October Bagels and Bio/Chem Defense

Another session of Bagels and Bio/Chem Defense will be held on Friday, October 25th at the National Academies Keck Center (500 Fifth Street NW, Washington DC).

This month will be an expanded session (from 10:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.) focused on qualitative frameworks that could provide the basis for structured expert discussions of the potential security concerns posed by emerging technologies in the life sciences.

In August the National Academies and the InterAcademy Partnership organized a one-day workshop during the BWC Meeting of Experts to give a small international group of people attending the sessions the opportunity to pilot test how two such frameworks might be applied to BWC-relevant case examples. This month’s session will feature a scaled-down version of the exercise.

Participants will have the opportunity to work in small groups to apply either the framework from the 2018 National Academies report, Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology or the technology assessment portion of the framework from Jonathan Tucker’s 2012 project on Innovation, Dual Use, and Security.

This event is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s discussion series on biological and chemical defense and security issues. It is free and open to the public, but you must register in advance. Bagels and beverages will be provided to attendees.