Synthetic Biology's Defense Dollars: Signals and Perceptions

Synthetic biology is swimming in defense dollars. The most recent figures available on US trends in synthetic biology research funding indicate that two thirds of the $200 million invested in 2014 came from the Department of Defense or its research agency DARPA. While many scientists see military money as just another source of funding on par with NIH or NSF funding—after all, the majority of the funds are for basic science without security classification and publication restrictions—there are good reasons not to brush it off. One of these is the perception of the field to outsiders.

From an international security perspective, the extensive influx of military funding can be perceived as threatening to analysts in other countries following these developments. The US Department of Defense declared just over $655 million on national biodefence research in 2014. Synthetic biology research appears, therefore, to make up about a fifth of the biodefence budget. DARPA aims not only to develop radically new, game-changing technologies for national security in order to maintain US technological supremacy, it also aims to create technological surprise...