Andrew Snyder-Beattie on the low-tech plan to patch humanity’s greatest weakness

By 80000_Hours @ 2025-10-02T17:05 (+77)

Episode summary

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

Most efforts to combat these extreme biorisks have focused on either prevention or new high-tech countermeasures. But prevention may well fail, and high-tech approaches can’t scale to protect billions when, with no sane person willing to leave their home, we’re just weeks from economic collapse.

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.

Andrew is hiring for a range of roles to make it happen — from manufacturing and logistics experts to global health specialists to policymakers and other ambitious entrepreneurs — as well as programme associates to join Open Philanthropy’s biosecurity team (apply by October 20!).

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.

This episode was recorded on August 12, 2025

Video editing: Simon Monsour and Luke Monsour
Audio engineering: Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Music: CORBIT
Camera operator: Jake Morris
Coordination, transcriptions, and web: Katy Moore

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.

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.

Pillar 3: Early detection

The key is to find “stealth” pathogens with long latent periods (like HIV) before they become widespread.

• Pathogen-agnostic metagenomic sequencing offers a solution by continuously sequencing all genetic material from sources like wastewater to identify novel threats without needing to know what to look for.
• Organisations like the Nucleic Acid Observatory, funded by Open Philanthropy, are already piloting this technology across the US.

Pillar 4: Medical countermeasures

• This is the ultimate exit strategy, but it can’t be the first line of defence. Modern vaccines (like mRNA) take too long to develop (e.g., the 100-day mission is too slow for rapidly spreading pathogens) and may not work against engineered threats designed to evade the immune system.
• Long-term, Andrew is optimistic about the “wrench hypothesis”: the idea that it’s fundamentally easier for a defender to design a molecule that “jams the gears” of a pathogen than it is for an attacker to design a pathogen with no vulnerabilities.

3. Other catastrophic biorisks, like agricultural collapse, are less concerning

Andrew’s team concluded that threats targeting humans directly are a much higher priority than those targeting agriculture or the environment.

• Agriculture is surprisingly robust. In a worst-case scenario where all crops die instantly, the US has enough stockpiled food (including animal feed) to last at least 18 months. For a permanent solution, we could use existing technology to feed bacteria natural gas to create an edible, nutritious sludge. The US could feed its entire population this way for 500 years using only a fraction of its natural gas and electricity production.
• Environmental threats are too slow to be existential. Even if all photosynthesis on Earth magically stopped instantly, we would still have roughly 1,000 years of oxygen left, providing ample time to develop countermeasures.

4. We urgently need entrepreneurial people to execute this plan

The field is extremely neglected, with fewer than 100 people working full-time on preventing the worst-case biological catastrophes. A shocking number of these critical projects have zero or only a handful of people working on them full-time.

Andrew’s team is hiring for numerous roles to build out this strategy.

• Key roles are open for grantmakers, a CEO and staff for the PPE nonprofit, experts in manufacturing and logistics, and hands-on researchers to test biohardening strategies — fill out the expression of interest form.
• You don’t need a biology PhD to contribute. Many of the problems are logistical, operational, and strategic. Andrew himself has an economics background, and other top people in the field have come from software engineering and physics.

Highlights

The worst-case scenario: 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.

Rob Wiblin: So if this theory is right, then these mirror bacteria would have an enormous competitive advantage against every other organism, because they would potentially be able to evade the immune system of basically all other organisms, and they wouldn’t have any natural competitors in that sense?

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Sort of. They would have a big competitive advantage inside of an animal — where it’s evading the immune system, but other pathogens are not evading the immune system. So it would have a competitive advantage there.

I think it’s a lot less clear how big of a competitive advantage it would have, say, in the soil or in the dirt or something like that. It would have some advantages. For example, viruses would not be able to infect it. So phages typically cut down on bacterial populations. Other protists that graze on bacteria also wouldn’t be able to eat and digest it.

So it would have some fitness advantages, but it would also have some big disadvantages. For example, it wouldn’t have horizontal gene transfer, so it wouldn’t be able to adapt as quickly to different environments. It would also be relatively limited in the types of nutrients that it could get. It would be probably persisting on achiral nutrients, which are a lot less abundant.

