Let’s make nice things with biology. Working on nucleic acid synthesis screening at IBBIS. Also into dual-use risk assessment, synthetic biology, lab automation, event production, donating to global health. From Toronto, lived in Paris and Santiago, currently in the SF Bay. Website: tessa.fyi
Tessa A 🔸
Karma: 2,930
On cyberbiosecurity:
I enjoyed Defining “Cyberbiosecurity” and why we should stop using the term, a skeptical 2019 blog post from Alexander Titus, which basically argues that “cyberbiosecurity” is a term that ends up discouraging work because no one knows where to start!
The winners of the 2021 NTI Next Generation for Biosecurity contest wrote Towards Responsible Genomic Surveillance: A Review of Biosecurity and Dual-use Regulation which focuses on data privacy issues related to pandemic genomic surveillance
Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery, a March 2022 paper, argues for controlled API access to ML models that might be used to generate toxins
The recent (April 2022) paper Biosecurity in an age of open science looks at some biosecurity implications of open data sharing, and argues for access controls and APIs based on FAIR principles
(For all of these comments, take these resources as a lower-intensity recommendation than other things on this list, since these are selected based on the criteria of “things that seem relevant to this topic” rather than “things I found particularly interesting”.)
Under Solutions to deal with misinformation, Tara Kirk Sell at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security has done a bunch of related work (her list of publications includes things like a National Priorities to Combat Misinformation and Disinformation for COVID-19 and Future Public Health Threats: A Call for a National Strategy and Longitudinal Risk Communication: A Research Agenda for Communicating in a Pandemic). She was also interviewed for the 80,000 Hours podcast in May 2020, though I suspect her thinking has evolved since then.
(For all of these comments, take these resources as a lower-intensity recommendation than other things on this list, since these are selected based on the criteria of “things that seem relevant to this topic” rather than “things I found particularly interesting”.)
I have strong “social security number” associations with the acronym SSN.
Setting those aside, I feel “scale” and “solvability” are simpler and perhaps less jargon-y words than “impact” and “tractability” (which is probably good), but I hear people use “impact” much more frequently than “scale” in conversation, and it feels broader in definition, so I lean towards “ITN” over “SSN”.
Thank you for highlighting this opportunity, which seems like the sort of cool research that this community is into funding (including me, I chipped in a little bit), as well as for doing so much investigation of the project in order to write up this report.
Man, I find it so difficult (on, like, an emotional level) to think clearly about the dollar value of an hour of my time (I feel like it is overvalued?? because so many people make so much less money than me, a North American???) but I agree that adopting some kind of clear heuristic here is good, and that I should more frequently be doing explicit trades of “I will spend up to 2 hours on trying to find a cheaper option, because I think in expectation that’s worth $60”.
I wonder if it might be possible to get volunteers to help find some of opportunities to save money, in the genre of
putting students up in cheaper hotels, booking flights further in advance, or selecting cheaper flights where inconvenience is minimal (rather than treating money as no object).
I am not confident that this is true, because coordinating with volunteers is a lot of work and coordination-time is limited, but I could imagine a world where you could be like “here is my BATNA for booking flights for these speakers, if someone can improve upon this in the next 12 hours, I will donate the difference in money to the charity of their choice”.
+1, the frugality options seem like a nice way to “make the opportunity cost of funding more salient” without necessarily requiring huge changes from event organizers.
This project sounds great! You said this is focused on “high-priority emerging technologies, especially AI and cybersecurity”. My network is mostly composed of synthetic biologists, would this also be an appropriate opportunity for them?
I just want to pipe in to say that I think this is a cool example; the structure of “extremely small prize for doing the thing at all” seems like a nice way to build up the funnel of new blogs in a more even-handed way.
Screen and record all DNA synthesis
Biorisk and Recovery from CatastropheScreening all DNA synthesis orders for potentially serious hazards would reduce the risk that a dangerous biological agent is engineered and released. Robustly recording what DNA is synthesized (necessarily in an encrypted fashion) would allow labs to prove that they had not engineered an agent causing an outbreak. We are interested in funding work to solve technical, political and incentive problems related to securing DNA synthesis.
Meta note: there are already some cool EA-aligned projects related to this, such as SecureDNA from the MIT Media Lab and Common Mechanism to Prevent Illicit Gene Synthesis from NTI/IBBIS. Also, this one is not an original idea of mine to an even greater extent than the others I’ve posted.
yeah, to expand upon this:
Best practices for assessment and management of dual-use infohazards
Biorisk and Recovery from Catastrophe, Values and Reflective ProcessesLots of important and well-intended research, including research into AI alignment and pandemic prevention, generates information which may be hazardous if misused. We would like to better understand how to assess and manage these hazards, and would be interested in funding expert elicitation studies and other empirical work on estimating information risks. We would also be interested in funding work to make organizations, including research labs, publishers and grantmakers, better equipped to handle dual-use through offering training and incentives to follow certain best practices.
One interesting and somewhat-related story here: an airport spa chain called XPresSpa launched a COVID-testing service called XpresCheck and have been working alongside Concentric by Ginkgo on airport biosurveillance for specific countries:
“For the past 3 months, XpresCheck and their testing partner, Concentric by Gingko, demonstrated that a traveler-based SARS-CoV-2 viral genomic surveillance program can help detect emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants in the United States,” said Dr. Cindy R. Friedman, chief of CDC’s Travelers’ Health Branch. “In fact, following the rapid expansion over the Thanksgiving break, the program detected the first documented U.S. cases of Omicron sub-lineage BA.2 and BA.3,” added Friedman.
