Part 1. The ecosystem is the enterprise
We live in a society increasingly reliant upon the fruits of nature. We consume those fruits directly, and we cultivate them as feedstocks for fuel, industrial materials, and the threads on our backs. As a measure of our dependence, revenues in the bioeconomy are rising rapidly, demonstrating a demand for biological products that is growing much faster than the global economy as a whole.
This demand represents an enormous market pull on technology development, commercialization, and, ultimately, natural resources that serve as feedstocks for biological production. Consequently, we must assess carefully the health and longevity of those resources. Unfortunately, it is becoming ever clearer that the natural systems serving to supply our demand are under severe stress. We have been assaulting nature for centuries, with the heaviest blows delivered most recently. Nature, in the most encompassing sense of the word, has been astonishingly resilient in the face of this assault. But the accumulated damage has cracked multiple holes in ecosystems around the globe. There are very clear economic costs to this damage -- costs that compound over time -- and the cumulative damage now poses a threat to the availability of the water, farmland, and organisms we rely on to feed ourselves and our economy.
I would like to clarify that I am not predicting collapse, nor that we will run out of resources; rather, I expect new technologies to continue increasing productivity and improving the human condition. Successfully developing and deploying those technologies will, obviously, further increase our economic dependency on nature. As part of that growing dependency, businesses that participate in the bioeconomy must understand and ensure the security of feedstocks, transportation links, and end use, often at a global scale. Consequently, it behooves us to thoroughly evaluate any vulnerabilities we are building into the system so that we can begin to prepare for inevitable contingencies.
Revisiting the definition of biosecurity: from national security to natural security, and beyond
Last year John Mecklin at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists asked me to consider the security implications of the emerging conversation (or, perhaps, collision) between synthetic biology and conservation biology. This conversation started at a meeting last April at the University of Cambridge, and is summarized in a recent article in Oryx. What I came up with for BAS was an essay that cast very broadly the need to understand threats to all of the natural systems we depend on. Quantifying the economic benefit of those systems, and the risk inherent in our dependence upon them, led me directly to the concept of natural security.
Here I want to take a stab at expanding the conversation further. Rapidly rising revenues in the bioeconomy, and the rapidly expanding scope of application, must critically inform an evolving definition of biosecurity. In other words, because economic demand is driving technology proliferation, we must continually refine our understanding of what it is that we must secure and from where threats may arise.
Biosecurity has typically been interpreted as the physical security of individuals, institutions, and the food supply in the context of threats such as toxins and pathogens. These will, of course, continue to be important concerns: new influenza strains constantly emerge to cause human and animal health concerns; the (re?)emergent PEDS virus has killed an astonishing 10% of U.S. pigs this year alone; within the last few weeks there has been an alarming uptick in the number of human cases and deaths caused by MERS. Beyond these natural threats are pathogens created by state and non-state organizations, sometimes in the name of science and preparation for outbreaks, while sometimes escaping containment to cause harm. Yet, however important these events are, they are but pieces of a biosecurity puzzle that is becoming ever more complex.
Due to the large and growing contribution of the bioeconomy, no longer are governments concerned merely with the proverbial white powder produced in a state-sponsored lab, or even in a 'cave' in Afghanistan. Because economic security is now generally included in the definition of national security, the security of crops, drug production facilities, and industrial biotech will constitute an ever more important concern. Moreover, in the U.S., as made clear by the National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats(PDF), the government has established that encouraging the development and use of biological technologies in unconventional environments (i.e., "garages and basements") is central to national security. Consequently, the concept of biosecurity must comprise the entire value chain from academics and garage innovators, through production and use, to, more traditionally, the health of crops, farmanimals, and humans. We must endeavor to understand, and to buttress, fragility at every link in this chain.
Beyond the security of specific links in the bioeconomy value chain we must examine the explicit and implicit connections between them, because through our behavior we connect them. We transport organisms around the world; we actively breed plants, animals, and microbes; we create new objects with flaws; we emit waste into the world. It's really not that complicated. However, we often choose to ignore these connections because acknowledging them would require us to respect them, and consequently to behave differently. But that change in behavior must be the future of biosecurity.
From an enterprise perspective, as we rely ever more heavily on biology in our economy, so must we comprehensively define 'biosecurity' to adequately encompass relevant systems. Vulnerabilities in those systems may be introduced intentionally or accidentally. An accidental vulnerability may lie undiscovered for years, as in the case of the recently disclosed Heartbleed hole in the OpenSSL internet security protocol, until it is identified, when it becomes a threat. The risk, even in open source software, is that the vulnerability may be identified by organizations which then exploit it before it becomes widely known. This is reported to be true of the NSA's understanding and exploitation of Heartbleed at least two years in advance of its recent public announcement. Our biosecurity challenge is to carefully, and constantly, assess how the world is changing and address shortcomings as we find them. It will be a transition every bit as painful as the one we are now experiencing for hardware and software security
(Here is Part 2.)