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

Area of Science:

• Biosecurity
• Synthetic Biology
• Risk Assessment

Background:

• The evolving biological risk landscape is shaped by advancements in synthetic biology and biotechnology.
• The relative biosecurity threat posed by numerous low-resourced actors versus few high-powered actors remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

• To model biorisk to determine the likely source of a deliberate biological attack.
• To analyze the impact of actor power and the number of steps in a risk chain on biosecurity threats.

Main Methods:

• Introduction of a simple risk chain model for biorisk.
• Modeling actor success probability with a sigmoid distribution and actor power with a power-law distribution.

Main Results:

• Highly powered actors are the expected perpetrators of biorisk events, despite their lower numbers.
• As the number of steps in the risk chain decreases, lower-powered actors become more likely perpetrators.
• The most difficult step in the risk chain is the primary limiting factor for actors.

Conclusions:

• Biosecurity risk assessments must consider actor power distribution.
• Health security strengthening requires making steps leading to biological events more difficult to bypass.