Inoculating science against potential pandemics and information hazards
Fig 2
Paths towards the adoption of universal screening of commercial synthetic DNA orders for hazardous sequences.
Covering the up-front cost of screening system development and initial adoption would eliminate barriers that might prevent companies from participating. Publishers could incentivize participation by declining to publish submitted manuscripts that rely on unscreened DNA, whereas universities, societies, companies, and funders could boycott groups that decline to adopt screening. Once in place, this system could effectively require hardware-level locks on future hardware permitting distributed synthesis. International governments could subsidize all screened oligonucleotides to impose an effective market-based requirement for approximately 1/15 of the current US annual biodefense budget.