My take is that these projects are not super information hazardy and what could be useful is for a subset of these projects (super PPE/sterilization?/countermeasures?) is a bunch of smart, entrepreneurial people who are reasonably aligned who can spend a few months bashing out ideas in a lab/office space somewhere.
I think that iGem is pretty entrepreneurial, it tends to attract a bunch of smart, motivated people who are psyched about working on synthetic biology (at least in my limited experience). Competitors tend to design projects around tracks and I could imagine $100k could buy influence to set up a track or (launch some other programme) to get ~400 working on these problems for 3 months (6000 competitors/(13 tracks + ‘our preventing pandemics’ track)). This works out at ~$250 per 3 person-months work which seems pretty reasonable. I could imagine it being an order of magnitude worse but it still seems like a good bet.
I’d expect for something like 80 projects to be investigated and 5 of them to be useful. There seems to be little downside counterfactual harm wise as they would be doing synbio stuff anyway. It’s plausible to me that directing them towards biosec projects has bad worst-case scenarios relative to synbio—I have thought very little about this, but I’d be surprised if these particularly bad projects weren’t caught by their biosec team.
iGem even seems to care quite a lot about biosecurity and I know that there are some links between open phil and the iGem biosec team so it’s plausibly even low cost to investigate.
Hi, I work on biosecurity at iGEM, can confirm we care quite a lot about it. A lot of these projects don’t seem obviously best solved through synthetic biology (cf. Biosecurity needs engineers and materials scientists) but iGEMers often surprise me!
I think many teams are already motivated to work on medical countermeasures, though I maybe see a somewhat greater number of exciting diagnostics projects than therapeutics projects (for example, two of the winners of the 2020 competition worked on rapid point-of-care diagnostics (https://2020.igem.org/Team:Leiden/Description, https://2020.igem.org/Team:TAS_Taipei). I would guess this is because it’s easier to measure the success of a prototype diagnostic over a few months than it is to figure out a relevant assay for treating a disease.
My take is that these projects are not super information hazardy and what could be useful is for a subset of these projects (super PPE/sterilization?/countermeasures?) is a bunch of smart, entrepreneurial people who are reasonably aligned who can spend a few months bashing out ideas in a lab/office space somewhere.
I think that iGem is pretty entrepreneurial, it tends to attract a bunch of smart, motivated people who are psyched about working on synthetic biology (at least in my limited experience). Competitors tend to design projects around tracks and I could imagine $100k could buy influence to set up a track or (launch some other programme) to get ~400 working on these problems for 3 months (6000 competitors/(13 tracks + ‘our preventing pandemics’ track)). This works out at ~$250 per 3 person-months work which seems pretty reasonable. I could imagine it being an order of magnitude worse but it still seems like a good bet.
I’d expect for something like 80 projects to be investigated and 5 of them to be useful. There seems to be little downside counterfactual harm wise as they would be doing synbio stuff anyway. It’s plausible to me that directing them towards biosec projects has bad worst-case scenarios relative to synbio—I have thought very little about this, but I’d be surprised if these particularly bad projects weren’t caught by their biosec team.
iGem even seems to care quite a lot about biosecurity and I know that there are some links between open phil and the iGem biosec team so it’s plausibly even low cost to investigate.
Hi, I work on biosecurity at iGEM, can confirm we care quite a lot about it. A lot of these projects don’t seem obviously best solved through synthetic biology (cf. Biosecurity needs engineers and materials scientists) but iGEMers often surprise me!
I think many teams are already motivated to work on medical countermeasures, though I maybe see a somewhat greater number of exciting diagnostics projects than therapeutics projects (for example, two of the winners of the 2020 competition worked on rapid point-of-care diagnostics (https://2020.igem.org/Team:Leiden/Description, https://2020.igem.org/Team:TAS_Taipei). I would guess this is because it’s easier to measure the success of a prototype diagnostic over a few months than it is to figure out a relevant assay for treating a disease.
Last year we tried to incentivize more direct work on technical advances in biosecurity via giving out 5 microgrants (https://2021.igem.org/Teams/Grants/Safety) and doing more to promote and spotlight our award for Safety and Security (https://video.igem.org/w/nkrCA4EaFGEuefUtbmLijN). We’ll be iterating on that program this year, though I don’t know exactly what form it will take; I’m definitely taking inspiration from the ideas here and in the Future Fund ideas thread, though.