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Modern science is a global enterprise and international research collaboration is a key feature of scientific and technological knowledge production. However, there is a growing concern that it faces challenges from those who seek to illegitimately acquire academic research and expertise or interfere with academic discourse. This has implications for national security, economic competitiveness and…
Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the life sciences have the potential to enable advances in biological discovery and design at a faster pace and efficiency than is possible with classical experimental approaches alone. At the same time, AI-enabled biological tools developed for beneficial applications could potentially be misused for harmful purposes. Although the creation of…
The fifth activity and status report of the Joint Committee on the Handling of Security-Relevant Research of the DFG and Leopoldina builds on its previous reports to present currently discussed security-relevant research areas and the framework conditions for security-relevant research in Germany. The report focuses on the assessment of the risks of international research cooperation…
The information brochure is dedicated to the most important questions about dealing with security-related research in Germany. It gives an initial insight into relevant subject areas, the importance and structure of the committes for ethics in security-related research and the legal framework and funding. It describes case studies and illustrates how ethical aspects of security-related research can be anchored…
China is investing a lot of money in research and is experiencing a rapid rise in global innovation indicators. It has a very well-trained and growing pool of talented researchers. At the same time, the political environment in China has become more authoritarian and the Chinese government is not only pushing for dominance in key…
The rapid adoption of persuasive technologies – any digital system that shapes users’ attitudes and behaviours by exploiting physiological and cognitive reactions or vulnerabilities – will challenge national security in ways that are difficult to predict. Emerging persuasive technologies such as generative artificial intelligence (AI), ambient technologies and neurotechnology interact with the human mind and…
Quantum technologies offer great potential for national defence, for example through improved data collection and secure communication. However, they also harbour significant ethical risks such as threats to privacy and security. The article presents six principles for the responsible development of quantum technologies in the defence sector, with a focus on multilateral cooperation, information security…
This article addresses the question of how the responsibilities for addressing the risks of dual use research ought to be divided. We begin by presenting the maximalist claim that proposes that since scientists are well placed to judge the potential for misuse of their studies, they alone are responsible for addressing these risks. Before assessing…
Although misinformation exposure takes place within a social context, significant conclusions have been drawn about misinformation susceptibility through studies that largely examine judgements in a social vacuum. Bridging the gap between social influence research and the cognitive science of misinformation, we examine the mechanisms through which social context impacts misinformation susceptibility across 5 experiments (N = 20,477). We find…
Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) has been well analyzed regarding the life sciences. This article explores the topic of younger fields of medical research and their potential for misuse, especially in the military context. The areas of research considered are artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, and neuroenhancement. Each of these areas have brought forward highly promising…
The World Health Organization (WHO) Global Guidance Framework for the Responsible Use of the Life Sciences addresses the governance of biorisks, including dual-use research, for countries. It emphasizes engaging multisectoral stakeholders such as governments, scientific bodies, health and research institutes, standard-setting organizations, funding bodies, and others. Ethics constitutes a key component of the framework. Given…
In medicine (as in other disciplines), the importance of IT expertise is generally growing. This in itself requires a culture of interdisciplinary assessment, for which medical ethics committees are not well equipped. The use of big data and AI methods (whether developed in-house or in the form of ‘tools’) poses further challenges for research ethics…
When does scientific work become ‘security-relevant’ research of concern? How can scientific findings be prevented from being misused and causing harm? The DFG and Leopoldina provide recommendations on how to deal with security-relevant research.
