Research produces large benefits. In some cases it may also pose novel risks, for instance work on potential pandemic pathogens. There is widespread agreement that such ‘dual use research of concern’ poses challenges for regulation.
There is a convincing case that we should avoid research with large risks if we can obtain the benefits just as effectively with safer approaches. However, there do not currently exist natural mechanisms to enforce such decisions. Government analysis of the risk of different branches of research is a possible mechanism, but it must be performed anew for each risk area, and may be open to political distortion and accusations of bias.
We propose that all laboratories performing dual-use research with potentially catastrophic consequences should be required by law to hold insurance against damaging consequences of their research.
This market-based approach would force researcher institutions to internalise some of the externalities and thereby:
Encourage university departments and private laboratories to work on safer research, when the benefits are similar;
Incentivise the insurance industry to produce accurate assessments of the risks;
Incentivise scientists and engineers to and devise effective safety protocols that could be adopted by research institutions to reduce their insurance premiums.
Current safety records do not always reflect an appropriate level of risk tolerance. For example, the economic damage caused by the escape of the foot and mouth virus from a BSL-3 or BSL-4 lab in Britain in 2007 was high (mostly through trade barriers) and could have been much higher (the previous outbreak in 2001 caused £8 billion of damage). If the lab had known they were liable for some of these costs, they might have taken even more stringent safety precautions. In the case of potential pandemic pathogen research, insurers might require it to take place in BSL-4 or to implement other technical safety improvements such as “molecular biocontainment”.
The (late) Global Priorities Project produced a long list of policy interventions and found that none of them were feasible at that time and place (UK in 2015), but maybe some of them can be adapted to other times or places where they are feasible.
Organization to push for mandatory liability insurance for dual-use research
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe
Owen Cotton-Barratt for the Global Priorities Project in 2015:
The (late) Global Priorities Project produced a long list of policy interventions and found that none of them were feasible at that time and place (UK in 2015), but maybe some of them can be adapted to other times or places where they are feasible.
Niel Bowerman’s article “Research note: Good policy ideas that won’t happen (yet)” from 2015 gives an overview.