Breaking (Bad) News on the Uses of Biotech:

1. 1. 1. Thousands of vials of suspicious materials, some labeled as pathogenic bioagents, laboratory equipment, cold storage and refrigeration units were discovered in a private home in Reedley, California.
      2. European allies at the Munich Security Conference reported that epibatidine, a highly potent neurotoxin derived from non-indigenous poison dart frogs, was used to poison Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

These stories bring to light a disturbing convergence of biological risk vectors that extend well beyond the historical paradigms envisioned when the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) was established in 1972.  Although currently framed by the international community as a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the Navalny case raises fundamental questions about whether and how regnant international classification standards, treaties, and verification mechanisms can contend with the dual-use capacity of emerging biotechnologic tools and methods, including gene editing, synthetic biology, and the force multiplying effects of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) that enable creation, dissemination, and concealment of novel forms of existing agents, as well as those that are newly formulated.

The California case illustrates that biotechnology has progressed from capabilities in pathogen isolation and basic culture to advances in molecular design, sequence manipulation, and synthetic pathways that enable development of more viably weaponizable drugs, microbes and toxins. This underscores the clear and present need for a revised, robust, and operationally relevant iteration (and interpretation) of the BWC that explicitly addresses these emergent risks and threats.

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