In the past, if you were a researcher who wanted to study a specific strand of DNA or RNA, you’d have to go through the laborious process of coaxing some bacteria to produce it for you in the lab.

Not anymore: These days, you can send your DNA or RNA order off to a synthetic biology lab that can print those genetic sequences for you. It’s an incredible technology that pairs well with other exciting new biological technologies. The just-released next generation of Google’s AlphaFold AI makes it possible to predict how many DNA sequences will fold into proteins — synthetic biology will let us actually build the proteins we’ve identified as promising.

It’s hard to overstate the potential of synthetic biology. Medical innovation is slow and grinding, but as it gets cheaper to manufacture sequences of interest, incredible new things become possible. Add in AI and you have the ability to make biology faster, more powerful, and more personalized.

But there’s one possibility that has many leading companies in the synthetic biology space nervous: that their technology’s awesome potential could be turned toward destructive ends.

After all, the power to print any DNA or RNA sequence you want could in theory be used to reintroduce a dangerous extinct virus like smallpox to the world (though luckily for us, pox viruses are hard to assemble) or to manufacture an entirely novel pandemic-causing virus.........

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