Rapid scientific and technological advances are fueling a 21st-century biotechnology revolution. Accelerating developments in the life sciences and in technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), automation, and robotics are enhancing scientists’ abilities to engineer living systems for a broad range of purposes. These groundbreaking advances are critical to building a more productive, sustainable, and healthy…
The diverse possibilities of modern IT systems bring with them pressing ethical problems. In addition to the obvious question of the morally acceptable use of information technologies, the aspects of designing, manufacturing and operating them are also crucial. The contributions deal with the potential for conflict between technology and ethics by presenting real-life case studies…
The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to study science communication and, in particular, the transmission of consensus. In this study, we show how “science communicators,” writ large to include both mainstream science journalists and practiced conspiracy theorists, transform scientific evidence into two dueling consensuses using the effectiveness of masks as a case study. We…
Ethical and social aspects of software projects are hardly considered in current computer science education. While it is now well known that successful projects require interdisciplinary teams of software developers, designers and experts from the application domain, the teams are rarely supplemented by disciplines from the humanities spectrum. In this article, concrete proposals are made…
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are bidirectional systems that interact with the brain, allowing neuronal stimulation as well as the acquisition of neural data. Being invasive interfaces extensively used in medical therapy, BCIs can be classified according to their invasiveness level. In this sense and as an example, invasive BCIs focused on neural recording have been used…
Global research collaboration in scientific and engineering fields has been critical to advancing the frontiers of knowledge, promoting economic prosper ity, and solving global challenges. The global research enterprise is, by design, largely open and unrestricted. However, new risks and challenges threaten this open collaboration, particularly regarding authoritarian nations like the People’s Republic of China…
The study provides an overview and comparative analysis of nine national approaches to strengthening knowledge security and the forces that drive them. The national approaches are those of Australia, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States. They all have developed different approaches, depending on the national political context,…
Aspects of security-relevant research and related ethical issues are increasingly coming into focus, among other things due to advances in research on artificial intelligence and pandemic pathogens, as well as scientific entanglements with states in which human rights violations and other violations of rule-of-law principles are observed. This is reflected in the fourth Progress Report…
Challenge-based learning (CBL) for engineering ethics tasks students with identifying ethical challenges in cooperation with an external partner, e.g., a technology company. As many best-practice parameters of such courses remain unclear, this contribution focuses on a teacher-centric introduction into deploying CBL for engineering ethics. Taking Goodlad’s curriculum typology as a point of departure, we discuss…
We aim to debate and eventually be able to carefully judge how realistic the following statement of a young computer scientist is: “I would like to become an ethical correctly acting offensive cybersecurity expert”. The objective of this article is not to judge what is good and what is wrong behavior nor to present an…
A host of companies provide a remote, automated workforce for conducting experiments around the clock.
Special Issue on Robots in the Wild. Robots have been successfully deployed in a wide range of domains – including land, sea, air, and space – for a variety of applications such as search and rescue, oceanography, wildlife surveys, and space exploration. In this issue, Zhou et al. have developed a trajectory planner for swarms of micro drones…
An international security conference explored how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for drug discovery could be misused for de novo design of biochemical weapons. A thought experiment evolved into a computational proof.
An international security conference explored how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for drug discovery could be misused for de novo design of biochemical weapons. A thought experiment evolved into a computational proof.
This paper identifies a new existential risk factor that has not been recognised in prior literature: Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). We illustrate how BCI technology could significantly raise the existential risk from global totalitarianism in the near future. In particular this is achieved not just by expansion of surveillance, but the expansion of brain stimulation. At…
Since the first reports of a novel severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)-like coronavirus in December 2019 in Wuhan, China, there has been intense interest in understanding how severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) emerged in the human population. Recent debate has coalesced around two competing ideas: a “laboratory escape” scenario and zoonotic emergence. Here,…
The way electorates were influenced to vote for the Brexit referendum, and in presidential elections both in Brazil and the USA, has accelerated a debate about whether and how machine learning techniques can influence citizens’ decisions. The access to balanced information is endangered if digital political manipulation can influence voters. The techniques of profiling and…
Although acts of cybercrime and cyberwar are different, the lines between the two have been become blurred over time. The nature of cyberspace has complicated the pre-existing doctrine for armed attacks, yet they are still being applied. Furthermore, the United States historically has responded to malicious cyber activity through a militarized lens. This tendency to…
Gene drives hold promise for use in controlling insect vectors of diseases, agricultural pests, and for conservation of ecosystems against invasive species. At the same time, this technology comes with potential risks that include unknown downstream effects on entire ecosystems as well as the accidental or nefarious spread of organisms that carry the gene drive…
Anecdotal evidence asserts that extremist materials on the internet play a decisive role in radicalization processes. However, due to a structural absence of empirical data in the current literature, it remains uncertain if—and to what extent—online extremist materials radicalize. Therefore, the approach of the current study was two-fold. First, we explored what types of online…
Strategies for Foundations, Universities, Civil Society Organizations, and Think Tanks.
