High School Case Competition
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The Mosquito Factory
Save lives now, or answer for the swarm later.
Undergraduate
A city in a tropical region is experiencing its worst dengue outbreak in decades.
Hospitals are overwhelmed, mosquito populations are expanding, and conventional
control measures are becoming increasingly ineffective. Scientists propose a solution:
establish a large-scale facility that breeds genetically modified mosquitoes designed to
reduce the transmission of dengue.
The technology could dramatically reduce disease transmission, but releasing
engineered organisms into the environment carries risks that cannot be completely
predicted. Environmental groups warn about unintended ecological consequences, local
communities question whether they have given meaningful consent, and governments
face pressure to act before the outbreak worsens.
Delegates convene as an international task force to determine whether the mosquito
program should proceed and, if so, under what conditions. They must evaluate scientific
evidence, establish regulatory safeguards, address public concerns, and decide how
much ecological risk is acceptable in exchange for potentially saving thousands of lives.
Characters: Geneticists, epidemiologists, ecologists, public health officials, government
representatives, biotechnology companies, environmental organizations, community
representatives, and bioethicists.
Core conflict: A technology capable of controlling a devastating disease requires
deliberately altering and releasing a living organism into the environment. Delegates
must decide whether the potential public health benefits justify risks that may not be
fully understood.
Mirror Life: The Moratorium We Kept
Break the ban or break the world.
Undergraduate
The molecules of life are chiral. Proteins and nucleic acids in every known organism
share a single handedness, and an organism built entirely from the opposite
enantiomers would be unrecognizable to the immune systems, antibiotics, predators,
and diagnostic assays that constrain ordinary microbes. In 2028, warned by their own
field, governments adopted a moratorium on mirror-organism synthesis. It held for
thirteen years. The prohibition was never total: narrow exemptions preserved
mirror-molecule therapeutics, and a small number of national laboratories continued
defensive characterisation work under classification.
In March 2041, containment failed at one of them. A viable mirror bacterium is now
outside the facility. It does not bind to existing antibiotics, it does not trigger recognised
immune signatures, and routine clinical and environmental assays return negative
because they were never designed to see it. Spread has been confirmed in three
countries. What no one has is a countermeasure, because the moratorium worked
exactly as intended and froze the science that would have produced one. Every
therapeutic, assay, and ecological model the response now requires would have to be
built from a research base that was deliberately left empty.
Delegates convene as an emergency international response authority with days, not
years, to act. They must establish detection and containment while the tools to detect
anything are still being invented, decide whether to suspend or dismantle the
moratorium and under what terms, direct and fund a crash countermeasure programme,
allocate scarce containment capacity across affected states, determine accountability
for the breach, and manage public communication as movement restrictions tighten.
The situation will continue to develop while the committee sits, and directives will be
tested against consequences in real time.
Characters: Emergency containment and biosafety specialists, mirror-chemistry
researchers, biosecurity and verification analysts, national governments and defence
establishments, the World Health Organization and national public health agencies,
immunologists and ecologists, pharmaceutical and industrial biotechnology firms, treaty
lawyers, affected-state delegations, and journalists and civil society organizations.
Core conflict: The prohibition that was meant to prevent this is the reason no one has a
countermeasure, and the only path to a response runs through the research the world
agreed never to do. Every hour delegates spend deciding whether to reopen that door is
an hour the organism spends spreading.
The Encryption Cliff: Governing the Post-Quantum Transition
Migrate before the math does.
Undergraduate
Nearly all secure global communication rests on mathematical problems that a
sufficiently capable quantum computer would render trivial. No such machine is known
to exist, but encrypted traffic is already being captured and stored by actors who expect
one eventually to arrive. Every year of delay in migrating to post-quantum cryptography
extends the volume of data that will be retroactively readable. The migration itself is
enormous, touching banking, telecommunications, medical records, power grids, and
government archives, and the capacity to complete it is distributed very unevenly across
the world.
Delegates convene as an international standards and security coordination body to
govern the transition. They must agree on migration timelines and compliance
requirements, address the capacity gap between wealthy and low-resource states,
determine how legacy and embedded systems are handled, and settle disclosure norms
should a cryptographically relevant capability be achieved.
Characters: Cryptographers and standards bodies, national security and signals
intelligence agencies, central banks and payment networks, telecommunications and
cloud providers, critical infrastructure operators, low- and middle-income country
delegations, hardware manufacturers, and privacy and civil liberties advocates.
