Biosecurity Fundamentals: Pandemics
The world witnessed the severe humanitarian and economic repercussions of pandemic pathogens during COVID-19 crisis, and we remain dangerously unprepared for future pandemics.
With the rate of zoonotic pathogen spread increasing and rapid technological advances in synthetic biology and AI, there exists the possibility of far deadlier pandemics, but also new opportunities to defend against them.
This podcast is from the Biosecurity Fundamentals: Pandemics course, which covers technical and policy efforts to prevent, detect and respond to catastrophic pandemics.
Podcasting since 2024 • 32 episodes
Biosecurity Fundamentals: Pandemics
Latest Episodes
Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments
The US State Department report is released each April and provides an assessment of states' adherence to arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament agreements and commitments. We see this as a useful resource giving some evidence of modern...
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17:26
The Biological Weapons Convention: An Introduction
This resource provides an overview of the Biological Weapons Convention, a disarmament treaty that bans the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological weapons. Despite 187 states being party to the treaty,...
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16:28
A Framework for Technical Progress on Biosecurity
In this post, Kyle Fish presents five key goals for biosecurity technologies: to be fast, general, cheap, robust, and scalable. These will be useful heuristics for us to apply as we consider a range of interventions over the next three weeks. K...
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18:41
Differential Technology Development: An Innovation Governance Consideration for Navigating Technology Risks
This paper introduces a framing of "differential technology development" – affecting the relative timing of new innovations to reduce a specific risk. For instance, it may be beneficial to delay or halt risk-increasing technologies and preferen...
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16:26
ESM3: Simulating 500 Million Years of Evolution with a Language Model
ESM3 is an AI model which is trained on protein sequence, structure and function data. This allows it to follow prompts to design novel proteins. When reading, consider the ways in which this model might present opportunities and risks for pand...
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21:34