Hey everyone, so you heard I'm styling myself
as a professional robot whisperer, a amateur
biohacker and an occasional meetup organizer,
and that's more or less accurate.
I'm going to talk about laboratory automation
and some biosecurity implications, sort of.
I submitted the title for this talk prior
to writing it, but I, I will be talking about
lab automation, but mostly because I think
that's a really important part of the story
of how biology has changed.
So we're doing biology in a whole lot of new
places, and I think our norms and regulations
around biosecurity have not really kept pace
with that.
When I think about how biology has changed,
I usually like to think back about 40 years.
That's when we had the first recombinant DNA
and this is what things looked like then.
She's pipetting with her mouth back in 1975.
They put out the Asilomar Principles and they
had to specifically forbid people from pipetting
bacteria with their mouths, which I find horrifying.
And uh, you know, I'm in a privileged position
because I work as a lab automation engineer.
And so I also get to be kind of horrified
by this middle picture, normal gel electrophoresis,
because I'm used to working with robots like
the ones on the right, which can do this kind
of common lab work about an order of magnitude
faster.
And I can't talk about how biology has changed
without showing you this graph.
So about a decade ago, well I guess two decades
ago now, the turn of the century: human genome
project, it took us a decade of work and it
cost $3 billion.
If you want to sequence a human genome today,
it costs you about a thousand dollars and
it will take you about a day.
And we are well on our way to $100 genome
and you see the same kind of trends in DNA
synthesis costs.
At this point, you know, this has all been
enabled by new hardware.
At this point, if you are an individual, you
can more or less have all of the tools you
need to read, write and edit DNA in your home.
So if you want to read DNA, there's this USB
powered DNA sequencer, which I think that's
cool that that exists.
It's called the minION and it costs about
a thousand dollars.
Most of us in this room probably could not
afford this thing in the middle.
It's a DNA printer, but a lab for example,
it could totally have this on their bench
top.
It costs about 50k.
And then we're in the bay area.
If you want to edit genomes, there is a local
startup for that.
This is the DIY CRISPR kit from The Odin and
it will only set you back $159.99.
And I really want to emphasize that a decade
ago this didn't exist.
There were no cheap tools for this even five
years ago.
And so what all that means is that biology
has become much cheaper and faster to engineer.
And that means that we are doing biology in
new places.
It used to be that if you wanted to do molecular
biology, you were in an academic context.
You are in a research lab.
Now you can sequence genomes on your kitchen
counter and, sometimes that is really wholesome.
This is actually a picture from an educational
nonprofit in New York.
They're called Bionoma Collabs.
They bring students up to their lab, AKA their
kitchen, and they have them sequence genomes
of novel plants that have never been sequenced
before, and they submit those to public databases.
So they're doing education.
The students get lab skills.
And they're also expanding human knowledge
and I love it.
I think this is great.
And there's also a lot of new for profit biology.
So this is a graph from a local org, you know,
increasing venture capital investment in synthetic
biology and it's not just venture capitalists
that are interested.
More than 40 countries have released a strategy
for the national bio-economy.
And a lot of these companies are so cool.
They're doing really amazing science fiction
things.
I do want clean meat.
I want new biofuels, I want spider silk ties,
immortal dogs.
I would like all of that, please.
And yet, you know, I'm worried that as we're
doing this and as biology is moving to new
places, we are not keeping it safe.
I probably don't need to tell anyone in this
room that technology moves faster than policy.
And so I want to spend the rest of this talk
talking about some ways that the policy has
not necessarily kept pace.
I'm going to start by talking about lab safety.
So Asilomar Conference, the place where they
said please do not mouth pipette your bacteria:
they put up this system of biosafety levels
and if you've ever worked in a biology lab
in Europe or North America, you have probably
known that you were working at BSL one, or
BSL two or BSL three if you're really fancy.
So these specified containment and safety
procedures, and the NIH in the US thought,
this is great.
We're gonna adopt this.
We're going to make following these safety
procedures a part of getting funding from
us.
This was a piece of regulation that worked
great when we had academic biology.
All of the biology that was being done was
dependent on NIH funding, and so it was this
effective enforcement of these biosafety regulations.
Now when you have commercial labs and community
labs, it doesn't work so well.
Well, sort of.
Most of the community labs I've been to, they
still follow these biosafety levels because
they were all trained in academia.
There's kind of these strong norms about biosafety
levels, but I want to emphasize that we're
dependent here on norms and heuristics.
Another place where there isn't really official
regulation is in-gene synthesis.