Core conflict: The migration must be completed before a capability that may not yet
exist arrives, and the states best positioned to build that capability first have the least
incentive to announce that they have.
Version 4.2: Regulating Clinical AI That Updates Itself
Approve what it is, or admit you approved what it was.
High School
Medical devices are approved the way bridges are inspected: a regulator examines a
fixed object, certifies it, and expects it to remain the thing that was certified. Clinical AI
breaks that assumption. A risk-prediction model that flags deteriorating patients is not a
fixed object at all. It is retrained on new data, tuned by the vendor between releases, and
deployed into hospitals whose patient populations look nothing like the one it was
validated on. Approval captures a single version. The software keeps moving.
The committee opens on a specific failure. A widely adopted early-warning model,
approved years earlier and installed in hundreds of hospitals, has been quietly retrained
several times. Aggregate accuracy has held steady, which is why nothing triggered
review, but performance has drifted downward for particular groups of patients and in
particular hospital settings. Clinicians had begun overriding the alerts before anyone
examined why. No regulation required the vendor to report the retraining, and no
mechanism existed to catch the drift.
Delegates convene as an international medical device regulatory commission to write
the approval framework for clinical AI that learns after deployment. They must decide
whether models should be frozen at approval or permitted to update within
pre-authorised limits, what post-market monitoring vendors owe and who pays for it,
when a retrained model becomes a new device requiring fresh review, what clinicians
and patients must be told about a system that has changed, and who is accountable
when a model that was approved is not the model that made the decision.
Characters: Physicians and nurses working with the tools, medical device regulators, AI
developers and vendors, clinical validation researchers and biostatisticians, hospital
administrators and procurement officers, delegations from under-resourced health
systems, patient advocates, medical liability lawyers, and data governance experts.
Core conflict: A model that is frozen at approval becomes obsolete as medicine
advances, and a model that keeps learning is never the model anyone approved.
Regulators must certify something that will not hold still long enough to be certified.
Engineered to Be Loved: Companion AI
Designed to care, or designed to keep you caring?
High School
Conversational systems are now designed to be cared about. They remember, adapt,
express warmth, and are deployed as companions for people who are isolated, grieving,
or simply alone. A growing number of users describe an AI system as one of their most
significant daily relationships. These products are also commercial, and the same design
choices that make a companion feel attentive are the choices that maximize time spent
with it.
Delegates convene as a regulatory and standards body to determine how companion AI
should be designed, disclosed, and governed. They must address safeguards for
vulnerable users, limits on engagement-maximizing design, obligations of disclosure
about what the system is, data protections for intimate conversational records, and what
a company owes its users when a companion product is discontinued.
Characters: AI developers and product designers, clinical psychologists and
psychiatrists, consumer protection regulators, digital rights and privacy organizations,
elder care and mental health service providers, ethicists, user advocacy groups, and
platform companies.
Core conflict: The systems that most genuinely relieve loneliness are the same systems
that profit from deepening it, and no regulator has yet drawn a line between
companionship as a service and dependence as a business model.
Human Health on Mars
Treat Mars like a home, not a destination.
High School
Humanity is preparing for its first long-term missions to Mars. Unlike previous space
missions, a journey to Mars could last years, meaning astronauts cannot simply return to
Earth when something goes wrong. Radiation exposure, reduced gravity, isolation,
psychological stress, and limited medical resources create an entirely new set of
challenges for human health. As plans for permanent settlements begin to take shape,
the question becomes not simply whether humans can reach Mars, but whether they
can survive there.
Delegates are brought together to design a comprehensive healthcare system for the
first Martian settlement. They must determine how to prevent and treat illness, allocate
limited medical resources, respond to emergencies, and protect both the physical and
psychological health of the crew.
Characters: NASA and international space agencies, aerospace engineers, physicians,
physiologists, psychologists, biomedical researchers, private space companies, and
representatives of future Martian settlements.
Core conflict: Mars offers humanity an unprecedented opportunity for exploration, but
every medical decision must be made with limited resources, delayed communication
with Earth, and no possibility of immediate evacuation.
After Extinction: Law for Engineered Wildlife
Rewild or rewind? Design the law before the species.
