探索生物学的攻防平衡（英）

In this piece, we examine how the offense-defense balance, a framework com-monly applied to conventional and strategic military domains, informs our understanding of the biological threat landscape. As advancements in synthetic biology and related enabling technologies lower barriers to both pathogen engi-neering and pharmaceutical development, it is important to understand how these advances shift the balance between attackers and defenders. This high-level qualita-tive assessment identifies four asymmetries likely to favor attackers and one likely to favor defenders. Although these five asymmetries are not exhaustive, they represent important features of the landscape as it exists today: 1. Kinetic considerations (favors offense): Attackers benefit from the exponential spread of self-replicating patho-gens, which can disseminate quickly through populations once released. In contrast, defensive pharmaceutical countermeasures, such as vaccines and therapeutics, face systemic delays, such as safety testing and manufactur-CASEY AVEGGIO, AMAN J. PATEL, SELLA NEVO, KYLE WEBSTERExploring the Offense-Defense Balance of BiologyIdentifying and Describing High-Level AsymmetriesExpert InsightsPERSPECTIVE ON A TIMELY POLICY ISSUEAugust 20252ing. These processes are primarily determined by nontechnical factors and will likely put defenders at a disadvantage as widely accessible biotechnological capability advances. 2. Financial burden (favors offense): The cost of synthesizing and releasing a pathogen is orders of magnitude lower than the cost of devel-oping, producing, and deploying pharmaceutical countermeasures at scale. Offensive actions require relatively small investments prior to release, but defensive measures demand sustained, large-scale funding before, during, and after a biological event. 3. Threat surface (favors offense): Offenders can select from more than 1,500 known human pathogens—as well as potentially human-ized; engineered; and, in the future, entirely novel variants—targeting a vast range of vulnerabilities in human biology. Because pharmaceutical coun-termeasures are often pathogen specific, defenders must anticipate and prepare for the full range of possible threats—many of which may be unpredict-able or intentionally designed to evade prepared-ness efforts. Furthermore, attackers may be able to choose the location and timing of an attack, while defenders must maintain readiness across wide regions, uncertain of the origin, scale, or timing of a potential threat.4. Access to knowledge and materials (favors defense): Defenders possess advantages in funding, research infrastructure, and access to open scientific col-laboration, but attackers must operate covertly and navigate such barriers as surveillance and export controls. However, the defense’s ability to act swiftly on emerging scientific advances is often constrained by ethical obligations and regulatory oversight—constraints that attackers, despite having fewer resources, are lar