Pricing Externalities to Balance Public Risks and Benefits of Research

Concepts to Bolster Biorisk Management

The rapid increase in the power of the life sciences has not been accompanied by a proportionate increase in the sophistication of biorisk management. Through conversations with thought leaders in biosafety and biosecurity, we have identified 19 concepts that are critical for biorisk management to continue to ensure the responsible and safe conduct of the life sciences in the future. Our work is not meant to be a comprehensive list, but rather a collection of topics that we hope will spark dialogue in the policy, research, and biorisk management communities.

Global policymakers and catastrophic risk

There is a rapidly developing literature on risks that threaten the whole of humanity, or a large part of it. Discussion is increasingly turning to how such risks can be governed. This paper arises from a study of those involved the governance of risks from emerging technologies, examining the perceptions of global catastrophic risk within the relevant global policymaking community. Those who took part were either civil servants working for the UK government, U.S. Congress, the United Nations, and the European Commission, or cognate members of civil society groups and the private sector. Analysis of interviews identified four major themes: Scepticism; Realism; Influence; and Governance outside of Government. These themes provide evidence for the value of conceptualising the governance of global catastrophic risk as a unified challenge. Furthermore, they highlight the range of agents involved in governance of emerging technology and give reason to value reforms carried out sub-nationally.

Promoting versatile vaccine development for emerging pandemics

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the importance of rapid and versatile development of emergency medical countermeasures such as vaccines. We discuss the role of platform vaccines and prototype pathogen research in modern vaccine development, and outline how previous pathogen-specific funding approaches can be improved to adequately promote vaccine R&D for emerging pandemics. We present a more comprehensive approach to financing vaccine R&D, which maximises biomedical pandemic preparedness by promoting flexible vaccine platforms and translatable research into prototype pathogens. As the numerous platform-based SARS-CoV-2 vaccines show, funders can accelerate pandemic vaccine development by proactively investing in versatile platform technologies. For certain emerging infectious diseases, where vaccine research can translate to other related pathogens with pandemic potential, investment decisions should reflect the full social value of increasing overall preparedness, rather than just the value of bringing a vaccine to market for individual pathogens.

The Psychology of Existential Risk: Moral Judgments about Human Extinction

The 21st century will likely see growing risks of human extinction, but currently, relatively small resources are invested in reducing such existential risks. Using three samples (UK general public, US general public, and UK students; total N = 2,507), we study how laypeople reason about human extinction. We find that people think that human extinction needs to be prevented. Strikingly, however, they do not think that an extinction catastrophe would be uniquely bad relative to near-extinction catastrophes, which allow for recovery. More people find extinction uniquely bad when (a) asked to consider the extinction of an animal species rather than humans, (b) asked to consider a case where human extinction is associated with less direct harm, and (c) they are explicitly prompted to consider long-term consequences of the catastrophes. We conclude that an important reason why people do not find extinction uniquely bad is that they focus on the immediate death and suffering that the catastrophes cause for fellow humans, rather than on the long-term consequences. Finally, we find that (d) laypeople—in line with prominent philosophical arguments—think that the quality of the future is relevant: they do find extinction uniquely bad when this means forgoing a utopian future.

Regulating impact on bystanders in clinical trials: An unsettled frontier

This article informally reviews key research ethics guidelines and regulations, academic scholarship, and research studies and finds wide variety in how they consider risk to bystanders in medical research (namely, non-participants whom studies nevertheless place at risk). Some of these key sources give no or very little consideration to bystanders, while others offer them the utmost protection (greater than they offer study participants). This unsettled frontier would benefit from a deeper investigation of the ethics of protecting research bystanders.