The Security Impact of Biotech

By Piers Millet

Piers Millet spent over 10 years working for the UN and the Biological Weapons Convention before leaving to co-found Biosecure Ltd, a company dedicated to safeguarding the bio-economy. There he works with international organizations, governments, industry and civil society to help ensure robust frameworks to maximize the benefits from biotechnology whilst minimizing any risks. He is also a founder member of the Safety Committee at iGEM, the international genetically engineered machines competition.

There is increasingly rapid progress in understanding how biological systems work. This gives us new tools to meaningfully manipulate those systems towards a given end. We are developing an unprecedented range of biological tools and biotechnologies to change our world at a fundamental level.

The benefits of biotechnology are already helping in many areas of our lives. As we described at an international bio-risk meeting in June 2015, biotechnology is driving changes in health, manufacturing, and food security. In the health sector, for example, the digitization of biology is speeding up the development of new vaccines, while advances in metabolic pathway engineering are changing how we can manufacture drugs and painkillers. New tools, such as gene drives, also allow us to deliberately engineer inheritable genetic traits into wild populations – offering a powerful new way to rid the world of certain vector-borne diseases.

“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62

Access all of The Cipher Brief’s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+ Member.

Subscriber+


Related Articles

Search

Close