Reverse genetics has been an indispensable tool to gain insights into viral pathogenesis and vaccine development. The genomes of large RNA viruses, such as those from coronaviruses, are cumbersome to clone and manipulate in Escherichia coli owing to the size and occasional instability of the genome. Therefore, an alternative rapid and robust reverse-genetics platform for…
Ethical issues concerning brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) have already received a considerable amount of attention. However, one particular form of BCI has not received the attention that it deserves: Affective BCIs that allow for the detection and stimulation of affective states. This paper brings the ethical issues of affective BCIs in sharper focus. The paper briefly…
Informed by social media data collected following four terror attacks in the UK in 2017, this article delineates a series of “techniques of disinformation” used by different actors to try and influence how the events were publicly defined and understood. By studying the causes and consequences of misleading information following terror attacks, the article contributes…
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is building links between China’s civilian universities, military and security agencies. Those efforts, carried out under a policy of leveraging the civilian sector to maximise military power (known as ‘military–civil fusion’), have accelerated in the past decade. Research for the China Defence Universities Tracker has determined that greater numbers of…
The scientific freedom protected by the German Basic Law is a prerequisite for the progress and prosperity of society. However, free research is also associated with risks resulting from the fact that useful research results and methods can be abused, for example as weapons of war or as a means of criminal or terrorist activities. According…
Continuing advances in science and technology offer the promise of providing tools to meet global challenges in health, agriculture, the environment, and economic development; some of the benefits are already being realized. However, such advances have the potential to challenge the oversight systems for responsible conduct of life sciences research with dual use potential –…
China’s People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) collaboration with foreign universities is growing and the expansion of international ties remains one of the priorities of the PLA National University of Defense Technology (NUDT). The developments outlined in this report warrant more attention and different approaches from those currently employed by most governments and universities. Responses to PLA…
Agricultural genetic technologies typically achieve their agronomic aims by introducing laboratory-generated modifications into target species’ chromosomes. However, the speed and flexibility of this approach are limited, because modified chromosomes must be vertically inherited from one generation to the next. In an effort to remove this limitation, an ongoing research program funded by the U.S. Defense…
Scientific advances over the past several decades have accelerated the ability to engineer existing organisms and to potentially create novel ones not found in nature. Synthetic biology, which collectively refers to concepts, approaches, and tools that enable the modification or creation of biological organisms, is being pursued overwhelmingly for beneficial purposes ranging from reducing the…
Advances in AI, robotics and so-called ‘autonomous’ technologies¹ have ushered in a range of increasingly urgent and complex moral questions. Current efforts to find answers to the ethical, societal and legal challenges that they pose and to orient them for the common good represent a patchwork of disparate initiatives. This underlines the need for a…
Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities are growing at an unprecedented rate. These technologies have many widely beneficial applications, ranging from machine translation to medical image analysis. Countless more such applications are being developed and can be expected over the long term. Less attention has historically been paid to the ways in which artificial intelligence…
We show that faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived or interpreted by the human brain. We used deep neural networks to extract features from 35,326 facial images. These features were entered into a logistic regression aimed at classifying sexual orientation. Given a single facial image, a classifier could correctly…
Edward Jenner and his contemporaries believed that his variolae vaccinae originated in horses and molecular analyses show that modern vaccinia virus (VACV) strains share common ancestry with horsepox virus (HPXV). Given concerns relating to the toxicity of modern VACV vaccines, we asked whether an HPXV-based vaccine might provide a superior alternative. Since HPXV may be…
Artificial intelligence and brain–computer interfaces must respect and preserve people’s privacy, identity, agency and equality, say Rafael Yuste, Sara Goering and colleagues.
