Designing safety policies to meet evolving needs: iGEM as a testbed for proactive and adaptive risk management.

iGEM has spent the past decade encouraging teams to push their projects to the frontiers of synthetic biology. However, as project complexity increases, so too does the level of assumed risk. In the absence of a coherent international framework for evaluating these risks in synthetic biology, iGEM has recently engaged with the MIT Program on Emerging Technologies to develop a progressive approach for handling questions of safety and security.