CISAC's William J. Perry created a free, public 10-week course for people to learn more about the looming dangers of nuclear catastrophe. His new MOOC, developed with the support of Stanford’s Office of the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, offers a chance to take that message to a much larger audience.

Living at the Nuclear Brink: Yesterday and Today is an online course (a "MOOC") taught by former Defense Secretary William J. Perry and a team of international experts. 

“I believe that the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophe is greater today than it was during the cold war,” said Perry, who recently wrote a New York Times op-ed on why America should dismantle its ICBM missile systems.

Because the continued risk of nuclear catastrophe isn’t widely recognized, Perry believes, “our nuclear policies don’t reflect the danger. So I’ve set off on a mission to educate people on how serious the problem is. Only then can we develop the policies that are appropriate for the danger we face.” 

The course offers participants the chance to ask questions and participate in discussions via an online forum, which Perry and his fellow experts will address during weekly video chats. Each week, Perry will be joined in conversation by top thinkers, including CISAC's Martha Crenshaw, David Holloway and Siegfried Hecker, Scott D. Sagan, and Philip Taubman. George Shultz, the former secretary of state, will also participate. Outside experts include Ploughshares Fund president Joseph Cirincione, nuclear negotiator James Goodby, former Russian Deputy Minister of Defense Andre Kokoshin, and Joseph Martz of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Learn more about "Living at the Nuclear Brink" in this story or watch a video. Register for the course here. It is now open for enrollment and begins Oct. 4.  

The CISAC lecture series, "Security Matters," surveyed the most pressing security issues facing the world today. Topics include cybersecurity, nuclear proliferation, insurgency and intervention, terrorism, biosecurity, lessons learned from the Cold War and Cuban Missile Crisis – as well as the future of U.S. leadership in the world.

The lectures come almost entirely from the 2014 winter term of International Security (PS114S), co-taught by intelligence expert and CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart and terrorism authority Martha Crenshaw co-taught the Security Matters class in 2015. (Zegart recently co-wrote a journal paper on why the U.S. might adjust its national security approach in light of a changing international order.)

“This series is the first in what we hope will be a continuing experiment of new modes and methods to enhance our education mission,” said Zegart. “We have two goals in mind: The first is to expand CISAC's reach in educating the world about international security issues. The second is to innovate inside our Stanford classrooms.”

Martin Hellman is not your average cryptography pioneer.

Hellman, who is known for his invention of public key cryptography (along with Whitfield Duffie and Ralph Merkle), has a life’s journey to share in story form, one that weaves together the most complex global flashpoints of our age with the deeply personal of any age. He and his wife’s new book, A New Map for Relationships: Creating True Love at Home and Peace on the Planet, spans far and wide, covering nuclear risks in North Korea, Iran, and America’s Middle Eastern wars.

But that is not all. He and his wife Dorothie Hellman open up about their marital struggles to show how they eventually reached a point of harmony and true love for each other. As Martin Hellman sees it, conflict in the international and interpersonal arenas has much in common.

“You can’t separate nuclear war from conventional war and conventional war from personal war,” he said in an interview. Hellman is a professor emeritus of electrical engineering and faculty affiliate at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.  

Just as he and Dorothie (self-acknowledged polar opposites) often butted heads during the first 10 or 15 years of marriage, nations too navigate dangerously outmoded “maps” to protect their national security and interests. Yet these “maps” are soon outdated, whether on the global stage or in the home. Hellman said, however, that differences of opinion, which revolve around fights to prove who is “right,” could instead be transformed into opportunities to learn from one another – and to expand peace in the world.

“You have to believe in the seemingly impossible gifts of unconditional love and greater peace in the world, and then dedicate yourself to discovering how to achieve them,” he said.

Cultivating inner, outer peace

He said that society only truly changes based on individual changes, so he calls for action in how people live their everyday lives. When countries fail to respect each other – and ignore the influence of history on those countries – then conflict is more likely, and it is similar to a person disrespecting another.

“You will see an immediate payoff as your relationships flower,” he wrote in the book. “The small impact that each of us can have on changing the world does not feel concrete enough to most people, but seeing progress in your personal relationships is very concrete.”

