Max Görlitz

Karma: 1,304

Currently, I work as a Fellow at Blueprint Biosecurity. We are investigating the potential utility of drug-free nasal sprays for respiratory infection prevention as part of the pandemic mitigation toolkit.

Previously, I worked at the European Commission’s Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (DG HERA), the EU equivalent of US BARDA. My focus was on R&D funding for innovative countermeasures for pandemic preparedness and response, especially diagnostics, PPE, medical devices, and (meta)genomic sequencing.

I have a master’s degree in Genomic Medicine from the University of Oxford and did my thesis on the computational optimization of probe design for bait capture enrichment sequencing. Before that, I worked as a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab and SecureBio, where we wrote a review paper on the safety of high-dose 200-235 nm far-UVC and its capability for pandemic mitigation. Before that, I was a student in clinical medicine at the Technical University of Munich.

I strongly believe we should be more ambitious about eradicating many infectious diseases.

Last updated: 2026-07-06

Email me at hello@maxgoerlitz.com

Max Görlitz 19 May 2026 9:27 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sudhanshu Kasewa’s comment on: Sudhanshu Kasewa’s Quick takes
I haven’t tried it yet but I reckon a combination of DJI Mic Mini (or another microphone) and Granola AI on your phone could work really well since then you can also go for a walk. Might give it a go at the next EAG.

Max Görlitz 17 May 2026 13:25 UTC
26 points
6 ∶ 0
on: How I think about catastrophic biological risk (part I)
I very much appreciate all the blog posts coming out from the Coefficient Giving biosecurity team at the moment. It is very helpful that you’re doing more public communication of your worldview and current priorities. The community now has better common knowledge.

Max Görlitz 14 May 2026 11:00 UTC
17 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Reflections on Anthropic and EA
This is, of course, very tempting, and sounds very exciting. It would be a glorious coincidence if, of all possible things I could be doing, the thing that is most intellectually interesting and fun and increases my status the most also happens to be the most impactful thing I could do with my life. Similarly, why is it that taking a high-paying, high-power job where the promise of impact is a vague sense of “influence” at the cost of progress on a difficult, high-risk, and concrete intervention is so appealing?
Reminds me of this classic: Beware surprising and suspicious convergence.

Max Görlitz 8 May 2026 11:55 UTC
12 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Contra Binder on far-UVC and filtration
Meta comment: It’s fantastic to see some technical biosecurity discussion on the forum—I feel like that’s been relatively rare the last 1-2 years.

Max Görlitz 15 Mar 2024 16:05 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Unflattering aspects of Effective Altruism
I disagree with the EA Forum’s approach to life
Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?
Thanks for referring to these blog posts!

Max Görlitz 12 Mar 2024 14:09 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: christian.r’s comment on: Focus on broad (and passive) defense technologies for biosecurity
Very useful comment, thanks!
hedging against uncertainty: we’re just very uncertain about what a future pandemic might look like and where it will come from
I fully agree with this; I think this was an implicit premise of mine that I failed to point out explicitly.
… though I think for it to work you have to also add a premise about the relative risk of substitution, right?
Great point that I actually haven’t considered so far. I would need to think about this more before giving my opinion. It seems really context-dependent, though, and hard to determine with any confidence.
Also, the Maginot line analogy is cool; I hadn’t seen that before. (I guess I really should read more of your report 🙂)

Max Görlitz 12 Mar 2024 14:00 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: christian.r’s comment on: Why are we not using upper-room ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) more?
That sounds reasonable! Thanks for adding your impression.

Why are we not using upper-room ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) more?

Max Görlitz11 Mar 2024 8:51 UTC

47 points

4 comments7 min readEA link

Focus on broad (and passive) defense technologies for biosecurity

Max Görlitz11 Mar 2024 8:48 UTC

37 points

4 comments2 min readEA link

Max Görlitz 5 Mar 2024 17:22 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tejas Subramaniam 🔸’s comment on: What posts would you like someone to write?
Very cool thanks for pointing that out! I think I might have seen it before but had forgotten about it—will check it out again.

Max Görlitz 5 Mar 2024 11:44 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: What posts would you like someone to write?
Xander, lmk if you have thought about this, and we can chat.

Max Görlitz 4 Mar 2024 16:32 UTC
15 points
1 ∶ 0
on: What posts would you like someone to write?
What a biosafe world looks like
Basically like “What Success Looks Like” (which is about transformative AI) but instead about what a world would look like that is really well protected from catastrophic pandemics.
It could be set in e.g. 2035, and describe what technologies and (political) mechanisms have been implemented to make the world “biosafe”—i.e. safe from global catastrophic biological risks.
I could even imagine versions of this that are a fictional story, maybe describing the life of someone living in that potential future.

Max Görlitz 4 Mar 2024 16:25 UTC
14 points
7 ∶ 0
on: What posts would you like someone to write?
List of theory of change documents of EA orgs.
I think it would be cool to have an overview of how different organizations think about their theory of change and how they present it. This would be helpful for organizations that don’t yet have a public theory of change but would like to create one. It would also be useful for getting a clearer picture of what the high-level plans of different orgs are.

