If you’re a government it makes a lot of sense to just stockpile enough to cover your entire population. Right now we spend about $10 billion a year on missile defence. Stockpiling one of these for every single person in the US would be 1% the cost of that.
— Andrew Snyder-Beattie
Conventional wisdom is that safeguarding humanity from the worst biological risks — microbes optimised to kill as many as possible — is difficult bordering on impossible, making bioweapons humanity’s single greatest vulnerability. Andrew Snyder-Beattie thinks conventional wisdom could be wrong.
Andrew’s job at Open Philanthropy is to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to protect as much of humanity as possible in the worst-case scenarios — those with fatality rates near 100% and the collapse of technological civilisation a live possibility.
As Andrew lays out, there are several ways this could happen, including:
- A national bioweapons programme gone wrong (most notably Russia or North Korea’s)
- AI advances making it easier for terrorists or a rogue AI to release highly engineered pathogens
- Mirror bacteria that can evade the immune systems of not only humans, but many animals and potentially plants as well
So Andrew and his biosecurity research team at Open Philanthropy have been seeking an alternative approach. They’re now proposing a four-stage plan using simple technology that could save most people, and is cheap enough it can be prepared without government support. (...)
The approach exploits tiny organisms having no way to penetrate physical barriers or shield themselves from UV, heat, or chemical poisons.
We now know how to make highly effective ‘elastomeric’ face masks that cost $10, can sit in storage for 20 years, and can be used for six months straight without changing the filter. Any rich country could trivially stockpile enough to cover all essential workers.
People can’t wear masks 24/7, but fortunately propylene glycol — already found in vapes and smoke machines — is astonishingly good at killing microbes in the air. And, being a common chemical input, industry already produces enough of the stuff to cover every indoor space we need at all times.
Add to this the wastewater monitoring and metagenomic sequencing that will detect the most dangerous pathogens before they have a chance to wreak havoc, and we might just buy ourselves enough time to develop the cure we’ll need to come out alive.
Has everyone been wrong, and biology is actually defence dominant rather than offence dominant? Is this plan crazy — or so crazy it just might work?
That’s what host Rob Wiblin and Andrew Snyder-Beattie explore in this in-depth conversation. (...)
The interview in a nutshell
Andrew Snyder-Beattie, head of Open Philanthropy’s biosecurity programme, puts the risk of human extinction from a biological catastrophe at 1–3% in our lifetimes.
However, he argues that a concrete, largely low-tech “four pillars” strategy could dramatically reduce this risk by buying us the time needed to survive even the worst-case scenarios.
1. Two primary classes of biological threats could pose an existential risk
- Engineered pathogens are a growing concern. The historical Soviet bioweapons programme — which employed tens of thousands of scientists to create threats like smallpox-Ebola chimeras and antibiotic-resistant plague — demonstrates the potential scale. With 40 years of technological progress and the rise of AI, the creation of even more dangerous pathogens has become easier.
- Mirror life represents a novel catastrophic risk. All life on Earth uses molecules with a specific “handedness” (e.g., right-handed DNA). If a “mirror-image” bacterium were created with the opposite handedness, our immune systems — and those of nearly all other organisms — would be unable to recognise or fight it. It could become pervasive in the environment, akin to living without an immune system. Andrew estimates a >10% chance of catastrophe if one were released.
2. The “four pillars” plan offers a robust, defence-in-depth strategy
Andrew’s team has developed a plan focused on physical, scalable, and pathogen-agnostic defences to protect society while medical solutions are developed.
Andrew’s team has developed a plan focused on physical, scalable, and pathogen-agnostic defences to protect society while medical solutions are developed.
Pillar 1: Personal protective equipment (PPE)
The core idea is to stockpile elastomeric respirators, which are vastly superior to N95s. They have a 20-year shelf life, provide a protection factor of 100 (or 10,000 when two people interact), and can be reused for months.
The cost could be driven down to $5–10 per mask, making it “outrageously cost effective” to protect entire populations for about 50 cents per person per year. A philanthropic effort could realistically stockpile enough for all essential workers.
Pillar 2: Biohardening buildings
To create safe indoor spaces, we can use simple, scalable technologies that are already widely available. Propylene glycol vapour (the same chemical used in fog machines and vapes) is extremely safe for humans but deadly to airborne pathogens, disrupting their membranes. The US already produces enough to cover all industrial and much residential floorspace.
For surfaces, common disinfectants like ethanol and hypochlorous acid (which can be made at home with salt, water, and electricity) are sufficient.
In extreme scenarios, homes could be turned into improvised clean rooms using positive air pressure generated by common appliances like furnace fans or leaf blowers pushing air through HEPA filters made from materials like household insulation.
[ed. More....]
by Robert Wiblin and Andrew Snyder-Beattie, 8000 Hours | Read more:
Image: YouTube
[ed. Who knew? Bacteria have left and right-handed versions: Mirror Bacteria]Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Many molecules on Earth can exist in one of two forms: a left-handed version and a right-handed version. A common example of this is sugar: glucose can exist in the right-handed version — that’s the version that we eat — as well as a left-handed version that you cannot digest, which is pretty interesting. These two molecules are identical if you put them in a mirror.
So it’s similar to your hands. Your hands in some sense are identical, but they are mirror images of one another. There are lots of properties where it’s the exact same and there are lots of properties where they’re different. For example, you can’t put a left-handed glove on a right hand.
What’s interesting is that many of the molecules in your body — and in fact all of the big, most important molecules — have this chiral property. So if you imagine a strand of DNA, all the little As, Ts, Cs, and Gs use the right-handed version. And all of the proteins in your body, like the bigger molecules that comprise the bigger machines, all use the left-handed version.
So if you’re a scientist in a laboratory, in the same way that you can create the mirror image version of sugar, you can also create the mirror image version of those little As, Ts, Cs, and Gs. And if you put the mirror image version of those little As, Ts, Cs, and Gs, you can create a mirror-image DNA strand that spins in the opposite direction, and it looks like the mirror image of regular DNA.
One interesting thing is that this is not just true of human biology; this is true of basically all life on Earth: bacteria, humans, plants, everything. All animals use right-handed DNA, left-handed proteins.
So a lot of scientists were thinking, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could create the mirror-image version of not just DNA or proteins, but an entire mirror-image version of a bacteria, like a whole mirror image organism?” There were a number of labs that were looking into this as a possible exciting project. The NSF even funded about a $4 million grant to look into this.
But there’s a major problem with this: your immune system has been trained on molecules that it recognises. And if you flip that molecule to the mirror-image version, your immune system is not going to be able to detect or break down those molecules. What that means is that if this bacteria were to get into your lungs or get into your bloodstream, there is a decent chance that it would grow on achiral nutrients and it would cause a lethal infection.
Now, you might then be asking, “There are plenty of bacteria that cause lethal infections. What makes this so bad?” The reason that this is bad is because it’s not just true of human immune systems; most immune systems on the planet have been trained on a certain chirality. So this would not just potentially infect and kill humans; it would potentially infect and kill many species of animals, possibly even species of plants. Plant immune systems work in a very similar way.
What that means is that this could be very persistent in the environment. It could be kind of pervasive. This would be a lot less like a human-to-human pandemic, but it would be something that is persisting in the soil, persisting in the environment. If there’s a tree that’s infected outside of your house and the wind blows in, then that would potentially infect you.
So it would be much more akin to living without an immune system. And people that have genetic diseases that have certain receptors broken typically die in childhood. It’s a very nasty disease. This would be like the whole world ending up in that situation.
