Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief

Using Biology for Communication and Information Transmission

Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief

The digital age has transformed daily life and economies worldwide. While today’s technologies store, compute, and transmit data at unprecedented volume and speed, there are potential applications for new paradigms of communication and information transmission. Harnessing biological processes and platforms could open new opportunities for durable and efficient data storage, powerful computational capabilities, and innovative approaches to sensing and peer-to-peer information transmission. Application of these technologies may also lead to new policy, security, and ethics challenges. To examine how cutting-edge biotechnologies and research could enable these new approaches, as well as the societal impacts they might have, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine hosted a virtual workshop on Using Biology for Communication and Information Transmission on January 20–21, 2022.

The workshop was organized by the National Academies’ Standing Committee on Biotechnology Capabilities and National Security Needs, which facilitates engagement between the national security community and biotechnology stakeholders to identify advanced biotechnologies with promising capabilities to meet national security needs along with early-stage research that may lead to new or enhanced biotechnologies. Presenters and attendees from government, academia, and the biotechnology industry gathered for live and prerecorded discussions and presentations over the course of 2 workshop days. This Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief provides the rapporteurs’ high-level overview of the event.

Elliot Chaikof (Harvard Medical School) and Andrew Kilianski (International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) served as moderators. Chaikof opened the workshop with a reflection on the seminal contributions of mathematician Claude Shannon to information theory and communication. In addition to establishing the foundation for digital circuit design theory, Shannon also introduced a mathematical framework for the transmission of information as quickly, efficiently, and accurately as possible. That framework outlined a single set of physical laws governing communication, whether the communication occurs through electronic, biological, or other media. Shannon also found mathematical inspiration in living systems and explored how biological processes could be applied to implement logic. Although the success of these efforts was limited by the biological knowledge at the time, Chaikof said that today, some

80 years later, Shannon’s work serves as a useful backdrop for the opportunities now being explored at the intersection of biology and information science and leads to the question: What new capabilities might the biology-based approaches emerging today unlock for the future of information transmission and communication? In summary, Chaikof described the workshop as providing “a better understanding of the unique opportunities and challenges represented by the medium of biology in defining the future of our information age.”

The speakers explored emerging advances in and applications of biotechnologies and research activities in the areas of communication and information transmission; the innovation ecosystem that is driving the research, development, and application of these technologies; and critical societal implications that must be considered in the adoption and translation of such biotechnologies. The speakers also explored workforce needs, infrastructure, and policy and governance associated with the development and use of the biology-based information transmission and communication research and technologies.

DNA AS A MEDIUM FOR DATA STORAGE AND INFORMATION TRANSMISSION

Yaniv Erlich (Eleven Therapeutics) and Mark Bathe (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) discussed the use of DNA as a basis for information storage and transmission. While the amount of data processed and stored using today’s digital technologies may seem enormous, Erlich said it is nonetheless dwarfed by the amount of information nature has stored in the form of DNA. He explained that the Earth’s biosphere has been estimated to contain about 10³⁷ bytes of DNA, about 12 orders of magnitude greater than the amount of information represented by all of humanity’s digital data combined. Motivated by a pressing need for new materials and platforms for large-scale data storage and computing, the speakers described how DNA could be harnessed to expand the capacity for information storage, processing, and transmission.

Describing DNA as “the ultimate storage device,” Erlich said that evolution has perfected nucleotide-based information storage over the course of 3.5 billion years. Found within every living organism, DNA is far more ubiquitous than any technology created to date, and is highly unlikely to become obsolete in the foreseeable future. It is also roughly five to six orders of magnitude more information dense than current state-of-the-art digital storage media, Erlich said. Bathe noted that a flash drive, which typically holds about 1 terabyte of data today, would hold 1 exabyte (1 billion gigabytes) of data if it was made of DNA. Finally, DNA is incredibly robust, capable of storing information for hundreds of thousands of years while requiring no energy inputs to maintain it once it is written.

The speakers explained how DNA can be used to store digital data by assigning each chemical nucleotide to a set of zeroes and ones. Using this method, both researchers have demonstrated the use of DNA to write, store, and read information. Bathe emphasized that DNA can be stored in a wide variety of formats, from medicines to microbes to materials. For instance, Erlich and colleagues stored a readable full-size movie file in a DNA solution in a small test tube.¹ They also used this technique to create 3D-printed objects in the shape of rabbits that have self-replicating properties.² These objects encase the DNA-coded instructions for printing replicas of themselves within silica beads in the polymer material from which they are made; replicas can be printed by reading those biomolecular-based instructions held within the object.

