Technology: Infectious Vaccine
Description: A synthetic virus that is asymptomatic and highly transmissible among humans and shares the same spike proteins as a pathogenic virus. This method would enable widespread immunity through natural transmission, without causing the disease symptoms associated with the pathogenic virus. I will refer to this idea as “infectious vaccines”, but it may need rebranded. Viruses naturally evolve to be less deadly over time, so my proposition is to engineer a shortcut.
Governance Goals: The ethics of developing a virus and releasing it into the public are quite questionable. Even if all data indicate that it would cause no harm, you would be never be able to get consent from everyone.
Ethics of development: Printing and assembly of synthetic viruses should not be carried out. I would advocate for research and in silica development in order to prepare for the worst but I think actual assembly and testing should not be done. Assembly and testing should be done perhaps when biotechnology evolves to point where we are certain of what the outcome would be, perhaps via in silica modeling.
Ethics of use: A technology like this should be reserved for use in civilization ending pandemic scenarios where time is of the essence. There is no other ethical use case.
Governance Actions:
Purpose: The goal of developing knowledge around how to design infectious vaccines is to have a functional tool as a last resort if a virus threatens humanity. As of now, mRNA vaccines seem to be the best we have. In essence infectious vaccines are a cheaper and faster way to distribute the mRNA vaccines. They would be exponentially distributed for almost free.
Governance action: Make a large monetary prize which would incentivize private companies to develop software for research, virtual development and virtual testing of infectious vaccines. For every dollar in the prize money you would get more than one dollar in research funded as companies would compete.
Assumptions: I am assuming that doing this research would actually improve humanities abilities to fight pandemics. It’s possible that it would simply illuminate a design and tool kit for bio-terrorism.
Governance Action: As the we know, synthesizing DNA and RNA is becoming ubiquitous and the price of doing so is going down. Given this fact, it appears to be a matter of time before the ability for bio-terrorists to make a deadly virus is trivial. That’s why I think it would make most sense to act immediately while there is still a moat. I propose that the monetary prize mentions above should be created sooner rather than later.
Unintended consequences of success: Its possible that in a case where this technology was used, we would be shooting ourselves in the foot because we would be using up our vectors for nucleic acid delivery (the same problem we have with re-dosing of gene therapies).
Governance Action: Assembly and release of a viral vaccine should meet unparalleled scrutiny. A vote should be held for people across the globe to vote on what conditions should be met for the use of an infectious vaccine.
Based on the scoring, implementing prize money immediately to incentivize private companies to develop software for research, virtual development and virtual testing of infectious vaccines is the best route. While the score for holding a global vote to define when this technology should be used is the highest, I don’t think it should be disregarded and a vote should be held regardless.
Professor Jacobson’s introductory remarks reminded me of how powerful synthetic biology is. In particular, when he mentioned that synthetic biology is the only platform other than silicon that is hierarchically composable and programmable. My ethical concerns lie in how this power should be managed.
I believe absolute power corrupts absolutely. Synthetic biology being kept in hands of a few is a foundation for a few bad people to be able to have unchecked power to do bad things. I think that the best way to ensure a stable, safe and prosperous future is to democratize and open source synthetic biology knowledge and tools. Humans are overwhelmingly good, and I think that synthetic biology will amplify this.
I think the way to do this is mostly to not have rules, not have regulations, and not have requirements for participation. There should be restrictions in place only for extreme edge cases like germ line editing, gene drives, or “infectious vaccines”.