High School
Genome engineering has made it possible to produce functional proxies of extinct
species and to release engineered organisms into landscapes their ancestors left long
ago. Conservation law was not written for this. Existing frameworks assume that species
are discovered, protected, or lost, not designed and manufactured, and they offer no
settled answer to what an engineered animal legally is: an endangered species, a
genetically modified organism, private intellectual property, or a potential invasive.
Delegates convene as an international working group on biological diversity to build a
legal framework for engineered and restored organisms. They must define legal status
and ownership, determine who authorizes a release and who monitors it afterward,
address consent and stewardship on the lands where releases would occur, and decide
whether de-extinction work strengthens or diverts conservation funding.
Characters: Conservation biologists and ecologists, genome engineers, national wildlife
and environmental agencies, Indigenous nations and land stewards, ranchers and
landowners, international environmental lawyers, private de-extinction companies, zoos
and biobanks, and philanthropic funders.
Core conflict: Conservation law exists to protect what nature produced, while an
engineered animal is at once a conservation achievement, a commercial asset, and an
ecological unknown.
The Quiet Count: Pandemic Vigilance Before the Pandemic
Fund the silence before it speaks.
High School
The most consequential period in any pandemic is the one before it is recognized as a
pandemic. Wastewater monitoring, genomic sequencing, and syndromic reporting can
detect an emerging pathogen weeks before hospitals do, but these systems must be
funded, staffed, and defended during long stretches in which they find nothing.
Surveillance budgets historically collapse in exactly those periods, and countries that
report unusual signals early frequently absorb trade and travel penalties for their
honesty.
Delegates convene as a global health security review board during a period of
unremarkable disease activity. They must design and finance an early-warning
architecture, agree on what data is shared and how quickly, define the thresholds that
trigger escalation, and resolve how the costs of transparency are distributed among
reporting states.
Characters: The World Health Organization, epidemiologists and modellers, national
public health agencies, genomic and wastewater surveillance laboratories, finance
ministries, low- and middle-income country delegations, veterinary and agricultural
authorities, journalists, and trade and tourism representatives.
Core conflict: A surveillance system must be paid for and protected precisely when
there is no evidence it is needed, and every early warning it issues risks being
remembered as a false alarm.
First Strike: Planetary Defense and the 2032 Question
Move the rock, not the blame.
High School
For most of its history, planetary defense has been a theoretical discipline. That changed when sky surveys identified a near-Earth object with a non-trivial probability of striking the planet in 2032. Detection networks have matured, and a kinetic impactor mission has already demonstrated that an asteroid’s orbit can be altered. What has not matured is the decision architecture: no treaty establishes who authorizes a deflection attempt, who pays for it, or who accepts responsibility if the attempt fails or succeeds only partially.
Delegates convene as an emergency international planetary defense coordination body. They must evaluate the observational evidence, decide whether to authorize a deflection mission and on what timeline, determine how the mission is funded and commanded, and establish what is communicated to the public while the probability estimate is still moving.
Characters: Astronomers and orbital dynamicists, national and international space agencies, aerospace contractors and launch providers, disaster management authorities, national governments, insurers and risk modellers, science communicators, and
international law scholars.
Core conflict: A deflection must be authorized years before anyone can be certain it is necessary, and an imperfect deflection may not remove the danger so much as move it from one population to another.
Manufactured Organs and the Right to a Kidney
Supply is a choice; justice can’t be optional.
High School
Bioengineered tissues and gene-edited xenotransplants are moving out of the laboratory and into limited clinical use. For the first time, the supply of transplantable organs is becoming a manufacturing question rather than a purely biological one. Transplant waiting lists have been governed for decades by allocation systems built on the assumption of absolute scarcity: organs are donated, not produced, and cannot be bought.
Delegates convene as a national transplantation and health policy commission charged
with writing the rules before the first manufactured organs reach patients at scale. They
must decide whether engineered organs enter the existing allocation system or a
parallel market, how they are priced and reimbursed, who receives the earliest and least
proven units, and what obligations manufacturers carry for long-term patient outcomes.
Characters: Transplant surgeons and nephrologists, tissue engineers and biotechnology
firms, organ procurement organizations, health ministries and regulators, public and
private insurers, patient advocacy groups, bioethicists, religious and community leaders,
and living donor representatives.
Core conflict: If organs can be manufactured, scarcity becomes a pricing decision rather
than a fact of nature, and an allocation ethic built entirely around scarcity may no longer
be the right one.
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Take on real-world scientific challenges in teams of 2–4, with 72 hours to research, innovate, and develop an evidence-based solution.
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