That dedication to unconditional love, he said, is the way that individuals can become models for what is needed globally.

And the time is now, he suggests, for such change if our living generations are to leave a more peaceful world for those who follow us. From Afghanistan to Cuba, Russia, Iraq to North Korea and beyond, the countries of the world need a journey of healing and reconciliation, as he writes in the book.

Today, the stakes could not be higher, Hellman noted. Long-running strategies like nuclear deterrence are risky and illogical – over time, given probability theory and the chances of mistake or malice, they won’t work.

“The United States thinks it’s a superpower, but how can we be when Russia or China could destroy us in less than a hour?” he said. “How is that being a superpower?”

As William J. Perry, the former U.S. Secretary of Defense and Stanford professor emeritus at CISAC, said on behalf of the Hellmans’ book, “The struggle for interpersonal dominance can lead to the end of a marriage, but the struggle for geopolitical dominance can lead to the end of civilization.”

The back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle has become the Achilles Heel of nuclear power, as CISAC’s Rodney Ewing writes in this new article. After more than 50 years of effort, no operating nuclear waste repositories exist in the U.S. for the spent nuclear fuel from commercial nuclear power plants – or for the high-level waste from the reprocessing of spent fuel. It is time to compare and evaluate the different strategies for nuclear disposal. Read more.

With each passing day, computer hacking against countries, organizations and people is forcing the subject of cybersecurity to the top of national security agendas.

An estimated 42.8 million cyber attacks will take place this year, according to experts. Scaling up to meet this challenge is why more than 140 people from science, politics, business and the military attended the fourth annual Cyber Security Summit at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) on Sept. 19-20.

The Munich Security Conference and Deutsche Telekom sponsored the event. CISAC is in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. Participants delved deep into issues associated with today’s online world, including how to balance privacy and civil liberties with the need for intelligence, for example. Discussions ranged on questions such as:

• What will the future of warfare look like – human soldiers or killer robots?

• How do we ensure that technological progress does not escape human control?

• What are the biggest challenges combatting the online activities of groups like the Islamic State?

• What are the possible cyberspace conflicts between the U.S., Russia and China?

• Are countries ready for cyber attacks against key infrastructure such as energy, water and utilities, or the U.S. election system, for example?

Electoral impact

In a talk on cyber attacks and the U.S. elections, panelists discussed how such electoral manipulation in the ongoing presidential campaign might happen, and what could be done about it. While it was noted that foreign adversaries could undermine the American public’s confidence in its election system, one expert pointed out that it’s unlikely to occur undetected on a widespread basis.

Credibility is now the battlefield, one panelist said. If hacking occurs, how will an election be validated? The track record shows that Russian has attempted to influence elections in Eastern Europe, so hacking into U.S. political entities is their way to sow doubt among voters.

The economic costs of cyber attacks – $400 to $500 billion a year was one participant’s estimate – and “cyberspace norms” were other issues explored. Countries and companies are grappling with the losses associated with these incursions, and with how – and who – should set the rules for the “digital game.”

On encryption, questions in one discussion revolved around how the public and private sectors can resolve such issues, how far data privacy could be compromised for effective intelligence work, and vice versa.

Online jihadism was another subject. The conference panelists talked about which tools are most effective in countering jihadist propaganda and recruitment on the Internet. Also, the need for Europe and the U.S. to work together on such fronts was mentioned.

CISAC and FSI participants included Amy Zegart, co-director of CISAC and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution; Martin Hellman, professor emeritus of electrical engineering; among others. Other attendees hailed from U.S. and European Union agencies and businesses, and local Silicon Valley companies.

Zegart said a collaborative spirit and drive for innovation characterizes Stanford. “In the past three years, we have built an exciting program dedicated to educating current and future cyber leaders, producing policy-driven knowledge, and convening leaders across sectors and borders,” she wrote in the program guide.

McFaul, in his opening statement, noted the origins of CISAC – it was created when there was a different technological concern – nuclear materials. Then, scientists and social scientists at CISAC got together to work on nuclear proliferation. Today, the threat is cyber attacks, and CISAC is confronting this challenge. He said the scariest briefing he had in his ambassador position at the U.S. Department of State was on cybersecurity.

