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  • Essay / My interest in gaining insight into the threats and opportunities posed by synthetic biology on security and safety

    I am a neurobiologist by training and program manager by profession, currently working at CERN, the European physics laboratory particles. My educational background is a bachelor's degree in biology at Pierre & Marie Curie University, an additional master's degree in Molecular & Cellular Biology at Caltech, and several continuing education courses in very varied themes: computational neuroscience, biomedical engineering, CRISPR-Cas9 applications, and bionic engineering. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get an original essay My professional experience includes several different positions: research and development project manager within the pharmaceutical company Sanofi, scientific consultant within the consultancy spin-off from Cambridge University (with a focus on gene editing and genome engineering projects), and founder and CEO of a startup specializing in prosthetics and bionics. All these experiences led me to work in areas related to the development of bioengineering techniques, whether for the development of new monoclonal antibodies or for the modification of the response of glial cells to implants. I currently hold several positions. First of all, I am responsible for knowledge transfer at CERN, managing projects for in silico simulations of biological tissue dynamics, new neuroimaging techniques and machine learning for drug discovery. My role is a combination of project management, policy and business development to disseminate these technologies into the industrial domain. I also work as an Alliance Partner for the Swiss non-profit Mindfire, an organization dedicated to developing human-level artificial intelligence. In this position, I monitor disruptive technologies and develop strategic partnerships. Finally, I recently obtained a role as an external advisor for a neuroscience project focused on the modulation of neuronal activity by ionic actuation at the micro and nanoscales. My interest in becoming a Conference Fellow lies in the need for me to gain knowledge about threats and opportunities. posed by synthetic biology on security and safety. As we have learned in recent years, with the development of new gene editing and genome sequencing tools, such as TALENS and CRISPR, it is becoming increasingly easier to create biological weapons or recreate agents Extinct pathogens. Recently, in an interview, Bill Gates claimed that the next deadly disease that would cause a global pandemic was coming, and that this disease would likely kill more than thirty million people within six months. Recently, a new threat to biosecurity has emerged in a new area. of biological research: synthetic biology. This new scientific field could be seen as a tool to modify existing biological codes, but also to rethink or rewrite systems from scratch. This field therefore brings major benefits to society, from the improvement of pharmaceutical or agricultural products to the possibility of biomimicry to improve artificial technologies. But like most promising areas of biology and genetics, this one also brings new types of biosecurity threats. With this threat/benefit duality, synthetic biology can be considered as what we might call a field of..