Programs Offered
Goldman School Project on Information Technology and Homeland Security (ITHS)
The Goldman School's Project on Information Technology and Homeland Security ("ITHS") uses advanced social science disciplines to analyze grand challenge problems facing information technology and homeland security.
Mission
Universities usually teach engineering and the social sciences as if each subject were separate and self-contained. In practice, the two are inextricably linked. Many of the 21st Century’s grand challenge problems – for example, preventing terrorism or fighting diseases that afflict the developing world – are at least as much social as technological. ITHS asks how the powerful tools developed by economists and other social scientists can make new technologies more effective.
ITHS draws on the Goldman School’s world-class expertise in innovation economics, information markets, risk psychology, game theory, organization design, science policy, politics, law, and related disciplines to develop insights for moving technology forward. We routinely collaborate with Berkeley scientists and engineers working in information technology, synthetic biology, sensors and actuators, particle and nuclear physics, nanotechnology, and other fields at the forefront of human knowledge.
Current Research
ITHS collaborates with Berkeley scientists and engineers working in information technology, synthetic biology, sensors and actuators, particle and nuclear physics, nanotechnology, and other fields at the forefront of human knowledge. Current research areas include:
- WMD Terrorism
WMD Terrorism poses the greatest single threat to Americans and our society. ITHS is working with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and other leading institutions to compile what is known about the threat and the various scientific and policy options for meeting it. The project has produced two on-line, graduate-level courses (Introduction to Homeland Security and Synthetic Biology and Security) and we will offer a third on-line (WMD Terrorism) in 2009. All lectures are freely downloadable over the Web. We are also working with more than two dozen collaborators to write WMD Terrorism: Science and Policy Choices (MIT Press forthcoming, August 2009). This will provide the first-ever book-length scholarly review of the WMD terrorism threat and what society can do to manage it. - New Medicines and Vaccines
Conventional patent incentives are largely ineffective at delivering drugs and vaccines for “diseases of poverty” in the developing world and rich nation “orphan diseases.” ITHS uses modern innovation economics to design cost-effective solutions for this long-standing problem. [More] - Homeland Security’s R&D Challenge: BioShield and BARDA
In large measure, homeland security is an R&D problem. This is nowhere more obvious than in biosecurity. Since 2004, the US Congress has passed two statutes (Bioshield and BARDA) and appropriated more than six billion dollars to develop drugs and vaccines to protect the nation against biological weapons. Sadly, very little has been accomplished. The reason, almost certainly, is that Congress’s incentives have been poorly designed. Fortunately, economists have studied incentive design for years. ITHS exploits these insights to develop cost-effective strategies for spending taxpayer dollars.[More] - Open Source Drug Discovery
Open source methods have revolutionized the way that human beings create complex computer programs. In principle, the same methods ought to work for pharmaceuticals and other information goods. Despite extensive speculation, however, there is still no convincing example of an open source drug discovery collaboration. This is not really surprising: Even in software, open source routinely flourishes in some niches but not others. Fortunately, economists have studied these extensively. The trick now is to recognize analogous opportunities in drug discovery and design new open source collaborations to colonize those spaces. [More] - Synthetic Biology: Making Real World Improvements to Biosecurity
Genetic engineering used to mean extracting DNA from one organism and inserting it in another. Since the 1990s, however, scientists have begun learning how to synthesize arbitrary DNA sequences from petrochemicals. This means, at least potentially, that engineers can now create organisms from DNA “blueprints” that have never existed before. The new field of synthetic biology seeks to exploit this power to design organisms – for example, microbes that make jet fuel from sugar cane or seek out and attack cancer cells – that were previously unthinkable. At the same time, synthetic biologists have been acutely aware that this power could be misused. Since 2006, ITHS has helped the academic and commercial synthetic biology communities design and launch real world initiatives to manage this risk. [More]
Expertise
ITHS draws on the Goldman School's world-class expertise in innovation economics, information markets, risk psychology, game theory, organization design, science policy, politics, law and related disciplines to develop insights for moving technology forward.
Support
Institutional support for ITHS is provided by a generous gift from John and Linda Schacht Gage, with additional support for specific projects from the Carnegie Foundation. ITHS is administered and based at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy.
Last Updated: 11/21/2008
