Safety Form

Our Safety form can be found here .

Security Concerns

Introducing Information processing technologies to synthetic biology allowed us to discover new practical useful paths for the domain we are pioneering. More importantly, security concerns came up to mind as we started to push the limits of what E.coli can do.

Indeed, leveraging the power of these cells could provide enough computing power to "hack" the most robust secure computer systems in the world. As it stands right now, the most robust cryptographic systems are completely out of reach of humanity, as it will take the evergy of the whole universe to crack them. However, by leveraging self-sustained cells that can make computations without any loss of energy, such a barrier would not only become obsolete, but any secure system would become unusable.

Implications for modern civilization are immense: without proper cryptographic foundations to use, most of the technology we currently rely on would become impractical. Anything from electronic transactions, to home computers, to nuclear power plants would easily become the target of hacking attacks

As we were exploring the implications of synthetic information processing in cells, we came to the conclusion that not all this power will be used for "evil"; indeed, the same tools that could destroy human civilization could easily be used to protect it.

We cannot fully grasp the consequences of the work we are currently developing, as understanding it would still take decades of research. However, we truly believe that iGEM's emphasis on synthetic biology as a domain of research worth pursuing would certainly help achieve this goal.