For his discussion on terrorism, Hellman brought pages of pro-encryption quotes from government officials. He suggested end-to-end encryption was good for Americans.

Crossing borders

The Munich Security Conference is considered to be the most important informal meeting on security policy. Outside speakers included Michael Cherthoff, former secretary of Homeland Security; Jane Holl Lute, the under secretary general for the United Nations; and Christopher Painter, coordinator for cyber issues at the U.S. Department of State.

Wolfgang Ischinger, the chair of the Munich Security Conference, said at the press conference that, “cybersecurity has over the last few years evolved to be one of the most indispensable agenda items.”

The “quest for rules” in cyberspace, he noted, is overwhelmingly difficult and vitally important.

Thomas Kremer, board member for co-sponsor Deutsche Telekom AG, said, “cyber attacks don’t accept national borders.” Cybersecurity has become a global issue, he explained, with ramifications for countries, companies and everyday people.

He added, “Our chances to fight cyber crime are far better when we collaborate.”

Stanford and CISAC are at the forefront of the national discussion on cybersecurity. The university launched the Stanford Cyber Initiative; hosted President Obama’s cybersecurity summit and defense secretary Ashton Carter’s unveiling of a new U.S. cyber strategy; and CISAC and the Hoover Institution have teamed up in recent years for media roundtables and Congressional bootcamps on cybersecurity.

Finally, CISAC senior research scholar Joe Felter and other experts held Hacking for Defense & Diplomacy class for educators and sponsors on Sept. 7-9. (See the final class presentations here). In spring 2016, they held the first such class to train students in cybersecurity for defense purposes. Steve Blank, a consulting associate professor in the Stanford School of Engineering’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, helped develop the class. This fall, they will prototype a Hacking for Diplomacy course at Stanford.

Click here for the Munich Security Conference’s agenda for this event and a list of participants. 

The international order is unraveling, according to a Stanford scholar. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has generally served as the top leader in this world order. But now the power equation is shifting, and the U.S. may see more countries challenging global rules and norms.

Three key factors threaten the distribution of power and authority among nations, said political scientist Amy Zegart, co-director of Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. But, she said, America can take a “pragmatic” approach to protecting its national interests.

The rise of China, more dangerous non-state actors than ever before and the weakening of international institutions are converging to create greater global instability, Zegart said.

Zegart co-wrote a journal article with Stanford political scientist Stephen Krasner about the benefits of a “pragmatic engagement” approach for the U.S. They also co-chaired a Hoover Institution working group on foreign policy and grand strategy to examine these issues.

If China continues to grow economically at its current rate, it will displace the U.S. as the country with the most material resources in the world, a position the latter has held for more than a century, Zegart said. Such a scenario comes with risks.

“It would mark the first time a great power would be a developing nation,” she said. “This has profound implications for the international order.”

For example, will China become a responsible stakeholder within the existing rules of the global order, Zegart said, or will it challenge that order?

“The record so far is decidedly mixed,” she said, noting that even if China wants to uphold the international economic and political order, it’s not clear that it can, based on its domestic political situation.

Challenges to power

On terrorism, technology has given weak states, non-state actors and even lone individuals the ability to wage cyberattacks, biological attacks and – potentially – nuclear attacks, according to Zegart.

“In this world, uncertainty abounds,” she said. In such an environment, people and even nations tend to retreat and not engage outside their spheres. “That’s part of the reason why in a recent survey, more than half of all Americans said they felt less safe today than they did on 9/11.”

Finally, international institutions such as the United Nations Security Council, the International Monetary Fund and the European Union are “misaligned with power realities,” as Zegart describes it.

“Institutions freeze into place the power relationships that exist at the time of their creation. They struggle to adapt to change. We see this at the domestic level, too. The U.S. government is built around a 1947 national security architecture that has a hard time adapting to 21st-century challenges, from cyberthreats to homeland security,” she said.

In the short term, Zegart said, the world is likely to see more contests for influence and more actors challenging what the United States will do. When the U.S. is not the guarantor of this order, the dynamic invites boundary testing.

“We see this with Iran’s missile testing, even after the Iran deal. We see it with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and hacking into the Democratic National Committee’s computers. We see it with China’s aggressive maneuvers in the South China Sea. We see it with North Korea’s escalation in the frequency of its nuclear and missile tests,” Zegart said.

