BIOSEAL Act of 2025

Attached is a draft of the BIOSEAL Act of 2025. I think it would be an important legislative effort to balance allowing important pathogen research to proceed but with safeguards that allow attribution if the research causes a laboratory-acquired infection that gets into the community or even spreads more widely. It requires that all research funded by the federal government that involves human or animal pathogens be traceable. This traceability is made possible by requiring all researchers to insert a laboratory-specific 'watermark' into the genome of any organism they intend to work on. This watermark is a silent mutation that is in a position of the genome where it does not change the properties of the pathogen, thus not affecting the research in any way. The location of this mutation in the genome is reported to the federal funding agency within 30 days of funding and the beginning of research. From that time forward, any community infection with an organism that is also under study at a nearby laboratory can be quickly identified as a lab leak, or not, by sequencing the organism. If it has the watermark, there is a 99.99% likelihood it came from that lab (it is not 100% because a natural mutation could, 1 out of 30,000 times, be in the same spot in the genome). If it does not have the watermark, the lab is exonerated. 

 

The second part of the legislation involves requiring that all sequencing experiments be conducted on machines that have a legally acceptable level of 'chain of custody' for any sequencing on a given machine. That would permit, under a court order with probable cause or the civil equivalent, the investigation of what research was going on at a particular laboratory.