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. 2017 Nov 14:6:e30247.
doi: 10.7554/eLife.30247.

A transatlantic perspective on 20 emerging issues in biological engineering

Bonnie C Wintle  1 , Christian R Boehm  2   1 , Catherine Rhodes  1 , Jennifer C Molloy  3 , Piers Millett  4 , Laura Adam  5 , Rainer Breitling  6 , Rob Carlson  7 , Rocco Casagrande  8 , Malcolm Dando  9 , Robert Doubleday  10 , Eric Drexler  4 , Brett Edwards  11 , Tom Ellis  12 , Nicholas G Evans  13 , Richard Hammond  14 , Jim Haseloff  3 , Linda Kahl  15 , Todd Kuiken  16 , Benjamin R Lichman  17 , Colette A Matthewman  17 , Johnathan A Napier  18 , Seán S ÓhÉigeartaigh  1 , Nicola J Patron  19 , Edward Perello  20 , Philip Shapira  21   22 , Joyce Tait  23 , Eriko Takano  6 , William J Sutherland  24
Affiliations

A transatlantic perspective on 20 emerging issues in biological engineering

Bonnie C Wintle et al. Elife. .

Abstract

Advances in biological engineering are likely to have substantial impacts on global society. To explore these potential impacts we ran a horizon scanning exercise to capture a range of perspectives on the opportunities and risks presented by biological engineering. We first identified 70 potential issues, and then used an iterative process to prioritise 20 issues that we considered to be emerging, to have potential global impact, and to be relatively unknown outside the field of biological engineering. The issues identified may be of interest to researchers, businesses and policy makers in sectors such as health, energy, agriculture and the environment.

Keywords: biological engineering; biorisk; ecology; expert elicitation; foresight; horizon scanning; human biology; medicine; synthetic biology.

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Conflict of interest statement

No competing interests declared.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.. Horizon scanning.
The seven stages of the horizon scanning procedure (Sutherland et al., 2011) used to identify emerging issues in biological engineering.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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