Boundary testing is not healthy for international relations – it raises the odds of crisis escalation. “Meanwhile, leaders are so busy managing the crisis du jour that seeing emerging dangers becomes much more difficult,” Zegart said.

To address the challenges, U.S. national security policymakers should “return to the basics and ask what our objectives are in a more chaotic world and what strategies we think will best achieve them, and then deploy resources to meet those objectives,” Zegart said.

Guiding principles

The working group that she and Krasner co-chaired advocated three guiding principles for U.S. national security strategy.

“First, we have to be unapologetic about the pursuit of American economic and security interests, and more tempered in the pursuit of our ideals. We have always as a nation stood for universal freedoms but we have pursued those freedoms abroad in different ways, to different degrees, in different times as the external environment demanded and internal capabilities allowed,” she said.

Zegart said the U.S. should lead by democratic example, not democratic imposition.

“The most fruitful path toward spreading democracy is not toppling dictators without a clear path to a successor regime. It comes from bolstering civil society for internal transitions to democracy and demonstrating the benefits of democracy here at home,” she said.

Second, the U.S. can reform the international order by bolstering alliances and regional organizations, Zegart said. This includes Europe and the Asia Pacific region, and international institutions like the United Nations, World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

“We are advocating pragmatic international engagement, not isolationism,” she said.

Third, Zegart suggests that America can develop flexible unilateral capabilities that can be deployed against a wide array of increasing threats.

“The world is uncertain and our resources are limited. Smarter spending starts with developing more agile military capabilities and more robust non-military levers to advance our vital interests. We need Pentagon acquisition reform, moving from exorbitant, niche weapons systems like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and investing in low-cost unmanned systems and cyber capabilities,” she said.

Zegart noted that Defense Secretary Ashton Carter is working hard to reform the way the Pentagon does business, but he faces resistance from entrenched interests.

As for the domestic and political impacts of a less stable world, Zegart said it is difficult to foresee all the consequences.

But she pointed to some disturbing indicators: growing chaos across the Middle East, rising nationalism in the U.S. and Europe, rising tensions in the Asia-Pacific region and domestic politics in many countries.

“I worry about rising political violence, erosion of trust in many institutions, not just political ones, and the backsliding of democracy, both in the United States and abroad,” she said.

Contact

Amy Zegart, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-4202, zegart@stanford.edu

Clifton B. Parker, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488, cbparker@stanford.edu

The Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies has welcomed five new senior military fellows, including three active duty lieutenant colonels from the U.S. Air Force and two from the U.S. Army, who will spend the next academic year at Stanford pursuing self-directed study of important national issues.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense and CISAC faculty member Bill Perry created the program to give military officers the opportunity to take a deep dive into an area of strategic interest.

The fellows will be considering a diverse range of topics, from how to adapt Silicon Valley’s innovative work culture to the Army, to China’s actions in the South China Sea, and the effectiveness of U.S. economic sanctions against North Korea.

You can learn more about our fellows’ military backgrounds and the intended focus of their studies from the brief bios below.

John Cogbill and Scott Maytan will be assigned to the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

John Chu, Ryan Blake and Jose Sumangil will be based at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

LTC John Cogbill

LTC John Cogbill was commissioned as an Infantry officer from the United States Military Academy in 1994 and has held a variety of positions in both conventional and special operations units. John’s first assignment was as a Platoon Leader and Executive Officer in the 82nd Airborne Division. John then served two years in the 1st Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment as a Platoon Leader and Civil-Military Affairs Officer. Next, John served three years in Alaska as an Airborne Rifle Company Commander and the Aide-de-Camp to the Commanding General. After earning his MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School, John taught Economics in the Social Sciences Department at West Point. Following the Command and General Staff College, he spent two years as a Combined Arms Battalion Executive Officer in the 1st Cavalry Division. He then served as the Strategic Plans and Requirements Officer for the 75th Ranger Regiment. Most recently, John commanded the Reconnaissance and Surveillance Squadron for the U.S. Army Third Corps. John has deployed on three combat and two peacekeeping missions, including two tours in Iraq, one tour in Afghanistan, one tour in Haiti, and a recent tour in Kosovo. He will be exploring how the Army can encourage innovation and use emerging technologies to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage on the battlefield.