So nowadays you can order a semi-arbitrary
sequence of genes and get those, get those
synthesized for yourself.
And back in 2009, there was a publication
in Nature Biotechnology, going, maybe this
is not great, maybe someone's going to order
smallpox or something.
We should probably put locks on the DNA printers
and prevent them from printing dangerous sequences.
The gene synthesis companies were not stoked
about this.
And so they requested... they put out this
huge announcement.
They said we're going to start screening everything
against a database of known pathogens and
this kind of screening protocol grew in popularity.
They formed this international gene synthesis
consortium, 80 percent of gene synthesis capacity
uses their screening protocol and that's all
cool.
But you know, those synthesis companies have
said we are open to being regulated nationally.
We think this kind of screening should be
required by national regulation and right
now it is not.
So this is not reassuring, but you might be
thinking well at least these things are going
to get regulated if they're ever getting,
you know, getting released into the public
coming to market, and that is sort of true.
The US has this coordinated regulatory framework
for the regulation of biotechnology, made
it in 1986, and I sort of feel like if you
have to put coordinated in the name, maybe
it's hard to coordinate and depending on what
kind of biology product you are making, you
might be regulated by the NIH or the FDA or
the EPA or the USDA or some unholy combination
of all of those organizations.
And even with all of those organizations,
things can still fall through the cracks.
So I think the glowing plant is an interesting
example.
They crowdfunded in 2013 on Kickstarter, so
NIH funding is out, and they're also, I'm
going to try to quote a National Academy of
Sciences report here but I might get it wrong.
They're not a plant or animal, they are not
a novel plant pest or pesticide.
They're not producing a novel chemical and
they are not an inter-generic microorganism
in commerce, which means in short that they
were nobody's responsibility.
So how do we stay responsible?
How do we bring biosecurity to all of these
new places where biology is happening?
Well, this is the part where I say I'm doing
a lightning talk, so I'm skipping over a lot
and especially I'm skipping over a lot of
the international context, but I do want to
briefly touch on the bio weapons convention.
The BWC.
It's a big piece of international regulation.
It forms an important part of that story.
And what they've decided to do this year,
they're having a meeting of experts about
developments in science and technology and
their plan is to develop a code of conduct
for biologists.
So again, that's kind of regulating through
norms.
Here in the US, the FBI has a bioterrorism
countermeasures unit and in my experience,
what they do is they go to community biolabs
and introduce themselves, and I've had an
FBI agent who's sort of come up to me and
say, hey, you know, I'm your neighborhood
FBI agent, if you see anything that makes
you uncomfortable, here's my card, just give
me a call.
So it's kind of via relationships.
And then, another kind of norm setting thing
is this iGEM competition.
They're an international competition that
is basically trying to funnel all of the students
in the world who are interested in synthetic
biology through them, so that they can emphasize
safety and security and hopefully set norms
in this emerging field.
So we have norms, maybe... maybe not the best
way to do regulation.
I think norms are really important, but I
don't think they're adequate on their own,
especially because, you know, I've just scratched
the surface.
There's a lot more technology coming.
One example I want to give, last year the
Venter Lab published this digital to biological
converter.
And so this is something that takes the bio,
the DNA synthesis, the printer that I showed
you earlier, and it connects it to a bunch
of other hardware and so it can print not
only DNA but also RNA and various polymer
is even viruses.
And in a world in which you can email someone
some instructions and they can use a machine
like this to print out a virus, a lot of our
containment regulations about: put locks on
the door of your lab and make sure your freezers
are, you know, well tracked so no one can
sneak in and take a vial out of them, they're
no longer really meaningful.
And, that brings me to why I wanted to give
this talk, which is that I think it is very
difficult for people and especially regulators
to keep pace with all of the biotechnology
that is happening, and all the new places
where we are doing biology.
And I think it's really important to be aware,
and at least maybe now you folks are more
aware of some of these emerging technologies.
In the reports I read over and over again,
they say we need to do more horizon scanning
or we need to develop better risk assessment
protocols.
And to me that sounds like the kind of research
that effective altruists might be interested
in, maybe even some of you.
And I just want to end by talking about something
that kind of worries me, which is that over
and over again, the story I hear from people
is that they are waiting for something to
go wrong for some do it yourself biologist
to really hurt themselves, or for some DNA
synthesis company to miss a dangerous order
or some, some other thing that I won't even
speculate about.
And uh, let's not, let's not wait for something
to go wrong.
I really think that that life is better with
biology and that we can have a really cool
21st century of biology, but only if we keep
it safe.
Thanks.