Any data storage system has three major components: the ability to write the data onto a storage device, the ability to maintain it in memory and retrieve it when needed, and the ability to read the data. Bathe noted that technologies for both DNA synthesis (“write”) and DNA sequencing (“read”) are now well established and becoming less expensive. His work, therefore, focuses on the step in between: storing and retrieving DNA-encoded data. To this end, he and his colleagues have developed a method to store DNA files in small glass beads. Their system uses DNA to store the data itself

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and to create metadata tags or “DNA barcodes” that create unique labels used to identify properties of the data held within each bead. The team showed that a library of 100,000 unique DNA barcodes can be used to uniquely label 10²⁰ files with only four barcodes per file.³ This approach could be used to store essentially any type of information, Bathe said. For example, Bathe and his colleagues are currently using their glass beads to store SARS-CoV-2 genomes from patient samples, creating a large data repository for retrospective analyses of COVID-19 variants without the need to freeze and maintain the actual viral samples indefinitely.

BIO-BASED COMPUTATION AND COMMUNICATION

In addition to storing information, scientists are exploring how biology-based approaches can be used to perform tasks in computation and communication. Researchers discussed opportunities to take advantage of living cells and nature’s sensing and communication strategies to enhance computational capabilities and establish new modes for information transmission.

Computation with Living Systems

Ángel Goñi-Moreno (Technical University of Madrid) and Pinar Zorlutuna (University of Notre Dame) described experiments with cell-based computation. Goñi-Moreno explained that the basic model of computation begins with inputs, applies an algorithm, and generates outputs. This fundamental process can be performed with electronics or with living systems.

DNA transcription is essentially the algorithm that living systems use to perform tasks. In his work, Goñi-Moreno has engineered regulators, or “genetic inverters,” to control this process by selectively repressing and promoting DNA activation.⁴ While nature has honed natural genetic regulators over billions of years of evolution, the results of engineered inverters are less precise, and Goñi-Moreno noted that minimizing noise poses a considerable challenge. Given this, his team embraced the complexity of natural systems to develop contextual genetic inverters whose effects vary according to the context in which they are used.⁵

Thus far, the team has established a library of 20 genetic logic gates that can be used to generate 135 different functions.⁶ With these methods, Goñi-Moreno and other researchers envision creating cellular computers in which the cell acts as the hardware and controlled gene expression is the software. Ultimately, he posits that cellular computers should be able to outperform electronic computers for certain types of computations.⁷

Zorlutuna discussed another approach to using cells for computation, one that is based not on single cells but on cells working together collectively. She and her colleagues have demonstrated the use of cells to perform collective computation for a task known as graph coloring, which computes the minimum number of colors needed to color a graph or map such that no two adjacent nodes have the same color. This task is computationally difficult because it requires a large solution space to be screened in order to find the optimal solution. Any algorithm based on Boolean logic requires a great deal of computing time to perform such tasks, but coupled oscillators can perform the computations more quickly.

Cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells) are natural oscillators, as Zorlutuna described. In her work, Zorlutuna harnesses this bio-oscillation to perform computational tasks. To do this, she and her colleagues culture cardiomyocytes, place them into particular patterns by using proteins and photolithography methods to constrain each cell’s location, and connect them to one another via strategically placed cardiac fibroblasts. The researchers encode the computational problem in the layout of the oscillator network; as the cells’ oscillations become synchronized, the phase delays between different

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oscillator nodes can be detected using microelectrode arrays or imaging and mapped to the graph coloring problem. The team has used this approach to create oscillator arrays of up to 64 nodes and demonstrated the cardiac cells’ ability to achieve optimal solutions to the graph coloring problem faster than electronic oscillators running heuristic algorithms.

Zorlutuna pointed to several advantages and disadvantages of this method. Key downsides include the system’s low frequency of oscillation, relatively large size compared with electronic oscillators, and lower programmability compared to a conventional central processing unit (CPU). On the other hand, she noted that the team’s system uses little energy and is remarkably versatile, including the ability to self-assemble 3D circuitries and interface with biological and electronic devices while outperforming other bio-oscillators and electronic systems.

Bio-inspired Communication and Information Science

Andrew Eckford (York University) and Urbashi Mitra (University of Southern California) discussed opportunities in bio-inspired communication and information science.