So I think this would not be something that would literally take over the whole ecosystem, and all bacteria suddenly turn into mirror bacteria because it outcompetes everything. It would not look like that. I think instead it would look like there’s a tiny trace amount of it, but there might be a tiny trace amount of it kind of everywhere.

Why antibiotics aren't enough to fight mirror bacteria

Rob Wiblin: Why couldn’t we just treat these [mirror] bacteria the same way that we treat other bacteria, using antibiotics? I guess you’ve kind of flagged why that wouldn’t necessarily work: we wouldn’t just have to treat people; we’d have to basically coat the entire Earth in antibiotics in order to stop it growing through all the plants and animals.

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Right. So the first objection is you’re not going to necessarily be able to save the crops or the ecosystem this way, because that would just require far too many antibiotics.

But I think there are two other objections to this. First is that, even if we were to pivot 100% of US antibiotic production — including agricultural antibiotic production — we’d only be able to cover maybe about 10% of the US population. So just the scaling of this would be quite grim.

The second thing is that the people that have these immunodeficiencies, they tend to die even if you give them antibiotics. So they need to be on the antibiotics prophylactically. So this isn’t something like where you just treat an infection; it means that all of us would have to be taking antibiotics every single day for the rest of our life.

Rob Wiblin: And doing that while watching the natural world probably die out.

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Right. And this puts us in a very precarious situation, because then if the power plant gets cut or the antibiotic production facility goes out, it’s game over.

Rob Wiblin: I guess we suspect that if we did create mirror bacteria, there’s a good chance that many of the plants around the world would just start gradually dying off as this bacteria spread and began infecting them. Do we know if that would take months or years or longer?

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Yeah. Well, I should also say that there are still a lot of uncertainties here. It’s very hard to predict exactly how this would interact.

Rob Wiblin: Because we don’t even know what species of bacteria it is.

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Yeah. I would say probably more than a 10% chance that if mirror bacteria were released tomorrow, it would be catastrophic. But I don’t necessarily think it would be more than 80%, for example. I think there’s still a lot of uncertainty, but more than 10% chance is still like, this is kind of a doomsday scenario.

On the question of speed: interestingly, bacterial pathogens tend to spread quite slowly if they only infect plants. There are these studies where an orchard will be infected with something and it won’t even necessarily get to the other end of the orchard within a year.

That being said, animals can spread bacteria very quickly. So if insects are infected with mirror bacteria and then they’re spreading it from plant to plant, that could end up saturating a forest quite quickly. Also, just human travel can move things very quickly. I mean, COVID was basically everywhere in the world quite quickly, so there’s no reason to think that wouldn’t be true of mirror bacteria as well.

The most cost-effective way governments could prevent respiratory transmission among their populations

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: So maybe one interesting implication is that if we can actually get the cost of [this elastomeric respirator] down to $10 or maybe even $5, this becomes one of the most cost-effective ways of preventing respiratory transmission. If the shelf life of this is 20 years for $10, that means basically 50 cents per person per year of protection, which is just outrageously cost effective. This is substantially more cost effective than an N95, and basically would be blocking most respiratory pathogens, or basically all of them.

So if you’re a government, I think 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 two orders of magnitude cheaper than that. It depends on what you think the risk is of a nuclear missile launch versus a pandemic, but this is extremely cost effective. I think any rational national security person should think that a population should have one of these for every person.

Rob Wiblin: It’s got a lot going for it: the advantage here is it’s much cheaper per day of use, much cheaper per year of coverage in storage. I guess it requires even less space, because you don’t have to stockpile like an N95 for one person every single day that they’re going to be using it. So I guess it’s like a tenfold or hundredfold reduction in cost relative to the N95s. I guess the N95s were maybe still worth stockpiling if that was all that we had, but at one-hundredth the price.

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Yeah, this is just the common-sense thing to do. I could talk a bit about the disadvantages. I don’t think it dominates on every dimension.

One thing is that healthcare workers don’t like wearing these, because they make you look a bit more scary, and it’s harder to talk through them compared to the cloth of the N95. So that’s one disadvantage. If you wear this for long periods of time, the condensation will get kind of gross.

