Bioengineering researchers have recently constructed the final steps required to engineer yeast to manufacture opiates, including morphine and other medical drugs, from glucose, drawing significant interest, and concern, from the media and academics in the science and policy fields, including at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).  

“Researchers are getting better at building biology based platforms to create a wide variety of compounds that are difficult, inefficient, or sometimes impossible to create by other means,” Dr. Megan J. Palmer told National Public Radio in the weekly Science Friday segment.

She highlighted how these platforms can enable production of potentially safer, cheaper and more effective drugs. “But one significant concern is if we create the full pathway to go from glucose to this intermediate and then all the way to things like morphine, this could feed into illicit markets and bolster new illicit markets.”

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The media this week has focused on comments by researchers who pointed out that the modified yeast could be used to manufacture heroin, a synthesized version of morphine. The prospect of “home-brewed heroin” has been prominently featured in news coverage.

There are significant concerns, says Palmer, but she cautioned that focusing solely on that possibility could lead to bad policy outcomes.

“There is a big opportunity for researchers, policy makers, and industry to work together to figure out what controls they can put in,” she said in a separate interview. “We have time to get ahead of this problem. We now have choices in how we build and regulate the technology. The challenge for regulatory and technical communities will be to avoid reactive quick fixes. It’s encouraging to see researchers engaging in these issues early on.”

The challenge will be to find ways for researchers, law enforcers, and policy experts to work together to build safeguards into the biology itself as well as into organizations and institutions. 

“We really need to think about security as a design principle,” Palmer said. She hopes to foster thoughtful and rigorous analysis of how the design of biotechnology impacts future governance options.

“This issue highlights beautifully the nexus between public policy and science and technology, which is where CISAC has already, and will continue to make important contributions,” said CISAC Co-Director David Relman. Dr. Relman is also the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor in the Departments of Medicine, and of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University. 

CISAC recently hosted a seminar led by Stanford’s Dr. Christina Smolke that discussed technology advances that are resulting in alternative supply chains for drugs, with particular attention to opiates.

Dr. Smolke is also troubled by the over-emphasis of the risks associated with the potential technology. “I believe it’s inflammatory, biased, and not grounded in an accurate representation of the technology. However, the commentary focuses on the risks of the supply chain and proposes regulations/governance for such a technology, without implementing a process to engage various parties in discussions to thoughtfully assess risks, opportunities, and regulatory needs in this context.”

“I think we need to frame this issue in the context of the larger systemic challenges involving the rearrangements of supply chains enabled through bio-manufacturing and how we spread responsible norms and practices,” Palmer said. “We need to think about governance options in terms of human capacities and technical capacities. What safeguards can we engineer into our technologies, and in turn what safeguards can we build into our organizations and institutions?”

Stanford scholars are urging Japan to take advantage of an upcoming opportunity to show clear, heartfelt remorse for its actions surrounding World War II.

Making such amends will give Japan credibility as it seeks to assume a global leadership role well into the future, they say.

On Aug. 15, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will publish a short statement to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, which follows similar practices of his predecessors.

Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), which has long advocated wartime reconciliation in Asia, recently issued a 15-page report in English and Japanese featuring eight hypothetical statements suggesting what the Japanese prime minister might say in his August address. The report, which is available in both English and Japanese, was recently made available to academics, media and the general public and has already received interest from the Japanese media.

The wording of Abe's statement will be scrutinized by governments and experts in Asia and around the world, the Stanford scholars say. During WWII, China and Korea, as well as other Asian nations, endured brutal Japanese military occupations.

"Many have been speculating what the (Abe) statement will be like," wrote Takeo Hoshi, director of the Japan Program at the Shorenstein Center, and APARC associate director for research Daniel Sneider in the report.

For example, Hoshi and Sneider asked, will Abe follow the direction set by prior Japanese prime ministers by expressing remorse for the suffering of Japan's Asian neighbors while apologizing for past aggression and colonization? Future collaboration in world affairs is also important, they added.

"We asked our colleagues what they would say in the 70th anniversary statement if they were the prime minister of Japan, and to write their own version of the statement," Hoshi and Sneider wrote.

"Our goal is to understand the diversity of reasonable views on the issue of Japan's responsibility for the cruel and violent war and Japan's role in building a peaceful and prosperous world," Hoshi and Sneider said.

The Stanford experts who wrote the statements included Hoshi and Sneider as well as Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; Peter Duus, a professor emeritus of Japanese history; Thomas Fingar, a distinguished fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute; David Holloway, a professor of international history and of political science; Yong Suk Lee, the SK Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute; and Harry Rowen, a professor emeritus of public policy and management.

For example, Fingar said in his version, "Let us also resolve to make the 80th anniversary of World War II the 10th anniversary of a more cooperative, more inclusive, and more secure region," and Hoshi wrote in his version, "To avoid any potential misunderstandings, Japan needs to recall past failures, remember the suffering of neighboring Asian peoples, and reaffirm the commitment to world peace more than ever."

On the subject of women, Lee's version noted, "The war and Japan's colonial rule created much suffering, but I would like to especially ask forgiveness to the women from many nations who suffered under colonial rule."