Lt Col Scott Maytan, U.S. Air Force

Lt Col Scott Maytan was the commander of a B-52H operational bomb squadron, responsible for ensuring combat mission readiness for any worldwide nuclear or conventional tasking. Lt Col Maytan is a navigator with over 2500 flying hours, primarily in the B-52H, and is a graduate of both the Command and General Staff College (U.S. Army) and the U.S. Air Force Weapons School. He has served four operational assignments, as an advanced tactics instructor, and also a tour at the Pentagon where he developed Air Force positions concerning long-range strike and aircraft nuclear requirements. Lt Col Maytan has served three combat deployments for Operations Desert Fox (Southern Watch), Allied Force and Iraqi Freedom and has also deployed four times supporting USPACOM’s Continuous Bomber Presence mission. Maytan will be studying the “red-lines” that shape Western deterrence posture, and how strategic action and deterrence posture in one region affects others.

LTC John Chu, U.S. Army

LTC John Chu is an active duty officer in the United States Army. Chu has held a variety of leadership and staff positions in his 20 year career. Most recently, he served as the Chief of Intelligence Training at the Department of the Army. Chu has twice been deployed to Iraq and once to Bosnia, with multiple assignments to South Korea, Germany and Turkey. Born in Seoul, he grew up in California and graduated from West Point in 1995. At Stanford, Chu is researching the Korean armistice agreement and the United Nations mission to South Korea. He will also examine U.S. policy toward North Korea, particularly analyzing the “brink of war” tension and developing strategic deterrence measures to reduce risk of unwanted military escalation on the Korean Peninsula. For both research streams, Chu aims to produce analyses and recommendations that could inform a policy audience.

Lt Col Ryan Blake, U.S. Air Force

Lt Col Ryan Blake is an active duty officer in the United States Air Force. Blake was the commander of a flight test squadron where he was responsible for the flight test of new Air Force programs. He has over 2,400 flying hours in over 40 types of aircraft, and has held two operational F-15E assignments, including combat deployments in support of Operations Southern Watch, Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. He had also been positioned at the Pentagon in defense acquisition and the Office of Security Cooperation in Baghdad. At Stanford, Blake is researching the U.S. policy toward China and its relation to Northeast Asia. He aims to discover areas of cooperation between the U.S. and Chinese militaries.

Lt Col Jose “Ed” Sumangil, U.S. Air Force

Lt Col Jose “Ed” Sumangil is an active duty officer in the United States Air Force. During his career, Sumangil has served in a range of operational assignments, including joint staff officer at U.S. Strategic Command where he was a lead planner of the command’s space campaign. Before coming to Stanford, he was the commander of a B-1 squadron and led airmen through combat deployments in support of Operations Enduring Freedom, Inherent Resolve and Freedom’s Sentinel. At Stanford, Sumangil is examining China’s actions in the South China Sea and the Philippines arbitration case regarding Chinese actions there. He seeks to offer perspectives and policy and strategy options to maintain peace and stability in the South China Sea.

Rodney Ewing, senior CISAC fellow and Frank Stanton professor in nuclear security, has been honored with three prestigious awards in the geological and mineralogical sciences.

Ewing will receive two medals at the Geological Society of America’s next annual meeting in Baltimore at the end of this month: the Ian Campbell Medal for Superlative Service to the Geosciences from the American Institute of Geosciences, and the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America for scientific eminence.

He is being recognized for his groundbreaking research on nuclear materials and his contributions to nuclear waste management.

“Rod Ewing is a modern mineral scientist at the top of his field who has excelled in both science and service,” according to the citation for the Campbell Medal.

“Dr. Ewing has made seminal contributions to our knowledge of radiation damage in minerals and the design of waste forms for high-level nuclear waste. And he continues to have a major impact on the policies underlying nuclear waste management in the United States.”

The international impact of professor Ewing’s research into nuclear waste storage is also being recognized with the IMA Medal of Excellence in Mineralogical Sciences from the International Mineralogical Association, which will be awarded at a meeting in Rimini, Italy next September.

