Biosecurity

Biosecurity covers two overlapping problems: containing naturally occurring pathogens (pandemic preparedness, lab safety) and preventing deliberate misuse of biology as a weapon. The hard part is asymmetry — the tools for reading and writing DNA are cheap and widely distributed, while the defenses (surveillance networks, medical countermeasures, treaty verification) are slow and expensive. Gene synthesis, directed evolution, and AI-assisted protein design have all lowered the barrier to engineering novel agents, so the threat model has to account for actors who never handled a pathogen before. Detection and response lag behind capability by years.