FP | A main element of the biological revolution will be its impact on
security in the broadest sense of the term, as well as on the more
specific realm of military activity. Both of these are part of the work
being done by various laboratories around the globe, including here in
the United States at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, where I serve as a senior fellow.
Some of the most promising advances made at JHU APL and elsewhere
involve man-machine interfaces, with particular emphasis on
brain-machine connections that would allow the use of disconnected
limbs; more rapid disease identification in response to both natural and
man-made epidemics; artificial intelligence, which offers the greatest
near-term potential for both positive benefit and military application
(i.e., autonomous attack drones); human performance enhancement,
including significant reduction in sleep needs, increases in mental
acuity, and improvements in exoskeleton and skin “armor”; and efficient
genome editing using CRISPR-Cas,
a technology that has become widely available to ever smaller
laboratory settings, including individuals working out of their homes.
The most important question is how to appropriately pursue such
research while remaining within the legal, ethical, moral, and policy
boundaries that our society might one day like to set, though are still
largely unformed. Scientists are like soldiers on patrol in unmarked
terrain, one that is occasionally illuminated by a flash of lightning,
revealing steeper and more dangerous ground ahead. The United States
needs to continue its research efforts, but, equally important, it needs
to develop a coherent and cohesive biological strategy to guide those
efforts.
But national biological research efforts will also have international
implications, so over time there will need to be international
diplomacy to set norms of behavior for the use of these technologies.
The diplomacy that went into developing the Law of the Sea, and is under
consideration in the cyberworld, could serve as a useful model.
A major challenge for such diplomacy is that individual nations,
transnational organizations, or even individuals will soon have access —
if they don’t already — to biological tools that permit manipulation of
living organisms. The rise of low-cost synthetic biology technologies,
the falling cost of DNA sequencing, and the diffusion of knowledge
through the internet create the conditions for a breakout biological
event not dissimilar to the Spanish influenza of
roughly a century ago. In that plague, by some estimates, nearly 40
percent of the world’s population was infected, with a 10 to 20 percent
mortality rate. Extrapolated to our current global population, that
would equate to more than 400 million dead.