CISAC senior fellow Siegfried Hecker has been awarded an honorary membership by ASM International – one of the most prestigious awards from the world’s largest association of materials scientists and engineers who study and work with metals.

The ASM International board of trustees cited professor Hecker “for scientific enlightenment of Plutonium technology; for leadership of Los Alamos National Laboratory and for leadership in international control of nuclear arms.”

Hecker said he was proud to join a list of honorees that included many of his “old metallurgical heroes,” including Arden Bemet (former director of the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology), and Thomas Edison (inventor of the phonograph, movie camera and light bulb) who was awarded an honorary membership in 1929.

ASM International established its honorary membership award in 1919 to recognize “truly outstanding individuals who have significantly furthered the purposes of the Society through an evidenced appreciation of the importance of the science of materials and through distinguished service to the materials science and engineering profession and the progress of mankind.”

Hecker was also invited this week to deliver the Alpha Sigma Mu International Professional Honor Society for Materials Science and Engineering distinguished lecture in Columbus, Ohio, where he recounted highlights from his storied career, from his time as a student at Ohio’s Case Institute of Technology, rising up the ranks to become director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, leading cleanup efforts at Russia’s former nuclear test site Semipalatinsk, and his current track-two diplomacy and nuclear non-proliferation initiatives with scientists from Russia, Pakistan, North Korea and Iran.

He concluded his lecture expressing the hope that scientists would use nuclear power to contribute to global peace and prosperity, rather than create war and disaster.

Bioengineering researchers have recently constructed the final steps required to engineer yeast to manufacture opiates, including morphine and other medical drugs, from glucose, drawing significant interest, and concern, from the media and academics in the science and policy fields, including at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).  

“Researchers are getting better at building biology based platforms to create a wide variety of compounds that are difficult, inefficient, or sometimes impossible to create by other means,” Dr. Megan J. Palmer told National Public Radio in the weekly Science Friday segment.

She highlighted how these platforms can enable production of potentially safer, cheaper and more effective drugs. “But one significant concern is if we create the full pathway to go from glucose to this intermediate and then all the way to things like morphine, this could feed into illicit markets and bolster new illicit markets.”

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The media this week has focused on comments by researchers who pointed out that the modified yeast could be used to manufacture heroin, a synthesized version of morphine. The prospect of “home-brewed heroin” has been prominently featured in news coverage.

There are significant concerns, says Palmer, but she cautioned that focusing solely on that possibility could lead to bad policy outcomes.

“There is a big opportunity for researchers, policy makers, and industry to work together to figure out what controls they can put in,” she said in a separate interview. “We have time to get ahead of this problem. We now have choices in how we build and regulate the technology. The challenge for regulatory and technical communities will be to avoid reactive quick fixes. It’s encouraging to see researchers engaging in these issues early on.”

The challenge will be to find ways for researchers, law enforcers, and policy experts to work together to build safeguards into the biology itself as well as into organizations and institutions. 

“We really need to think about security as a design principle,” Palmer said. She hopes to foster thoughtful and rigorous analysis of how the design of biotechnology impacts future governance options.

“This issue highlights beautifully the nexus between public policy and science and technology, which is where CISAC has already, and will continue to make important contributions,” said CISAC Co-Director David Relman. Dr. Relman is also the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor in the Departments of Medicine, and of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University. 

CISAC recently hosted a seminar led by Stanford’s Dr. Christina Smolke that discussed technology advances that are resulting in alternative supply chains for drugs, with particular attention to opiates.

Dr. Smolke is also troubled by the over-emphasis of the risks associated with the potential technology. “I believe it’s inflammatory, biased, and not grounded in an accurate representation of the technology. However, the commentary focuses on the risks of the supply chain and proposes regulations/governance for such a technology, without implementing a process to engage various parties in discussions to thoughtfully assess risks, opportunities, and regulatory needs in this context.”

“I think we need to frame this issue in the context of the larger systemic challenges involving the rearrangements of supply chains enabled through bio-manufacturing and how we spread responsible norms and practices,” Palmer said. “We need to think about governance options in terms of human capacities and technical capacities. What safeguards can we engineer into our technologies, and in turn what safeguards can we build into our organizations and institutions?”