A call for biosecurity fieldbuilding
My name is Abbey, and I work at cG on the Capacity Building team. I’m posting to share an informal update about our excitement for biosecurity capacity building.
We’ve seen incredible progress in the field of technical AI safety and governance, and a lot of that is thanks to fieldbuilding programs.
We now think that on the margin, it’s likely that biosecurity is neglected relative to AI safety. AI progress will likely significantly increase the capability of a bad actor (including a rogue AI) to engineer dangerous pathogens, and we’d like to grow the number of people preparing defenses against that scenario.
Specifically, our Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team’s research suggests that there are four pillars of pathogen-agnostic defenses that can significantly reduce bio x-risk; and because these are defensive measures (with less dual-use potential), we want to broadly encourage people to work on them. Some projects, like red teaming, could involve infohazards that warrant more caution; you can check in with the BPP team if you want to do work like this or encourage it.
The measures are:
Personal protective equipment (‘PPE’)
Pervasive physical barriers and layers of sterilization (‘biohardening’)
Pathogen-agnostic early-warning systems (‘detection’)
Rapid, reactive medical countermeasures (‘MCMs’)
You can read more about them here, or listen to the 80k podcast discussion here.
The recommendation: More fieldbuilding on these four pillars and biosecurity in general
We’d be excited to see fieldbuilding organizations hosting talks, workshops and trainings, and research mentorship tracks on bio. Currently, there are a handful of AIxBio programs, like ERA’s (which are great!), but little material on the four pillars and few fieldbuilding programs exclusively dedicated to biosecurity (Cambridge Biosecurity Hub is the only one I know of). Bluedot’s Biosecurity course offers great resources as well – we’d love to amplify this material and strengthen the career pathways for getting into biosecurity.
Putting more focus on biosecurity could be especially impactful for organizations that:
Are looking to find a differentiated niche
Are based in a location that has a lot of bio or physical engineering talent (especially relative to software engineering / ML talent)
Are based in a location with more political influence and interest on biosecurity topics (especially relative to AI)
For example, it seems likely that European hubs like Berlin or Brussels would be excellent places to build up biosecurity programming. Boston and DC also have very vibrant biosecurity scenes – big shoutout to CBAI for taking steps to create a dedicated bio research mentorship program in Cambridge, MA.
For remote or full-time research mentorship programs, having a dedicated biosecurity program would create stronger network effects and institutional expertise about biosecurity. As a lower lift, we’re also excited for existing programs to add biosecurity as an additional track (like SPAR did earlier this year!)
If this sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to apply to our Capacity Building RFP!
Minor, but in case you aren’t aware, the Cambridge Biosecurity Hub is a fieldbuilding program exclusively dedicated to biosecurity (they are running the AI x Bio stream at ERA, helped start a bio stream at SPAR, and are running their annual conference in a few weeks in Cambridge UK). I think it’s funded by CG’s Biosec team, but it may be funded by your team (the Biosec team is at least aware of them). People interested in making more stuff happen in this space should consider reaching out to them!
In any case, I’m also excited about more biosecurity fieldbuilding work happening and agree that it’s been extremely neglected for a long time—thanks for writing this!
That’s us! Thanks Caleb, you’re right that CBH helped start the AIxBio stream at ERA, bio stream at SPAR and I’m also talking with CBAI and a few other project based fellowships.
We’re making a lot of effort to coordinate the current field builders and to get more people involved (meetings, slack, coordination docs). If anyone wants to be involved in the larger bio community building conversations or chat about fieldbuilding please have a low bar to reach out to me—grace@cambiohub.org. I being involved in biosecurity community building part-time for 2-3 years and have been full time around 5 months so would love to chat about my experience if it’s helpful.
Thank you, great point! My mistake.
I want to flag some work that’s been going on to help with this. Big +1 that we need a lot more biosecurity fieldbuilding that encourages individuals to GM a particular topic/focus area.