The exchange of chemicals is the heart of nature’s communication systems. Eckford highlighted the potential benefits and challenges of exploiting these processes of molecular communication for transmitting information. One key advantage is that the signaling chemicals and the receivers necessary to exchange information already exist, are biocompatible, and have been proven to work in nature. Because molecular communication is based on diffusion through chemical concentration gradients, this communication strategy also requires little energy. Eckford’s research has shown that the rate of information transmission scales linearly with the number of receptors;⁸ for example, 10 receptors will have 10 times the data rate of one receptor. This means it should be possible to implement molecular communication systems at a large scale by adding more receptors. Because molecular receptors are so small—on the scale of a single molecule—Eckford noted that many receptors could be arrayed in a small space to support high rates of data transmission. For example, at least 1 billion such receptors could fit in an area the size of 1 square millimeter. “The potential for this kind of communication is actually enormous, not just at the nanoscale, but as a general kind of communication technique,” Eckford said.

Engineered molecular communication approaches have already been demonstrated in microfluidics⁹ and in a tabletop multiple input-multiple output (MIMO) device,¹⁰ which Eckford’s team used to send a short text message from a transmitter to a receiver using chemical signals. To date, Eckford said the top speed of data transmission using molecular communication has been about 10 bits per second. He posited that this approach could be the key to unlocking the potential of nanobots for enabling medical applications such as targeted chemotherapy delivery and tissue regeneration. Nanobot technology is advancing rapidly, but challenges with coordinating the actions of multiple nanobots to work collectively inside the body have posed an important barrier. While recognizing that there is still a long way to go to perfect engineered molecular communication systems and optimize data transmission speeds, Eckford said the approach holds promise for a wide range of potential applications in biomedicine and beyond.

Biological systems in nature use a variety of signaling mechanisms, from electrons to molecules, leading to a wide range of actions such as sensing, migration, and phenotypic changes. Expanding on the molecular communication approaches Eckford described, Mitra discussed a range of opportunities to examine biological systems through the lens of information science to inspire new engineering designs. She stressed the importance of appropriate analytical approaches to not only manipulate biological systems but also to make inferences based on data collected through observation

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and controlled experiments. Her work has focused on modeling biological systems to capture the essential operations underlying their behavior; identifying the levers or signaling entities that can be manipulated to induce actions; and uncovering the fundamental limits of bio-inspired systems, both in terms of the constraints imposed by biology and the physical constraints imposed by available technology.

Mitra pointed to several examples of how her group and others have applied these approaches to understand, model, and build on biological processes. For instance, she and her collaborators studied how bacterial assemblages conduct electricity along chains stretching from seafloor sediment into the water column and how lessons from this collective behavior can be leveraged to optimize the design of microfluidic systems.¹¹ In other studies, she has modeled how individual bacteria act as decision-making agents within the collective process of quorum sensing, the mechanism by which groups of bacteria gauge the number of cells in their population and exhibit different behaviors when the population is below versus above certain density thresholds.¹² She also discussed how fundamental insights about biological organization and communication can inform advances in biomedical research and public health. For example, her group has collaborated with researchers developing a breath test for COVID-19 to understand variability within sensing systems, and also with epidemiologists to design optimal sampling strategies to track outbreaks during the pandemic. “I’m incredibly excited about this great marriage, if you will, between information science and biology,” Mitra said. “This is an incredibly rich area for us to apply information science in order to decide how to collect data [and] how to make decisions about what’s going on in terms of these various phenomena.”

SECURITY AND PRIVACY ISSUES

In addition to their benefits, technologies for computation and communication hold the potential for misuse and harm, both intentional and inadvertent. Yevgeniy Vorobeychik (Washington University in St. Louis) and Nicholas Evans (University of Massachusetts Lowell) joined other speakers in discussing considerations related to security and privacy.

Vorobeychik shared his work on vulnerabilities related to facial recognition and identification technologies. Such technologies have become ubiquitous in consumer electronics and other applications, yet they can also potentially be hacked to allow impersonation or to invade personal privacy. Computer systems use deep artificial neural networks (also known as deep learning) to classify a face as belonging to a collection of predefined names or to recognize a face by identifying whether it matches a predefined input. Vorobeychik discussed some of the vulnerabilities raised by these technologies, along with examples of approaches to mitigate them.

