The exercise was facilitated by the Centre for Existential Risk (CSER) and the BioRISC project, both based at the University of Cambridge. A group of 41 academics and figures from industry and government submitted 450 questions facing the UK government regarding biological security. These were then debated, voted on and ranked to define the 80 most urgent questions.
The questions were sorted into six categories: bioengineering; communication and behaviour; disease threats; governance and policy; invasive alien species, and securing biological materials and securing against misuse.
The line-up – published in PLOS ONE – includes questions around whether data from social media platforms should be used to help detect early signs of emerging pathogens; custom DNA synthesis; threats from “human-engineered agents”, and how to incorporate biosecurity into science education.
“In the year before the pandemic, the UK was ranked second in the world for global health...