A brand new evaluation of roughly 600,000 analysis papers reveals structural limits to single-country safety oversight of dual-use analysis and identifies trade-offs that policymakers face when strengthening such oversight.
KAIST (President Kwang Hyung Lee) introduced in the present day that Professor Seokbeom Kwon of the School of Business and Technology Management has printed a large-scale empirical evaluation analyzing the structural limitations of tightening safety oversight on dual-use analysis and its potential price to scientific progress. The research seems in Science on June 5, 2026.
Dual-use analysis (DUR) refers to scientific analysis that has each reliable civilian functions—akin to vaccine and therapy improvement—and potential security-sensitive functions, akin to organic weapons or bioterrorism. Examples embrace analysis on viral transmission mechanisms or pathogen habits.
The United States has been strengthening safety oversight of dual-use analysis. Most lately, Executive Order 14292, signed in May 2025, intensified federal oversight of organic analysis with potential safety implications, together with harmful gain-of-function analysis. The U.S. authorities additionally has prolonged the coverage definition of the dual-use analysis to incorporate broader classes along with the gain-of-function analysis. However, current coverage dialogues have relied totally on anecdotal proof and historic case research.
U.S. ex-ante safety oversight establishments are based mostly on National Security Decision Directive 189 (NSDD-189) and apply when the federal authorities is concerned in analysis. Therefore, analysis performed with out federal authorities involvement successfully falls exterior the jurisdiction of this oversight.
Professor Seokbeom Kwon developed a brand new analytical methodology combining the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s multi-stage safety evaluation course of with patent-paper quotation knowledge, and analyzed roughly 600,000 analysis papers. The work has been acknowledged in academia for shifting discussions of dual-use analysis, which had beforehand relied largely on case-based evaluation, towards large-scale empirical evaluation.
The evaluation confirmed that dual-use analysis constantly has better scientific influence than comparable analysis. This implies that analysis topic to the safety oversight tends to play an necessary function in scientific progress and technological innovation.
In addition, the share of dual-use analysis immediately involving the U.S. federal authorities decreased from about 41% in 1981 to about 22% in 2005, whereas the share involving overseas establishments elevated from 35% to 54% over the identical interval. This reveals that whereas U.S. safety oversight mechanisms based mostly on NSDD-189 have been utilized to home analysis, the share of abroad dual-use analysis has continued to develop.
Professor Seokbeom Kwon defined, “Strengthening security oversight on dual-use research by a single country alone may impose disproportionate costs on domestic science, while having structural limits in preventing the development of equally important research conducted overseas,” including, “To achieve both scientific progress and national security, international cooperation and balanced policy design could contribute to mitigating these structural tensions.”
This research offers data-based proof for worldwide coverage discussions surrounding dual-use analysis. In specific, it’s anticipated to function an necessary reference for future discussions on analysis safety regulation and world cooperation methods not solely in biotechnology, but additionally in superior expertise fields which may be related to safety considerations, akin to synthetic intelligence (AI) and quantum expertise.
This research was printed as a sole-author paper by Professor Seokbeom Kwon in Science on June 5, 2026.
※ Paper title: “Dual-use research under scrutiny,” DOI: 10.1126/science.aee2479
This analysis was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea’s Humanities and Social Sciences Young Researcher Support Program (2025S1A5A8009362).