With the advance of biotechnology, biological information, rather than biological materials, is increasingly the object of principal security concern. We argue that both in theory and in practice, existing security approaches in biology are poorly suited to manage hazardous biological information, and use the cases of Mousepox, H5N1 gain of function, and Botulinum toxin H to highlight these ongoing challenges. We suggest that mitigation of these hazards can be improved if one can: (1) anticipate hazard potential before scientific work is performed; (2) consider how much the new information would likely help both good and bad actors; and (3) aim to disclose information in the manner that maximally disadvantages bad actors versus good ones.

Biology can be misused, and the risk of this causing widespread harm increases in step with the rapid march of technological progress. A key security challenge involves attribution: determining, in the wake of a human-caused biological event, who was responsible. Recent scientific developments have demonstrated a capability for detecting whether an organism involved in such an event has been genetically modified and, if modified, to infer from its genetic sequence its likely lab of origin. We believe this technique could be developed into powerful forensic tools to aid the attribution of outbreaks caused by genetically engineered pathogens, and thus protect against the potential misuse of synthetic biology.

Personnel assessment applications of event related brain potentials (ERP) require temporal stability. Visual, auditory and bimodal ERP records were obtained about two hours apart for a group of young adult males. Similar records were obtained from a group of older adults about two months apart. No ERP amplitude or temporal stability differences were found between the two groups. Age was positively correlated with visual stability measures and negatively correlated with auditory stability measures. No correlation of age with bimodal stability measures was found. Large individual subject differences were found for the ERP analog waveform and temporal stability. The ERPs were highly stable within subjects from session to session, whether recorded hours or months apart. Greatest stability was obtained for bimodal presentation, less for visual and least for the auditory records. Differences in patterns of waveform stability were found for site and modality conditions across individuals.

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