New scientific frontiers and emerging technologies within the life sciences pose many global challenges to society. Big Data is a premier example, especially with respect to individual, national, and international security. Here a Special Agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation discusses the security implications of Big Data and the need for security in the life sciences.
http://www.molbiolcell.org/content/26/22/3894.full
A very good example is precision personalized medicine, where you are seeing tremendous investments in drug development, particularly in cancer research and metabolic disease, where very large data sets are leveraged. If you are looking at an individual’s genome, it is just one snap shot. What are needed are data over time, during exposure to the environment, for example. From the human standpoint, maybe this is looking at your lifestyle—daily diet or exercise. It all goes into helping determine potential health vulnerabilities and appropriate therapies. If you set that as a stage and then look at potential policy aspects, there is a lot of activity looking at privacy, but not a whole lot looking specifically at security.
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The power of the life sciences is open source, open sharing, but in it there is the added dimension of an individual’s very intimate information. So there may be a call to redefine how we address security in the future. It may not be building up secure walls, whether they are physical or virtual, that protect data like our financial data. In this world of the life sciences, which is inherently open, we are going to have to rethink security.