Manufacturing processes for biological molecules in the research laboratory have failed to keep pace with the rapid advances in automization and parellelization. We report the development of a digital-to-biological converter for fully automated, versatile and demand-based production of functional biologics starting from DNA sequence information. Specifically, DNA templates, RNA molecules, proteins and viral particles were…
The potential misuse of advances in life sciences research is raising concerns about national security threats. “Dual Use Research of Concern in the Life Sciences: Current Issues and Controversies” examines the U.S. strategy for reducing biosecurity risks in life sciences research and considers mechanisms that would allow researchers to manage the dissemination of the results…
Long-standing efforts to develop a commercially viable laser-based process for uranium enrichment, initially with atomic and later molecular isotope separation, have had limited success. This article discusses a model for a third generation of laser enrichment technology where CO2 laser light is Raman scattered to generate 16 μm photons that excite a vibrational mode in…
An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus — one related to the virus that causes SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) — has triggered renewed debate over whether engineering lab variants of viruses with possible pandemic potential is worth the risks.
The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)-CoV underscores the threat of cross-species transmission events leading to outbreaks in humans. Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations1. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system2, we generated…
Some research results obtained in the life sciences can be used not only for the benefit of individuals and society as a whole, but also misused with intent to cause harm. Research such as this is referred to as Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC). To counteract such misuse proactively the German Ethics Council advocates…
Canine distemper virus (CDV), a close relative of measles virus (MV), is widespread and well known for its broad host range. When the goal of measles eradication may be achieved, and when measles vaccination will be stopped, CDV might eventually cross the species barrier to humans and emerge as a new human pathogen. In order…
Highly pathogenic avian influenza A/H5N1 virus can cause morbidity and mortality in humans but thus far has not acquired the ability to be transmitted by aerosol or respiratory droplet (“airborne transmission”) between humans. To address the concern that the virus could acquire this ability under natural conditions, we genetically modified A/H5N1 virus by site-directed mutagenesis…
Highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza A viruses occasionally infect humans, but currently do not transmit efficiently among humans. The viral haemagglutinin (HA) protein is a known host-range determinant as it mediates virus binding to host-specific cellular receptors. Here we assess the molecular changes in HA that would allow a virus possessing subtype H5 HA to…
The safe preparation and characterization (XRD, NMR and vibrational spectroscopy, DSC, mass spectrometry, sensitivities) of a new explosive dihydroxylammonium 5,5′-bistetrazole-1,1′-diolate (TKX-50) that outperforms all other commonly used explosive materials is detailed. While much publicized high-performing explosives, such as octanitrocubane and CL-20, have been at the forefront of public awareness, this compound differs in that it…
Brain computer interfaces (BCI) are becoming increasingly popular in the gaming and entertainment industries. Consumer-grade BCI devices are available for a few hundred dollars and are used in a variety of applications, such as video games, hands-free keyboards, or as an assistant in relaxation training. There are application stores similar to the ones used for…
This volume deals with ‘case studies in ethics from science, business, technology and society’. Despite the different areas and diverse topics, there is one thing in common: ethical questions are meaningful and possible in all examples.
The article argues that the scientific community must reflectively engage with scientific and research ethics. In addition to institutionalised rules and routine practices in the disciplines, this requires the earliest possible appropriation of the topic by students in the sense of a ‘key competence’. However, systematic integration as a training content is not recognisable for…
The Challenges and Opportunities for Education About Dual Use Issues in the Life Sciences workshop was held to engage the life sciences community on the particular security issues related to research with dual use potential. More than 60 participants from almost 30 countries took part and included practicing life scientists, bioethics and biosecurity practitioners, and…
In the past decade, the perception of a bioterrorist threat has increased and created a demand on life scientists to consider the potential security implications of dual use research. This article examines a selection of proposed moral obligations for life scientists that have emerged to meet these concerns and the extent to which they can…
The pandemic influenza virus of 1918–1919 killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people worldwide. With the recent availability of the complete 1918 influenza virus coding sequence, we used reverse genetics to generate an influenza virus bearing all eight gene segments of the pandemic virus to study the properties associated with its extraordinary virulence. In…
Full-length poliovirus complementary DNA (cDNA) was synthesized by assembling oligonucleotides of plus and minus strand polarity. The synthetic poliovirus cDNA was transcribed by RNA polymerase into viral RNA, which translated and replicated in a cell-free extract, resulting in the de novo synthesis of infectious poliovirus. Experiments in tissue culture using neutralizing antibodies and CD155 receptor–specific…