In one experiment, researchers demonstrated that applying glasses with certain characteristics could fool facial recognition systems into seeing a match when a match does not actually exist, allowing one person to impersonate another.¹³ However, Vorobeychik and his colleagues identified ways to reduce the effectiveness of such attacks by training deep neural networks using inputs in which parts of the image are occluded.¹⁴ Other researchers have raised concerns about the possibility of matching a face to a genome by using genomic data to predict phenotypes and then using artificial intelligence to perform facial recognition with publicly available facial images.¹⁵ However, Vorobeychik said that it is quite challenging to achieve this given the sheer number of publicly available facial images, and adding noise to facial image data before putting it on the Internet makes it practically impossible to find the right match using this approach.¹⁶

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Noting that information technology in general has a poor track record in terms of security and privacy, Evans said it is likely that biocomputing and other bio-inspired technologies will have many of the same vulnerabilities as electronic technologies, in addition to some unique ones. He challenged attendees to consider what forms malware might take and how this biotechnology might conceivably be misused. For example, if computation involves living organisms, could a computer virus be spread via an actual biological virus? Also, might the rush to find ways to hack biological devices lead to a proliferation of malevolent uses of biotechnology in general?

In addition, Evans noted that these technologies could underpin increasingly detailed surveillance strategies, for instance, making it more feasible to collect private and health data in public settings and potentially use it to trace individuals’ behavior. Expanding on this point, Erlich, Bathe, and Chaikof said that DNA sequencing and storage technologies can aid strategies to track pathogens, biomarkers, or the use of certain drugs via wastewater, which has important public health implications but also raises concerns about privacy and lack of consent.

Pointing to the maxim that “if you aren’t paying for the product, then you are the product,” Evans stressed the importance of transparency and personal control over the collection and use of personal data. He said that security and privacy are critical upstream issues warranting immediate attention, and posited that disparities of power (between companies and users) and economic competition (which incentivizes cheap and fast solutions) are likely to influence the security and privacy implications of these technologies as they mature. “Without intentional design of devices with information security in mind, we’re likely to see repetition of the central security issues of the tech landscape, simply reflected in biology,” Evans cautioned.

Finally, Erlich pointed out that DNA-based information storage also raises new opportunities for secretly carrying information from one place to another. DNA can be encoded in a vast array of materials and organisms where it would be able to withstand a wide range of environmental conditions and be difficult to detect, making it well suited for clandestine information transfer.

ETHICS AND POLICY ISSUES

Evans and other speakers also discussed ethics and policy considerations pertaining to the use of biology for computation and communication. Just as information technology has had an imperfect track record with security and privacy, biology has its own questionable past in terms of ethics and equity. Evans pointed to the history of racism and eugenics in biology and medicine, a history that he said has not necessarily been fully rejected by the field today, as evidenced by recent controversies about medical devices calibrated to perform better with white skin. “I think we should approach this field with caution, as with all fields,” Evans said. “The tension lies between inclusive design and understanding that socially mediated categories like race and gender are themselves kind of fictions that we need to navigate really carefully.”

While there are no easy answers to ensuring inclusion, equity, and ethics in biotechnology, Evans said that existing work by Black, disabled, Indigenous, and other minority scholars on the topic of genetics in medicine is likely to be relevant to biocomputing and other biotechnologies. He added that engaging with groups that have pioneered security and privacy protections for biomedical data sharing can help ensure that the field’s first practices are best practices.

With regard to the role of government and regulation as these biotechnologies mature, Evans said that a key role for government is to set standards and prioritize research in areas such as security where private firms might not be otherwise inclined to focus their efforts. He added that it will be critical to ensure adequate knowledge transfer from academia and the private sector to the government bodies involved. As a cautionary example, he noted that gaps in technical knowledge led the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to miss software problems that resulted in patients being exposed to high amounts of radiation when computers first started to be used in the administration of radiotherapy. The adoption of new biotechnologies in medicine and other fields could raise

similar issues when the risks fall outside the realm of traditional risk assessment knowledge and practices, he said.

Erlich added that standards, whether arising from government or other sources, could influence the path ahead for DNA storage technologies. An absence of standards could lead to a proliferation of approaches to reading and using DNA data, which may ultimately lower costs but reduce interoperability between technologies.

FUTURE OUTLOOK

In a wide-ranging discussion, the speakers examined the future outlook for biology-based and bio-inspired data storage, computing, and communication technologies, including the near- and long-term opportunities they present; the societal impact of their potential applications; key barriers and bottlenecks; and examples of priority areas for future development of technology and practices.

DNA Data Storage

Several participants noted that DNA data storage is among the most mature technologies discussed at the workshop, although there are still many unanswered questions, in particular with regard to how this new data storage modality might enable new modes of computation. Erlich highlighted some key advantages of DNA-based data storage and biocomputing approaches over conventional electronics, including the ability to embed information in a wide variety of objects or substances; the potential to perform in-memory computation without transferring the data to CPUs; and potentially the ability to propagate information from node to node in nonstandard ways, akin to the way SARS-CoV-2 spreads rapidly through the human population via exhalations.

