evidence: Natural processes of mutation and transmission caused these threats to human society. Human beings could create similar or even more dangerous threats—by accident or on purpose. Such accidents happened, for example, in 2003 when a Singaporean researcher acquired SARS from inadvertent cross-contamination of viral samples.8 In 2004, the accidental release of the SARS virus from a Chinese laboratory infected nine people, one of whom died.9 In 2014, a researcher working in a lab in India was accidentally infected with buffalopox virus,10 and in 2019 more than 3,000 brucellosis cases were detected in China due to contaminated exhaust from a brucellosis vaccine–making company.11 Going further back in history, during World War II, Japan deliberately used pathogens to spread plague, anthrax, typhoid, cholera, and other diseases among Chinese military and civilians.12 The United States and the Soviet Union developed major biological weapons programs during the Cold War,13 which Russia, then part of the Soviet Union, continued illegally even after it signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972.14 Yet, if societies and governments overreact and impose ill-conceived regulations to control these risks, they would defeat themselves by depriving the world of the great benefits that bioscience and technology can provide. [...] Varadharajan Sundaramurthy, group leader, National Centre for Biological Sciences [...] Shilpa Joshi, associate biomodeling scientist