American scientists just proved AI capable of bioengineering contagious diseases. How is that a good thing?
This summer researchers at Stanford and the Arc Institute showed how AI trained on data from existing viral genomes can come up with entirely new viruses.
If that doesn’t trouble you at least a little, you may be an AI bot yourself.
Two ethics professors who weren’t involved in the project discuss its moral and ethical implications in an Aug. 25 interview with their own institution, Georgetown University.
The Stanford–Arc Institute experiment is “significant in scale, novelty and potential application,” jointly remark Jesuit Father Myles Sheehan, MD, and Laura DeNardis, PhD. “The highest significance lies in the dual-use application potential of this technology, good and bad.”
These new viruses, the ethicists add, have “therapeutic potential in their ability to target and kill bacteria—potentially bringing new treatments to deal with infections caused by drug-resistant bacteria—while at the same time raising security concerns regarding the potential to develop bioweapons.”
Here are three more takeaways from their responses to questions from Georgetown’s news team.
1. The principles of digital ethics and biomedical ethics are as much about beneficence—helping humanity—as they are about non-maleficence—avoiding harm.
Precision medicine that targets specific bacteria and potentially addresses currently untreatable diseases “would be the very definition of beneficence,” Sheehan and DeNardis state.
2. The fear is that the new advancement could be used to create biological weapons.
The scientists behind the Stanford-Arc Institute study “took pains to ensure that the viruses they generated did not have the potential to infect eukaryotic cells—cells with nuclei like you find in animals and plants,” Sheehan and DeNardis note.
“But one could imagine bad actors using this technology to produce viruses that could be lethal and to which we would lack resistance, as well as modifying some viruses we already know are dangerous and increasing their virulence and pathogenic potential.”
3. The popular warning not to do something just because you can may well apply here.
It underscores the importance of thinking through potential consequences, Sheehan and DeNardis point out.
“If you review the article in Science describing this work, there was considerable ethical sensitivity and care taken,” they point out. “But it remains that the genie is out of the bottle and some other scientists could use this either sloppily, with bad consequences, or with deliberate intent to create a bioweapon.”
“It is also the case,” Sheehan and DeNardis add, “that other technologies, like recombinant DNA and CRISPR, also pose threats and risks that we have already worked to consider and limit.” (Feel better now?)
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.