Building on these points, Bathe added that the opportunity to store vast amounts of data in small spaces with little or no maintenance cost represents a distinct advantage for DNA-based data storage. He speculated that it might be possible to store, for example, a zettabyte of data in a space the size of a coffee mug within a decade, but he noted that large-scale implementation will require a significant reduction in the cost of DNA synthesis. He added that DNA-based information storage also could enable new strategies for massively parallel computing, for example, by using enzymes or other molecules to facilitate interactions between vast numbers of DNA files simultaneously. “[Futurist] Roy Amara said we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run,” Bathe noted. “I think we’re still in that short run overestimation, and I think it will take decades to see where it really goes.”

Computation and Communication

Several participants suggested that biocomputing and bio-inspired communication technologies are likely to find their first applications in the sphere of biomedicine. Zorlutuna posited that her team’s bio-oscillation computational approach may be initially used for biomedical applications such as biorobotics. To advance this technology farther, she said there is a need to develop methods for tailoring cells for faster and more cost-effective fabrication of bio-oscillator arrays, perhaps through the use of stem cells.

Mitra said that bio-inspired engineering advances could enable important near-term applications in microbiology. For example, this work could help inform ways to overcome antimicrobial resistance or build microbial fuel cells for nanomachines. She said that the applications for molecular communication are less clear at this point, though there may be opportunities to leverage these approaches for in-body telemetry and sensing for biomedical applications.

One key barrier to implementation of in-body biotechnologies, however, is the need to interface electronic and biological components. For example, Eckford said that getting two nanobots to communicate with each other is likely an easier problem to solve than the question of how to extract the information generated by these devices and move it outside of the body into a system where it can be processed and interpreted. While an information transfer rate of tens to hundreds of bits per second would likely be sufficient for communication

between nanobots, moving streams of data from a large array of nanobots in the aggregate presents a much more difficult problem. Eckford speculated that an in-body demonstration system might be on the 20-year horizon but applications are likely more on the 30-year timeframe. As these approaches advance, Mitra added that another issue to consider is what happens to in-body devices after they are deployed: would they eventually decay or exit the body, or remain in place forever?

Environmental Applications

Beyond biomedicine, the speakers highlighted the potential benefits these biotechnologies may offer for environmental and ecological applications. For example, Goñi-Moreno suggested that techniques for engineered organisms could be used to restore collapsing ecosystems, for example, by programming soil bacteria to remediate pollutants. Evans and Mitra said that in addition to addressing the technical challenges of such applications, it is also important to account for how interactions with wild organisms and other features of the natural environment may influence the engineered organisms and the environment. Pointing to ill-fated experiments with biological engineering to control invasive species in Australia, Evans noted that the field of synthetic biology is still early in the process of developing standards and suggested that government is best positioned to provide safe testbeds for bioengineering projects. Tom Knight (Ginkgo Bioworks) added that researchers are exploring ways to mitigate the potential downsides of the uncontrolled release of engineered organisms by making organisms that are dependent on specific chemicals that must be added to the environment in order for them to survive. Goñi-Moreno posited that keeping engineered cells alive after environmental release would be a fairly large challenge and suggested that it will be important to find ways to use evolution to the advantage of the overall goal of these efforts. Mitra cautioned that it is important to recognize that humanity’s goals may not align with what organisms and ecosystems are “optimizing” from their perspective, suggesting a need to better quantify the objective functions of biological systems and how they relate to conceptions of what is “good.”

Potential Research Directions

The speakers identified several areas that are ripe for further exploration as research moves forward. Vorobeychik said that ensuring facial recognition and identification technologies function as they should is growing increasingly important as they become integral to device authentication and other computer vision applications such as autonomous driving. He speculated that technologies with biological components could open remarkable new opportunities—for example, raising the prospect that machine learning could be applied to DNA data directly—but also new potential vulnerabilities.