Research programs such as Impact Research Groups (London), Research Impact Oxford (Oxford), Cambridge Impact Research Program (Cambridge), Harvard-MIT Impact Research Initiative (Boston), Catalyst (UC Berkeley, UChicago, Purdue), all have dedicated biosecurity tracks and are vaguely managed under the CEA Pilot Unis team.
There now exists a community/field-building page on the Biosecurity Hub Slack. If anyone is keen to join, feel free to let me know! I’m very much excited about global, large-scale, MATS-like, biosecurity fieldbuilding and would be keen to hear from potential collaborators.
Happy to chat about any of this: ayushmaan.sharma@dph.ox.ac.uk
This is a really thoughtful call to grow the biosecurity field. One thing that might deserve a bit more attention is how this work expands beyond the small group of countries where most biosecurity research and institutions are currently concentrated.
In many low- and middle-income settings, pathogen surveillance infrastructure is still quite limited. Because of this, local researchers often have fewer opportunities to engage in biosecurity work, not necessarily due to a lack of interest or talent, but because there are fewer platforms for experimentation and collaboration.
One possible direction could be supporting simpler, lower-infrastructure surveillance pilots that can act both as early-warning systems and as starting points for building local research communities. For instance, pooled nasal-swab sentinel surveillance, indoor air sampling in crowded environments like schools or clinics, or environmental sampling in markets and farms could be practical approaches in places where wastewater monitoring or continuous sequencing systems are not yet feasible.
Programs like these could strengthen pathogen detection while also helping to grow a wider community of researchers working on biosecurity challenges. If biosecurity field-building is meant to be truly global, some of the greatest opportunities may lie in enabling experimentation and community formation in under-surveilled ecosystems, rather than concentrating most efforts in places that are already well resourced.
I am personally very interested in exploring and piloting initiatives along these lines in resource-limited settings. If anyone working in biosecurity field-building, surveillance, or global health is interested in collaborating on efforts in LMIC contexts, I would be very happy to connect. You can reach me at eennadi@gmail.com.
Probably spell out ‘cG’ in your first line. Not everyone working on pandemic mitigation will know what this means. As I’ve mentioned before, and submitted to your Biosecurity and Pandemic Preparedness team through their webform calls etc, there is a critical 5th pillar, which is ‘Strategy’, for example a jurisdiction’s choice between eg a suppression/mitigation strategy in a bioevent vs eg an exclusion/elimination strategy. Strategy choice is partly constrained by context (eg islands are much more able to deploy an exclusion/elimination strategy. But such strategies are perhaps the biggest single (pillar) determinant of impact. During the Covid-19 pandemic the five national jurisdictions explicitly articulating and deploying an exclusion/elimination strategy had negative age-standardised cumulative excess mortality through the first 2 years of the pandemic (China, NZ, Australia, Taiwan, Singapore). One size of response does not fit all and more capacity building in policy and decision-making around understanding the critical role of strategy and developing decision tools for when/how to deploy which strategy probably have more impact in some jurisdictions that the other 4 pillars you include. I recommend (again) adding ‘strategy’ as a 5th pillar, especially to protect the 10% of the world’s population that live in island nations.
Relevant evidence: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0004554
Great to hear that cG is prioritising biosecurity capacity building! I’m very keen to see more work done in the space.
Some opportunities for people interested in getting into biosecurity (CoI note I run both):
Oxford Biosecurity Group recently launched a talent database for people interested in leadership roles and starting organisations in biosecurity, with exclusive events and networking opportunities.
Apply here by 29th April to be included in the next review.
The Introduction to Biosecurity course is doing a call for people to run local version of the course. A local version can be online or in person, with a specific country or regional focus.
Apply here by 27th March.
There’s definitely a lot of demand, e.g. so far we’ve had nearly 40 applicants with 3 weeks to go for people interested in running local versions.
In terms of other things I recommend for people getting into biosecurity, I have this 1-pager.
If you are interested in doing biosecurity capacity building, feel free to reach out at lin@oxfordbiosecuritygroup.com