy will play in U.S. growth over the next fifty years. Currently, the bioeconomy produces at least 5% of US GDP; In comparison, semiconductors account for only 1% of US GDP. By some measures, 60% of physical inputs to the global economy can be produced by biological processes; The promise of biology is enormous in tackling some of humanity’s greatest challenges, including climate change.
As AI increases our ability to engineer biology, we will need guardrails. While it’s easy to conjure up doomsday scenarios of lone wolf amateurs building a bioweapon from scratch from home, studies by the Rand Corporation and OpenAI have argued that existing big language models like ChatGPT do not significantly increase the risk of creating a biological threat. Because they do not provide new information beyond what is already available on the internet. It is also important to keep in mind that just because an AI model can design new pathogens does not mean that users will have the safe wet lab infrastructure and resources to create them.
However, the biorisk landscape is constantly evolving as AI tools improve in accessibility and ease of use. Soon, more complex base models could provide malicious actors with more data, scientific expertise, and assay troubleshooting skills, helping them recommend candidate biological agents and order biological parts from a variety of suppliers to evade screening protocols.
Organizations such as the Federation of American Scientists and the Nuclear Threat Initiative have proposed creating structured red teams that actively look for vulnerabilities to preemptively secure our biosecurity infrastructure to evaluate the biological capabilities of existing DNA sequence screening methods and AI tools. More than 90 scientists have signed a call to ensure the responsible development of artificial intelligence in the field of protein design. To build a robust testing economy, we will need both development standards and requirements to implement risk assessments, as well as public-private collaboration.
By now, most of us have eaten, treated or worn a product made with biotechnology. Soon technology will disrupt every industry and fundamentally reshape our normal lives: new fertility treatments will transform parenthood; cellular reprogramming can begin to reverse the aging process; Biocomputing will power the computers of tomorrow. As a country standing on the cusp of these innovations, we have a unique chance to direct how biotechnology develops, realize its enormous benefits, and shape the norms of responsible innovation before other countries get ahead.
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