Biosecurity and Biohacking
محفوظ في:
| المؤلف: | |
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| التنسيق: | artículo original |
| الحالة: | Versión publicada |
| تاريخ النشر: | 2026 |
| الوصف: | This article examines the tension between the democratization of biotechnology driven by the do-it-yourself biology movement —known as biohacking or DIYbio— and the biosecurity risks that such decentralization introduces into the practice of contemporary genetic research. It assumes that the sharp reduction in the cost of gene-editing tools such as CRISPR-Cas9, together with the simplification of their operating protocols, has moved molecular manipulation capabilities once reserved for universities, pharmaceutical companies, and state facilities into community laboratories and individual workspaces lacking the containment infrastructure and institutional oversight those settings traditionally required. From this shift, three specific vulnerabilities are examined —the unintentional or deliberate alteration of pathogens, the absence of adequate biocontainment levels, and the possibility of synthesizing hazardous genetic material without institutional control— and it is analyzed why existing regulatory frameworks, designed around identifiable institutional actors, prove insufficient against a dispersed, heterogeneous, and largely anonymous community of practitioners. Finally, two non-mutually-exclusive lines of response are assessed: self-regulation developed by the biohacker community itself, and technological containment built directly into modified organisms. The article adopts an applied-ethics and philosophy-of-technology approach that treats the governance of emerging biotechnology as a problem of institutional design under uncertainty, understood here as the impossibility of precisely anticipating which individual actors will gain access to which technical capabilities, and when. |
| البلد: | Portal de Revistas UNA |
| المؤسسة: | Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica |
| Repositorio: | Portal de Revistas UNA |
| اللغة: | Español |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.revistas.una.ac.cr:article/23018 |
| الوصول للمادة أونلاين: | https://www.revistas.una.ac.cr/index.php/praxis/article/view/23018 |
| كلمة مفتاحية: | biohacking biosecurity CRISPR-Cas9 biotechnology governance applied ethics bioseguridad gobernanza biotecnológica ética aplicada |