🦠 Biosecurity Futures | Layers of Defence

Layers of DefenceScreening DNA, Spotting Outbreaks, Stacking Imperfect Safeguards

Wednesday, 2 December 2026 · 18:15–19:45ETH Zürich, HG G 26.1 -- ⚠️a different room than previously

You can order synthetic DNA online. Whether anyone checks what you ordered, or who you are, depends on which company you used and where they are based.

That is one layer, and it sits before the problem rather than solving it. Screening only helps if it catches things, and a determined adversary is not obliged to cooperate.

So there is a second question: what protects us if prevention fails? The usual answer is to list the pathogens that worry us and prepare countermeasures for each. That works against nature. Against someone deliberately trying to surprise us, no list is ever complete. The alternative is to look for defences that work without knowing what is coming, by exploiting constraints every pathogen has to obey: it has to get into a body, and if it spreads far enough to matter, it can be detected.

This closing session works through both halves: how synthetic DNA orders are screened and where that system has gaps, and what generalised defences look like when you stop trying to predict the threat. Including an honest look at how much of this exists today.

Biosecurity Futures is an introductory series on global catastrophic biological risks, hosted by the Zurich Biosecurity Hub at ETH Zürich.

Biosecurity Futures Series Schedule:

Worse Than Nature: Why the Deadliest Pandemics Won't Be Natural Ones — 30 Sep

AI Meets Biology: What Frontier Models Actually Change — 12 Oct (Monday)

Mirror Life: A Risk We Could Still Prevent — 28 Oct

The Air We Share: Clean Air, Far-UVC and Defences That Work Against Anything — 11 Nov

Layers of Defence: Screening DNA, Spotting Outbreaks, Stacking Imperfect Safeguards — 2 Dec

Open to students, researchers and staff from all departments and all universities, and to interested people from outside academia. Free.

Subscribe to the calendar to get all five sessions.

More at zurichbiosecurity.ch. Questions: [email protected]