Is there any further calculation for B10 - the ‘Expected lives lost due to DURC per year over next 50 years’? I expect this is where a lot of the juice is, and would be a central component for the charity’s advocacy work, but I don’t see the working (maybe it’s in the idea report soon to be published?). The cell formula suggests maybe the assumption is one pandemic killing 80M in the 50 year period (yielding the 1.6M/yr estimate). Is this right?
It looks like ‘leakage %’ is the risk that a dangerous agent within DURC ends up causing harm. For leakage via accidents, were rates of LAIs or other models used to calibrate the estimate? Or just based on deforestation + priors, as it appears?
Was malicious use considered, or is it assumed within leakage estimates? I think this is a big component of the risk from DURC. The furore over horse-pox synthesis was less about the chance that horse-pox would escape Evans’ lab—it was that it showed the possibility and the technique that actors could use to access smallpox. Similarly, the worry over the mouse-pox IL-4 experiment was less that the engineered mouse-pox would escape into the wild, and more that they demonstrated a considerable step actors could take towards inducing vaccine resistance in poxviruses.
Given CE is already recommending this idea, it’s probably moot whether misuse was directly modelled or not (though it will come up for the eventual charity!). If it wasn’t, I now wonder about the bio ideas CE didn’t recommend, and whether modelling misuse would change those bottom-lines.
Hi Ben!
With the benefit of hindsight, I realise we could’ve been more clear on what “leakage” means in this context, given that the topic matter might suggests we are talking about lab leaks.
We’re not! In our model, lab leak rates would only factor into our estimate of how many deaths will be caused by DURC in the future.
Leakage in the CEA refers to the risk that new guidelines in academic communities might be “leaky” in that researchers might choose to migrate to other jurisdictions, countries or privately owned labs (though few of these exist on the BSL levels we are most concerned with) or worse yet, move their research underground. Hence, our CEA discounts the estimate of how many lives could be saved by including this possibility.
On the DURC CEA:
Is there any further calculation for B10 - the ‘Expected lives lost due to DURC per year over next 50 years’? I expect this is where a lot of the juice is, and would be a central component for the charity’s advocacy work, but I don’t see the working (maybe it’s in the idea report soon to be published?). The cell formula suggests maybe the assumption is one pandemic killing 80M in the 50 year period (yielding the 1.6M/yr estimate). Is this right?
It looks like ‘leakage %’ is the risk that a dangerous agent within DURC ends up causing harm. For leakage via accidents, were rates of LAIs or other models used to calibrate the estimate? Or just based on deforestation + priors, as it appears?
Was malicious use considered, or is it assumed within leakage estimates? I think this is a big component of the risk from DURC. The furore over horse-pox synthesis was less about the chance that horse-pox would escape Evans’ lab—it was that it showed the possibility and the technique that actors could use to access smallpox. Similarly, the worry over the mouse-pox IL-4 experiment was less that the engineered mouse-pox would escape into the wild, and more that they demonstrated a considerable step actors could take towards inducing vaccine resistance in poxviruses.
Given CE is already recommending this idea, it’s probably moot whether misuse was directly modelled or not (though it will come up for the eventual charity!). If it wasn’t, I now wonder about the bio ideas CE didn’t recommend, and whether modelling misuse would change those bottom-lines.
Hi Ben! With the benefit of hindsight, I realise we could’ve been more clear on what “leakage” means in this context, given that the topic matter might suggests we are talking about lab leaks. We’re not! In our model, lab leak rates would only factor into our estimate of how many deaths will be caused by DURC in the future. Leakage in the CEA refers to the risk that new guidelines in academic communities might be “leaky” in that researchers might choose to migrate to other jurisdictions, countries or privately owned labs (though few of these exist on the BSL levels we are most concerned with) or worse yet, move their research underground. Hence, our CEA discounts the estimate of how many lives could be saved by including this possibility.
Ah okay, thanks for the correction! In which case I think ~all my questions apply to the B10 figure then.