I think Concentric is aiming to continue running airport biosurveillance; the idea of working from airport waste (rather than needing to directly sample travellers) is super interesting!
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.
Continuous sampling for high-risk laboratories
Biorisk and Recovery from CatastropheWe would be excited to fund efforts to test laboratory monitoring systems that would provide data for biosafety and biosurveillance. The 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax leak happened because a clogged air filter had been removed from the bioweapons laboratory’s exhaust pipe and no one informed the night shift manager. What if, by default, ventilation ducts in high-containment laboratories were monitored to detect escaping pathogens? Establishing a practice of continuous sampling would also support efforts to strengthen the biological weapons convention; it would become easier to verify the convention we had a baseline data signature for benign high-containment work.
Additional note: the OSINT data sources mentioned in the Strengthening the Bioweapons convention project (publication records, job specs, equipment supply chains) are also a form of continuous monitoring, but it seemed useful to carve this out as a separate technical priority.
Reducing risks from laboratory accidents
Biorisk and Recovery from CatastropheSome life sciences research, such as gain-of-function work with potential pandemic pathogens, poses serious risks even in the absence of bad actors. What if we could eliminate biological risks from laboratory accidents? We’d like to see work to reduce the likelihood of accidents, such as empirical biosafety research and human factors analysis on laboratory equipment. We’d also like to see work that reduces the severity of accidents, such as warning systems to inform scientists if a pathogen has not been successfully deactivated and user-friendly lab strains that incorporate modern biocontainment methods.
You might find some answers in the question on computational biology thesis topic suggestions or some ideas in this post on project ideas in biosecurity, but/and I second Will’s idea of moving this into its own question post if you want to solicit more suggestions.
I think you’re right that the human-health-via-nutrition case for GMOs is pretty weak. Advocating for non-GMO food fortification (e.g. the work of the Food Fortification Initiative, who have been written up by GiveWell but are not a top charity) seems more tractable than pushing for GMOs.
Your “Other use cases of GMOs” section focuses on addressing other nutritional deficits. My (not deeply researched) sense is that the major benefits of agricultural GMOs are probably more about reduced famine via:
* ability to survive climate extremes
* resistance to pest insects (cf. Bt Binjal, which is approved in Bangladesh)
* resistance to plant diseases (e.g. work to make plantains resistance to banana streak virus)
There also seem to be some GMOs that allow for a reduction of pesticide use (e.g. GM cotton in China) which I (non-confidently) suspect has human and environmental health benefits. Do you have any thoughts on how advocacy for these uses of GMOs stacks up against the nutritional case?
This:
it is worth some eyebrow-raising if it turns out that the ingroup defense is something along the lines of “well, by bioethicists, we mean research ethicists, and by research ethicists we mean research bureaucrats, and by research bureaucrats, we mean research bureaucracy.”
has been roughly my impression of the curious EA bioethics hate, which I have tried to push back on when I’ve seen my friends expressing it. I liked the Rob Bensinger piece Thirty-three randomly selected bioethics papers that you linked.
My sense is that there are institutions making dubious, hyperconservative, and omission-biased “ethical” judgments for reasons that are more to do with liability than ethics. I think many USA-based researchers don’t really interact with “bioethics” except when asked to fill out extremely onerous forms for their institution (e.g. “what are the risks of asking people to look at differently-coloured triangles on a computer screen?”, where an insufficiently-detailed response means your project can’t go ahead).
I haven’t read The Culture series but/and I really enjoyed this meta piece about it: Why The Culture Wins: An appreciation of Iain M. Banks for a really excellent discussion of meaning-seeking within a post-scarcity utopia. An excerpt:
In fact, modern science fiction writers have had so little to say about the evolution of culture and society that it has become a standard trope of the genre to imagine a technologically advanced future that contains archaic social structures. … Such a postulate can be entertaining, to the extent that it involves a dramatic rejection of Marx’s view, that the development of the forces of production drives the relations of production (“The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.”). Put in more contemporary terms, Marx’s claim is that there are functional relations between technology and social structure, so that you can’t just combine them any old way. Marx was, in this regard, certainly right, hence the sociological naiveté that lies at the heart of Dune. Feudalism with energy weapons makes no sense – a feudal society could not produce energy weapons, and energy weapons would undermine feudal social relations.
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One interesting consequence of this process [of globalized cultural evolution] is that the competition between cultures is becoming defunctionalized. The institutions of modern bureaucratic capitalism solve many of the traditional problems of social integration in an almost mechanical way. As a result, when considering the modern “hypercultures” – e.g. American, Japanese, European – there is little to choose from a functional point of view. None are particularly better or worse, from the standpoint of constructing a successful society. And so what is there left to compete on? All that is left are the memetic properties of the culture, which is to say, the pure capacity to reproduce itself.
On passive technologies, I imagine the links from Biosecurity needs engineers and materials scientists would be informative. The areas highlighted there under “physical protection from pathogens” are:
Improving personal protective equipment (PPE)
Suppressing pathogen spread in the built environment
Improving biosafety in high-containment labs and clinics
Suppressing pathogen spread in vehicles
For spread in vehicles and the built environment, my sense (based on conversations with others, not independent research) is that lots of folks are excited about about upper-air UV-C systems to deactivate viruses. I don’t know the best reading on that so here’s a somewhat random March 2022 paper on the subject: Far-UVC (222 nm) efficiently inactivates an airborne pathogen in a room-sized chamber
(For all of these comments, take these resources as a lower-intensity recommendation than other things on this list, since these are selected based on the criteria of “things that seem relevant to this topic” rather than “things I found particularly interesting”.)