Biosecurity Comics Help Communicate Risk and Inform Policy

In 2024, an interdisciplinary group of scientists and bioethicists shook the synthetic biology world when they published a paper arguing against pursing a certain line of research—the creation of mirror life.¹ Mirror life refers to organisms that would be made up of molecules with the opposite chirality, or “handedness,” of the ones that occur in nature. The scientists warned that creating even a simple mirror organism like mirror bacteria could put life on Earth in danger: They would have no natural predators, allowing them to propagate unchecked, and if they infected a human, the immune system would struggle to detect them.

At the time, Ketan Thorat, a scientist and regulatory compliance officer at BRIC-Institute for Stem Cell Science and Regenerative Medicine, found the paper fascinating. “I realized that mirror life itself is such a beautiful thought experiment.” But as he started explaining the ethical quagmire that is mirror life to his non-scientist friends, he noticed that they had a hard time visualizing what a chiral molecule looked like.

“I felt that such an important discussion is being lost because of the lack of understanding,” said Thorat. Two of the students in his office at the time were very good artists, so he asked them if they could draw something that could help explain the difference between left- and right-handed DNA molecules. “They drew it, and I was so excited by it that I proposed that if we can actually create an entire comic.”

Now, Thorat and a small team of scientists and artists have created a series of comics about different topics in biosecurity through a program called the Bio-Responsibility Collective. With these comics, Thorat and his team hope to use engaging visual storytelling to help scientists and policy makers better understand biosecurity and its role in keeping life on Earth safe.

An Anti-Alarmist Approach to Biosecurity Communication

The ability to engineer biology is a relatively recent scientific development, Thorat explained. “Until [four or five] decades ago, all we did was to observe and study biology,” he said. But with the advent of genetic engineering in the 1970s, that all changed, necessitating the development of policies and regulations on biological research.

These regulations are important, for example, because they can prevent research that has good intentions from turning dangerous in the wrong hands—dual-use research of concern (DURC). An example of DURC would be if a scientist engineered a non-human-infective virus into one that could infect humans with the goal of developing a vaccine against it. However, if that virus were to infect a human, either due to negligence or malice, it could be very dangerous for society.

One of the biggest challenges in helping people understand biosecurity topics like mirror life and DURC, Thorat said, is that for a long time, many in the field have taken an alarmist approach.

“[People will say,] ‘if you don’t do this, it might lead into this, which is extremely catastrophic,’” he said. “In our comics we have kept an approach that…if we do the biosecurity effectively, this will not happen.”

In their recent comic on mirror life, the team does precisely this. By clearly laying out the different properties a mirror cell could have and what the consequences of creating mirror life would be, they wrap up the comic with what scientists and regulators are advocating for and doing to prevent those outcomes.

While the main audience for these comics is policymakers, Thorat thinks that scientists could also benefit from the comics as a reminder of how to keep their research secure.

“Even though regulations exist and the researchers know that regulations exist, more often than it should, it becomes a tick-boxing activity instead of really putting thought into the risk associated with the research,” he said. “I feel that these tools can be a mode of communication there as well.”

As artificial intelligence (AI) use increases in biological research, Thorat and his team are planning to create comics about AI- and cyber-biosecurity soon.

From Scripts and Sketches to Biosecurity Policies

To build their comics, Thorat and his team start with the story they want to tell, moving frame by frame until they have as much detail on the page as possible. From there, they create the characters and backgrounds to include in the scene. They have developed a uniform design style and color palette for the comics. They also work hard to ensure that their human characters have diverse skin and hair colors as many studies have shown that the majority of characters in children’s comics are white, leading to underrepresentation.

“Our characters all have longer eyes. It's inspired by an Indian art form,” Thorat said. “We wanted to also ensure that this part of the globe is also represented.”

To distribute the comic, the team shares it among their networks, but Thorat knew that if they really wanted the comics to make an impact, they had to reach many more people. So, he reached out to the team at BioPrevail, which is a non-profit organization involved in biological threat preparedness. The BioPrevail team agreed to share the comics in their newsletter.

As the initial team members moved onto other institutions, now awareness of the comics has spread too. They formed the Bio-Responsibility Collective as the avenue to develop and distribute the comics.

So far, the feedback Thorat and his team have received on the comics has been positive. “One of the authors of the [mirror life] Science article, she's on my campus, so I showed it to her, and she absolutely loved the idea,” he said, adding that she told him she’d like to use their comic in her talks on mirror life in the future. Thorat is excited whenever he hears that people want to use the comics for educational and communication purposes, but he’s still waiting on one specific kind of response, he said.

“Everyone is like, ‘Hey, it was so cool to look at,’” said Thorat. “But, I'm looking forward to feedback in which someone says that, ‘Hey, I used it in this discussion with a policy maker,’ and that would really be the goal.”