Max Görlitz 4 Mar 2024 12:38 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What posts would you like someone to write?
Comparing different ARPAs, ARIA, and SPRIN-D
- Could be an interesting blog post to compare the ARPAs in the US with ARIA in the UK and SPRIN-D in Germany
- What do they have in common?
  - What are their most important differences?
  - Would be cool to summarise all these comparisons in a nice table

Max Görlitz 4 Mar 2024 12:28 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 0
on: What posts would you like someone to write?
What would it take to eradicate all infectious diseases by 2050?
I want to see high-level abstract research what it would take to eliminate all infectious disease by a certain date, e.g. 2050 or 2080
I really liked “10 technologies that won’t exist in 5 years” by Jacob Trefethen, and this post would have a similar vibe.

do some very rough BOTECs
- how much did it cost to eliminate smallpox?
- how much did it cost to almost eliminate polio?
- what other diseases have been eradicated?
- come up with average cost of eliminating one disease
- of course last mile is the hardest and maybe most costly
- what other attempts at eradicating diseases failed and how much did that cost?
  - malaria
What links here?
- $14t BOTEC cost to eradicate all infectious diseases by marvolopanda (13 May 2024 9:55 UTC; 13 points)

Max Görlitz 4 Mar 2024 12:08 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What posts are you thinking about writing?
Comparing agnostic metagenomic sequencing and massively multiplexed bait capture sequencing for clinical disease surveillance and early-warning systems
This will likely be part of my lit review of my master’s thesis and should also make an interesting blog post.
I am unsure whether to call it massively parallelised or massively multiplexed bait capture sequencing when you use on the order of 10⁵-10⁶ probes at the same time
What is agnostic metagenomic sequencing? https://doi.org/10.1128/cmr.00119-22
What is massively multiplexed bait capture sequencing? https://doi.org/10.1128/jcm.00612-23
What are the pros and cons of the different approaches?
- cost?
- amount of labor needed?
- how quickly do you get results?
- ...
examples of Pros of bait capture sequencing
- “results in two to three orders of magnitude enhancement in sensitivity at a reduced cost” (Kapoor et al. 2023)
- “mitigates Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) concerns because host sequence data are not collected” (Kapoor et al. 2023)
How are these methods different from similar, commercially available products?
(e.g., https://www.twistbioscience.com/products/ngs/fixed-panels/comprehensive-viral-research-panel)

Max Görlitz 4 Mar 2024 11:34 UTC
16 points
1 ∶ 0
on: What posts are you thinking about writing?
Things we often tell people considering pivoting into biosecurity work
This will probably be a collaborative giving-advice-to-newcomers style post
Preliminary outline:
1. Intro
  1. Write something if you repeat it a lot
  2. Biosecurity vs. scope-sensitive ‘EA’ biosecurity
2. There are good opportunities for learning, getting started, and testing your fit.
  1. Compared to 5 years ago, we have solid options for getting up to speed
  2. (Meta) readings lists, newsletters, courses, research programs
3. EA-specific mentoring and orgs are sparse
  1. Not many orgs, not a ton of growth
    There is a shortage of organizations that can absorb talent
    Need for more orgs in the future
    Good to have more founder type people
  2. a lot of high-level strategic work (roadmapping, blueprinting) to figure out priorities and gaps in existing academic/industry research
  3. Mentoring is really bottlenecked
4. Free yourself from the ‘EA’-label / A lot of important work happens outside of EA
  1. But don’t despair! There are many places to do important work!
  2. Biosec interventions have a pretty solid causal chain
  3. And many scope-sensitive biosec-promising interventions (path. Agnostic etc.pp.) have lots of overlap with public health or One Health focussed biosec.
  4. A lot of important stuff outside of EA, esp. When it comes to actually implementing stuff
    Examples
  5. Very valuable to get additional marginal scope-sensitive thinking in traditional settings
  6. Become an expert in something “boring”
    Link ASB thing and say it also applies to technical stuff, not only policy work
5. Yes, you can most likely contribute [so be agentic]
  1. Biosec is highly interdisciplinary
  2. points about taking initiative and being agentic.
    Kind of a call to action toward the end of the post
  3. Plenty of open questions for a number of backgrounds
    You def don’t need a biomedical background (that seems to be a common misconception)
    Link to Will’s post about biosecurity needs engineers
    Examples
6. (Conclusion)
  1. Reach out, etc. Maybe just a closing sentence

Max Görlitz 19 Jan 2024 14:10 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Announcing New Biosecurity Interventions Syllabus
It’s fantastic to see that this is public now; thanks, Lin!

Max Görlitz 8 Dec 2023 13:45 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: New Our World in Data page & article on pandemics
Brilliant work, as always; thank you! It is great to easily access these graphs and the infographic for future “intro to biosecurity” or similar presentations.

Max Görlitz 20 Nov 2023 18:19 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Hello from the new content manager at CEA
Welcome Toby :)

Max Görlitz

Why are we not us­ing up­per-room ul­tra­vi­o­let ger­mi­ci­dal ir­ra­di­a­tion (UVGI) more?

Fo­cus on broad (and pas­sive) defense tech­nolo­gies for biosecurity

What a biosafe world looks like

List of theory of change documents of EA orgs.

Comparing different ARPAs, ARIA, and SPRIN-D

What would it take to eradicate all infectious diseases by 2050?

Comparing agnostic metagenomic sequencing and massively multiplexed bait capture sequencing for clinical disease surveillance and early-warning systems

Things we often tell people considering pivoting into biosecurity work

Why are we not using upper-room ultraviolet germicidal irradiation (UVGI) more?

Focus on broad (and passive) defense technologies for biosecurity