![\"Fresno](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/ReedleyLab01.jpg\" "\\"Fresno")
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Fresno County Assistant Director of Public Health Joe Prado, right, projects images of refrigerators, freezers and various liquids found in a Reedley warehouse run by a Chinese-owned company under investigation for operating illegally, during a timeline presentation at the Fresno County Board of Supervisor\u2019s meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2023. AB 1864 would make California the first state to require screening of custom mail-order DNA and gene synthesis orders to prevent misuse and protect the public.<\/p>\n
CRAIG KOHLRUSS<\/p>\n
Fresno Bee file<\/p>\n
In late 2022, a code enforcement officer in Reedley noticed<\/a> a garden hose sticking out from an abandoned warehouse. Inside, she found more than 30 refrigerators and freezers containing thousands of fluid-filled vials. Later investigation discovered labels for HIV, malaria, tuberculosis and dengue<\/a>. Earlier this year, police found a similar setup<\/a> in a Las Vegas garage with ties to the same man.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a reality behind the story I find even more shocking: Regardless of whether the people running labs like these are malicious, reckless or clueless, there is no law anywhere in the world that would prevent them from ordering the genome of a deadly pathogen through the mail. In fact, the DNA needed to create Ebola is less regulated than the penicillin at your local pharmacy.<\/p>\n Assemblymember Marc Berman, D-Palo Alto, aims to solve that. In February, he introduced Assembly Bill 1864<\/a>, which would make California the first state to require companies selling custom mail-order DNA \u2014 and the machines that make it \u2014 to screen orders and make sure only legitimate researchers can access the building blocks of pathogens.<\/p>\n Discovering the issue<\/p>\n I first became concerned about this problem two decades ago while serving on the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, a U.S. government advisory board on biological risks. Scientists had begun publishing methods for reconstructing viruses from strands of DNA, including the 1918 influenza strain<\/a> responsible for a pandemic that killed an estimated 50 million people. Around the same time, companies had begun offering custom-made DNA through the mail. What was to stop someone from ordering the one to recreate the other? Could a pandemic be launched from a garage?<\/p>\n Our 2006 report concluded<\/a> that synthetic DNA could be misused to create dangerous pathogens, and we recommended screening to prevent that scenario. The scientific community took the recommendation seriously. Industry formed the International Gene Synthesis Consortium<\/a> in 2009 to coordinate voluntary screening, and the U.S. government published a series of guidelines culminating in a screening framework<\/a> released in 2024 that more than 20 firms now publicly attest to following<\/a>.<\/p>\n Compliance, however, has never been enforced.<\/p>\n Rapid advances in AI and synthetic biology make voluntary screening woefully inadequate. In 2006, perhaps a few hundred people in the world had the expertise to turn a synthesized sequence into a functional pathogen. That number is now growing fast. Frontier AI systems are increasingly capable of walking non-experts through complex biological procedures. Safety evaluations published by leading AI companies show<\/a> their systems outperforming trained virologists on questions about highly technical laboratory protocols<\/a>. As a result, the California Report on Frontier AI Policy<\/a> concluded there is \u201cgrowing evidence\u201d that AI could enable biological attacks.<\/p>\n