In August 2014, the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center issued a report on a Stanford-hosted dialogue on World War II memories in northeast Asia. Heightened tensions the last few years among the governments of China, Japan and South Korea have revolved around territorial disputes and the way WWII is portrayed in speeches and educational materials.

"Each nation in northeast Asia and even the U.S. has selective or divided memories of the past, and does not really understand the views of the other side," said Stanford's Gi-Wook Shin, director of the Shorenstein center, in a 2014 Stanford news release.

Clifton Parker is a writer for the Stanford News Service.

Responses to the project

Toyo Keizai, a leading Japanese business weekly, published all eight verisons in English and Japanese stating, "we hope this will provide an opportunity to bring about a wide range of discussion."

University of Tokyo professor Tetsuji Okazaki wrote about the project in the Asahi Shimbun (the article is in Japanese and also attached as a PDF below).

It’s been 29 years since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, but two nuclear security experts affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) say there are still lessons to be learned from the worst nuclear accident of the 20th century.

In a new book by Sonja Schmid, the former CISAC science fellow argues that the consensus in the West about the cause of the disaster – that it was an inevitable result of a deeply flawed, backward Soviet system –  has precluded Western nuclear industries and policymakers from meaningfully incorporating the Soviet experience into their own practices.

The book, “Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry”, is being praised by leading experts in the nuclear security field, including Freeman-Spogli Institute (FSI) Senior Fellow David Holloway who wrote: "[Schmid's] argument that the Soviet experience has to be incorporated into our broader understanding of the nuclear industry is both convincing and important."

Schmid was a social science research associate at Stanford University, a science fellow at CISAC, and a lecturer in the Program in Science, Technology and Society (STS) at Stanford from 2005-2007. She is now an assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s STS Department.

Schmid credits CISAC with providing resources crucial to the conception, research, and completion of “Producing Power,” including multiple travel grants to conduct research for the book, help with editing preliminary drafts, and a final book edit.

Schmid also tapped CISAC’s stable of nuclear experts. Along with Holloway, CISAC Associate Director for Research Lynn Eden mentored and supported her project. Siegfried Hecker, an FSI senior fellow, connected her with multiple Russian interviewees.

“Mentoring Sonja was a great pleasure. She came to CISAC with deep insight about the close connection between Soviet state bureaucracies and the reactor design choices that those bureaucrats made. It was an amazingly interesting and ambitious project,” Eden said.

“CISAC is a scholarly community that encourages and supports outstanding research and writing that is in some way policy-relevant,” she said. “For our pre- and post-doctoral fellows especially, we want to encourage them and help them to think deeply and/or broadly about a question that affects people’s lives, and to write clearly about it.”

Edward Geist, a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC, said Schmid’s book is the first to grapple with the institutional history of Soviet nuclear power.

“The traditional accounts have tended to organize events around a ‘what went wrong’ narrative,” said Geist, whose article “Political Fallout: The Failure of the Emergency Management at Chernobyl”, appeared in the spring issue of Slavic Review. ”There’s a school of thought that emerged in the Soviet Union and was readily picked up abroad that says the Chernobyl disaster was the ultimate example of everything that was wrong with the Soviet Union,” Geist said.

This worries Geist, who specializes in nuclear power, Soviet history, and emergency management.

“As a result of having lived through the worst, Russian and Ukrainian nuclear energy industry leaders, to my mind, actually have a more realistic mindset regarding the hazards of nuclear energy than their Western counterparts,” Geist said.  “While a catastrophic nuclear accident in the United States is really unlikely, the nuclear industry claims to have made nuclear power safe through superior methods and procedures–and that attitude can forestall effective emergency planning.”

The Chernobyl disaster hurt popular trust in nuclear energy, including in the United States. The still-popular narrative that Chernobyl was a problem purely of Soviet making was spun by representatives of nuclear industries in other countries to protect their interests from popular backlash.

By detailing the decision processes and procedures behind the Soviet Union’s nuclear reactor choice, design and commercialization, Schmid aims to show that the Soviet process was rational and the product of expert input rather than an irrational byproduct of the Communist regime. Chernobyl, in short, was an accident of history rather than a byproduct of an illegitimate system and should therefore be studied by members of the Western nuclear industry and policymakers.

“The Western nuclear field has more to learn from the Soviet experience than they care to admit. The bureaucratic practices of the Soviets are not really that unique to them and can be repeated by our bureaucracies,” said Geist.

The 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan was a case in point. Fukushima’s reactors were designed and built by Americans.

It’s Schmid’s hope that by putting Chernobyl in the context of what was a sophisticated nuclear energy bureaucracy that had many more successes than failures, much like its American counterpart, that lessons of caution can be drawn by the latter.

“What Chernobyl has demonstrated (and Fukushima has only confirmed),” writes Schmid, “is that organizing a civilian nuclear industry remains at best a high-stakes process of trial and error.”

Geist, with an eye on his field of emergency management, agrees.

“The lesson from Chernobyl and Fukushima is accidents happen no matter what procedures or levels of sophistication, but accidents need not be catastrophes if you’re willing to learn from others’ errors and incorporate them into planning.”