Asha George led a session of the annual meeting entitled Everything Old Is New Again. George addressed the enormous benefits of advancements in biology which, at the same time, also raise a host of new concerns. Advances in four areas in particular are occurring extremely quickly: synthetic biology, cyberbiology, microbiology, and biotechnology and George provided an overview of the changing biological threat landscape and covered ideas such as the creation of a super soldier, the combination of organic matter with nanotechnology, and the use of DNA itself to store information. All of these have very real ethical and national security implications, and are worthy of attention.
Details of the annual meeting are available on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists website.
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