Policy Failures & Opportunities Underlying 21st Century Biostrategies | Drew Endy

About the Event: What is a better question than where did SARS-CoV-2 come from?  
Why can we routinely forbid research with live smallpox but not influenza or coronavirus?
Why do well-intentioned elected officials believe centralized DNA synthesis screening will improve biosecurity?
How can we create or strengthen trust in biotechnology-based operations, transactions, and offerings?
We live today within a collapsing biosecurity bubble, inflated by standing down the US offensive bioweapons program under Nixon but deflating since.
Can we responsibly steward development and deployment of 21st century biotechnologies, sufficient to enable planetary-scale flourishing, without veering into Hobbesian despair? 
What lessons can be learned from what the physics and policy communities did or did not accomplish in the 1930s?  
Or the internet leaders did or failed to do in the 1980s?  
Or the AI community failed to do in the 2010s?
Are there practical paths forward besides reacting to unilateral innovators and actors?

About the Speaker: Drew Endy is a bioengineer at Stanford University who studies and teaches synthetic biology. His goals are civilization-scale flourishing and a renewal of liberal democracy. Prof. Endy helped launch new undergraduate majors in bioengineering at both MIT and Stanford and also the iGEM — a global genetic-engineering “Olympics” enabling thousands of students annually. His past students lead companies like Ginkgo Bioworks and Octant. He is married to Christina Smolke CEO of Antheia the essential medicine company. Endy served on the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) the Committee on Science Technology & Law (CSTL) the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Synthetic Biology Task Force and, briefly, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board (DIB). He currently serves on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Advisory Committee on Variola Virus Research. Esquire magazine recognized Drew as one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century.
 

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