Safety and Security Concerns: Open Source BioDefense

Christine Peterson

Christine Peterson writes, lectures, and briefs the media on coming powerful technologies, especially nanotechnology. She is the co- founder and President of Foresight Institute, the leading nanotech public interest group. Foresight educates the public, technical community, and policymakers on nanotechnology and its long-term effects.

She serves on the Advisory Board of the International Council on Nanotechnology and the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA's Nanotech Briefs, and served on California's Blue Ribbon Task Force on Nanotechnology. She directs the Foresight Conferences on Molecular Nanotechnology, organizes the Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes, and chairs the Foresight Vision Weekends. Her work is motivated by a desire to help Earth’s environment and traditional human communities avoid harm and instead benefit from expected dramatic advances in technology. This goal of spreading benefits led to an interest in new varieties of intellectual property including open source software, a term she is credited with originating.

Len Sassaman

Len Sassaman is a security researcher and biohacker. During the "crypto wars" of the 1990s, he was involved in the battle against United States regulations that treated strong cryptography as a munition, and has been a strong advocate of policies that promote citizen innovation in the sciences ever since. He and his wife, Meredith L. Patterson, conduct research on transgenic lactic acid bacteria in their home lab; their projects focus on public health issues such as vitamin deficiencies and rapid detection of food contaminants. With fifteen years of perspective on federal security regulatory activity, he sees biohacking as the next frontier in citizen science and a vibrant resource that must not be regulated out of existence.

Sassaman is a PhD student at COSIC, the COmputer Security and Industrial Cryptography laboratory at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, and a member of The Shmoo Group security think-tank.

Edward You

Edward You is a Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, Countermeasures Unit, Bioterrorism Prevention Program. Mr. You is responsible for creating programs and activities to coordinate and improve FBI and interagency efforts to identify, assess, and respond to potential intentional biological threats or incidents. These efforts include expanding FBI outreach to the Biological Sciences community to address biosecurity. Before transferring to the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, Mr. You was a member of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in Los Angeles for four years.

Mr. You has also been directly involved in policy-making efforts with a focus on biosecurity. He is an ex officio member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity; is an active Working Group member of the National Security Council Interagency Policy Committee on Countering Biological Threats; and was an FBI representative on the Executive Order Working Group on Strengthening Laboratory Biosecurity in the United States.

Prior to joining the FBI, Mr. You worked for five years in graduate research on human gene therapy at the University of Southern California, Keck School of Medicine. He subsequently worked for three years at the biotechnology firm AMGEN Inc. developing cancer therapeutics.