Who Should We Fear More: Biohackers, Disgruntled Postdocs, or Bad Governments? A Simple Risk Chain Model of Biorisk.

ABSTRACT: The biological risk landscape continues to evolve as developments in synthetic biology and biotechnology offer increasingly powerful tools to a widening pool of actors, including those who may consider carrying out a deliberate biological attack. However, it remains unclear whether it is the relatively large numbers of low-resourced actors or the small handful of high-powered actors who pose a greater biosecurity risk. To answer this question, this paper introduces a simple risk chain model of biorisk, from actor intent to a biological event, where the actor can successfully pass through each of N steps. Assuming that actor success probability at each independent step is sigmoidally distributed and actor power follows a power-law distribution, if a biorisk event were to occur, this

SUBMITTER: Sandberg A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7310205 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May/Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature