by Doris Cruz works on a sample in the laboratories of Ring Therapeutics, a biotech company that is doing significant research on aniloliviruses. Credit – John Tlumacki-The Boston Globe via Getty Images
meimagine 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. Laboratory grown meat; nutritionally improved grains are climate resistant. This is what the future could look like in the coming years.
The next big game-changing revolution is biology. It will enable us to fight disease more effectively, feed the planet, generate energy and capture carbon. We are already at the edge of these opportunities. Last year saw several important milestones: the US allowed the production and sale of lab-grown meat for the first time; Google DeepMind’s AI predicted structures of more than 2 million new materials, which can be used for chips and batteries; Casgevy was the first commercially approved gene therapy using CRISPR. If I were a young person today, biology would be one of the most interesting things to study.
Like the digital revolution, the biotech revolution stands to change the American economy as we know it—and it’s coming faster than we expected, charged by AI. Recent advances in biotechnology have led to our ability to program biology just as we program computers. Just as ChatGPT OpenAI trains human language input to find new text, AI models trained on biological sequences could design novel proteins, predict cancer growth, and create other useful wearables. In the future, AI will be able to help us run millions of theoretical and actual biological experiments, predicting outcomes more accurately without hard trial and error – greatly accelerating the rate of new discoveries.
We are now on the cusp of a “ChatGPT moment” in biology, with significant technological innovation and widespread adoption on the horizon. But how ready is America with what needs to be done to make it happen? I am very excited for this momentous moment to come, but it is vital to ensure that it happens on our shores. That’s why I’m serving on the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. As the commission wrote in its recent interim report, “Continued US leadership in biotechnology development is not guaranteed.”
America has a history of being the first mover in an emerging industry before losing its leadership and outsourcing its 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, especially, semiconductors. To avoid the same mistake, it is imperative that we secure a reliable supply chain domestically and internationally that covers everything from raw material extraction to data storage while building the necessary talent pipeline. Relying on other countries for important components in biotechnology involves enormous economic and national risks. For example, if our genetic information was left in the hands of our enemies it could help them develop bio-weapons that are used to target a specific genetic profile. A recent executive order by President Biden aims to prevent sales of such sensitive personal data to China and other rival countries.
Investment in both human capital and physical infrastructure will be critical to continued US leadership in biotechnology. Such investments need not come from government alone but should provide incentives to encourage more private funding, as the CHIPS and Science Act did. There is no exaggeration of how central the bioeconomy will be to US growth over the next fifty years. Currently, the bioeconomy generates at least 5% of US GDP; in comparison, semiconductors represent only about 1% of US GDP. By certain measures, 60% of physical inputs to the global economy could be augmented by biological processes – the promise of biology to tackle some of humanity’s greatest challenges, including climate change, is enormous .
As AI boosts our ability to engineer biology, we will need guardrails. While it’s easy to see doomsday scenarios where lone wolf amateurs are building bioweapons from home, studies by the Rand Corporation and OpenAI have argued that existing large language models such as ChatGPT do not significantly increase the risk will create a biological threat, as they do not provide new information beyond what is already on the internet. And it’s also important to remember that just because an AI model can design novel pathogens doesn’t mean users have the safe wet lab infrastructure and resources to create them.
However, as AI tools improve in accessibility and ease of use, the biorisk landscape is constantly changing. Soon, more complex base models could provide malicious actors with more data, scientific expertise, and experimental troubleshooting skills, helping to recommend candidate biological agents and helping them order biological parts from a diverse set of suppliers for screening protocols. to avoid.
Organizations like the Federation of American Scientists and the Nuclear Threat Initiative have proposed a structured red team—actively looking for vulnerabilities to preemptively secure our biosecurity infrastructure—for current DNA sequence screening methods and evaluating the biological capabilities of AI tools. More than 90 scientists have signed a call to ensure that AI develops responsibly in the field of protein design. We will need standards for development as well as requirements for implementing risk assessments, as well as public-private sector collaboration to create a robust testing economy.
By now, most of us have probably eaten, treated or consumed a product created with biotechnology. Soon, technology will disrupt every industry and fundamentally reshape our everyday lives: new fertility treatments will change parenthood; the initiation of cellular reprogramming may reverse the aging process; biocomputing will power the computers of tomorrow. Standing on the cusp of this innovation, we have a unique opportunity as a country to drive forward how biotechnology succeeds, realize its enormous benefits, and shape the norms for responsible innovation – before other developed countries.
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