Goñi-Moreno and Mitra discussed the challenges related to extracting digital signals from biological systems. Goñi-Moreno noted that in his work, noise creates a substantial barrier to quantifying signals. Fluctuations in noise can lead to different information being extracted from the same scenario. Mitra stressed that, although digital data are clearly powerful, it is not the only way to characterize information. Even analog signals can yield valuable information, and she said it should not be assumed that all analog information should be converted to digital data when developing devices that interface with or are inspired by living organisms. “There are different ways of quantifying information,” Mitra said. “We’re not restricted to a digital world, and we can definitely signal and characterize the amount of information we can transfer even when [the signals] are analog.” Mitra added that developing a new “biological information theory”—for example, elucidating the theoretical underpinnings of signaling mechanisms—is an important opportunity for the field and should be achievable in the next 20 years.

Interdisciplinary Exchange

The participants discussed how the two-way interactions between information science and biology can help to advance each field. For instance, Eckford said that computer vision is one area where information science has gained insights from biology (e.g., on how the human optical system works) while biology has benefited from image analysis technologies. He added that information theory can also help shed light on biology and identified this as an important area for future

exploration. Goñi-Moreno said that there is information that is readable with biological but not electronic systems, and that biological systems can influence information science at the theoretical level. For example, insights on how living systems evolve and mutate can help inform approaches to improve the operators at work in algorithms. Knight and Todd Coleman (Stanford University) also noted that neuronal signaling is an active research area that has significant overlap with information science. Expanding on this, Eckford said that innovations in molecular motors and nonlinear reactions could open new opportunities for molecular communication beyond diffusion-mediated signals, akin to creating a series of molecular dominoes to effect a signal.

Even beyond the intersection of biology and information science, speakers stressed the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration and data sharing among researchers. In light of the critical role of exchange among computer scientists, domain scientists, engineers, experimentalists, and theoreticians, Mitra noted the importance of incentivizing and advancing interdisciplinary education and training to equip collaborators from different disciplines with the language and skills to work together productively. Mitra added that scientists can be understandably protective of their data, making it important to find ways to facilitate data sharing while supporting researchers’ intellectual property rights. “In order to really move this field forward, everyone needs to have better access to data,” Mitra said. “We need to understand and figure out how we can incentivize data sharing in such a way that we don’t jeopardize the research activity of our scientists.” Evans added that it will be crucial to bring code libraries and databases together in systematic ways in order to extract knowledge from those shared resources, something that has been a struggle in other areas of science.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In closing the workshop, Chaikof quoted from Richard Hamming’s seminar titled You and Your Research: “If you don’t work on important problems, it’s not likely that you’ll do important work.”¹⁷ The 2-day workshop provided a forum for researchers and engineers to share key achievements at the intersection of biology and information science. The participants discussed the status and potential applications of several technology areas along with their key advantages; limitations; and related ethics, security, and privacy issues, summarized in Table 1. In the workshop presentations and discussions, participants explored how biological and bio-inspired approaches for information storage, computation, and communication could help address pressing issues in areas such as medicine and environmental restoration, while providing powerful new platforms for growing the information economy. Yet, even as these innovations may help to solve some problems, they may also create new risks and vulnerabilities. Many speakers urged an interdisciplinary, inclusive, and purposeful approach to anticipating and addressing potential pitfalls in terms of equity, security, and personal privacy while facilitating the adoption of these technologies and appropriate regulations in order for society to reap their benefits.

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TABLE 1 Overview of Example Technologies Discussed at the Workshop

NOTE: This table lists examples of technologies shared by workshop participants. It does not include all ideas mentioned by participants, and should not be interpreted as consensus conclusions or recommendations of the National Academies.

DISCLAIMER: This Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief was prepared by ANNE JOHNSON with contributions from ANDREW BREMER and NANCY CONNELL as a factual summary of what occurred at the workshop. The statements are those of the individual workshop participants and do not necessarily represent the views of all participants, the workshop planning committee, the Standing Committee on Biotechnology Capabilities and National Security Needs, or the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

REVIEWERS: To ensure that this Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief meets institutional standards for quality and objectivity, it was reviewed by ANDREW ECKFORD (York University), ANDREW KILIANSKI (International AIDS Vaccine Initiative), and ROBERT SCHOBER (Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg). The review comments and draft manuscript remain confidential to protect the integrity of the process.

Workshop planning committee members: TODD COLEMAN (Chair), Stanford University; DENISE BAKEN, Shield Analysis Technology, LLC, ANDREW KILIANSKI, International AIDS Vaccine Initiative.

The Standing Committee on Biotechnology Capabilities and National Security Needs, under which this workshop was organized, is supported by the U.S. government.

Suggested citation: National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2022. Using Biology for Communication and Information Transmission: Proceedings of a Workshop—in Brief. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/26560.

Division on Earth and Life Studies Copyright 2022 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.