Life sciences research has vastly improved the human condition by curing diseases and reducing harm from a wide variety of human ailments. But it could also cause grave harm, either by accident or deliberate misuse by insiders or third parties. In this report, the authors explain the effects of using tort liability to incentivize researchers and research institutions to create a culture of safety in their laboratories.

How Does and Should Tort Liability Affect High-Consequence Life Sciences Research?

James M. Anderson, Gerald L. Epstein, Katie Dammer, Elika Somani, Lloyd Dixon, Bethany Saunders-Medina

ResearchPublished May 27, 2026

Life sciences research has vastly improved the human condition by curing diseases and reducing harm from a wide variety of human ailments. But it could also cause grave harm, either by accident or deliberate misuse by insiders or third parties. Tort liability is one tool that policymakers can use to create incentives to reduce the risks from this research. But existing knowledge of the incentives that liability creates and whether those incentives affect behavior in the context of life sciences research is limited.

Laboratories that conduct high-risk research owe multiple, overlapping duties to the general public under both federal and state laws. These duties arise from regulatory compliance obligations and tort liability. Awareness of these duties—and any resulting behavioral modifications or institutional changes in response to such awareness—has practical implications for public safety.

In this report, the authors review existing tort law and discuss specific cases in which tort liability played a role in establishing precedent for researchers and laboratories. The authors explain the benefits and challenges of using tort liability to incentivize researchers and research institutions to establish and enact necessary safety protocols. In particular, the authors focus on how researchers and institutions perceive, understand, and respond to potential liability exposure and how those perceptions might affect research practices.

Key Takeaways

  • A complex web of social norms, guidance, regulations, statutes, and common law governs safety for high-consequence life sciences research.
  • Institutions or researchers could theoretically be held liable in tort for serious harms that come from high-consequence life sciences research, although litigation is rare.
  • Researchers are much more aware of specific regulations and policies to promote safety than of the risk of tort liability.
  • In contrast, research administrators and lawyers are more aware than researchers of the risk of tort liability.
  • Tort liability plays a small but important role in creating incentives for safety by serving as a high-level set of incentives to reduce risk.

Recommendations

  • Courts and legislators should adopt a balanced approach that integrates tort liability with statutes, guidance, regulation, oversight, and professional norms to manage the risks and benefits of high-consequence biological research.
  • Courts or legislators could hold laboratories strictly liable for any harms that result from high-consequence research. Such a change might increase the safety incentives at these institutions, but the change might occur at a possible cost of deterring valuable research and/or creating incentives to conduct said research at labs that are less subject to tort liability (because they are less resourced or not in the United States). These labs might be less safe.

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Anderson, James M., Gerald L. Epstein, Katie Dammer, Elika Somani, Lloyd Dixon, and Bethany Saunders-Medina, How Does and Should Tort Liability Affect High-Consequence Life Sciences Research? Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2026. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA4804-1.html.
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