So I’m not saying these are perfect in every way, but I think in a life-and-death situation, it’s pretty obvious that this is the thing that I want.

The other interesting implication of the $10 cost per mask is that this starts to get within the budget range of, say, a group of philanthropists that wanted to do this even if the governments were not making a rational decision and buying a lot of these.

That’s something that we’re in the early stages of thinking through. But you could totally imagine a philanthropic effort where if you were just trying to cover, say, the people that had to go outside during a catastrophe, a group of philanthropists could come together to stockpile, say, 30 million of these — that would be $300 million, maybe $150 million if the cost is cheap enough — and hire a bunch of really good people to do the shipping and logistics.

And the next time there’s a pandemic, if you need to work in a power plant or you need to work in a water treatment facility, you wake up one morning and there’s one of these on your doorstep for every single essential worker. This is something that private philanthropists could just do to protect people.

Why Andrew works on biorisks rather than AI

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: So the Center for Global Development has the number at basically a 50/50 chance within the next 25 years of a pandemic that would be as bad as COVID or worse.

Then there’s the separate question of what’s the probability of a catastrophe where it would actually threaten human survival? I think that number is also quite high. I would say that’s something like 1% to 3% — which sounds like a low number, but what that means is I think there’s a higher probability that I die due to a biological catastrophe than I die, say, in a car accident.

Rob Wiblin: Well, that everyone dies in a biological catastrophe than that you die in a car accident.

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Correct. Yes.

Rob Wiblin: Why have you chosen to work on biological catastrophes in particular over all of the other risks? I mean, I guess we tend to talk more about AI on this show. It’s particularly salient at the moment. But there’s other things you could have gone and worked on as well.

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: The short answer would be that I think it is very tractable. I think it is extremely neglected. I think there are basically fewer than 100 people working full-time on strategies that would encompass the worst-case scenarios. And I don’t think the importance is, say, more than an order of magnitude less important than something like AI risk.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Why do you think it’s not an order of magnitude less?

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: I think basically it depends on how much risk you put on AI. If you put a 30% chance of extinction from AI, then a 1% to 3% chance of extinction from bio is still within the realm of… The tractability and the neglectedness arguments can still outweigh that.

Rob Wiblin: I thought you were going to make an argument that the risks from AI and risks from bio are connected.

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Oh, they are. Yeah.

Rob Wiblin: I suppose we’ve mentioned one reason already why the two are intertwined, which is that making a biological weapon is one way that an AI might threaten humanity in order to get its way.

I guess people think that there’s a high risk that especially open-weighted AI models might be extremely helpful for bad actors who want to run their own biological weapons programme. Basically they can get much better expert advice and assistance, and something that previously would have required something like the Soviet programme with thousands of workers maybe could be done with just dozens at some point in the future. So that’s quite troubling.

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Exactly. That is quite troubling, yeah.

Rob Wiblin: Is there anything we can do to stop that from happening? Or is it just a foregone conclusion that sooner or later these open-weighted models are going to be jailbroken and they’re going to be extremely helpful at doing this sort of work?

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: I don’t think it’s a totally foregone conclusion. You can imagine different things, like better DNA synthesis screening. So even if a model is giving you terrifying instructions for how to make a biological weapon, ultimately you still have to get physical things in order to conduct that attack. And it’s not trivial to get those physical things, so perhaps there could be various checkpoints to prevent terrorism.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. To what extent do you think it helps us that, even if you’re getting good advice from a computer kind of telling you what to do, it’s just like difficult to run the experiments, it’s difficult to do the work in a lab? I guess biology is very fiddly, kind of famously so.

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Yeah, absolutely.

Rob Wiblin: You mentioned in your notes that you want to do a crash programme to put in place your four pillar strategy — which we’re going to talk about later — in about two and a half years. Is that sort of set by this AI deadline, where you feel that the threat is getting worse because of AI advances?

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Possibly. In some sense it’s because I think we could do it in two and a half years, so why not set a very ambitious deadline? But yes, with AI progress being what it is, the possibility that it could help create biological weapons faster, I think even if there’s only a 10% chance of that, that’s something that we should be really sprinting towards and working to close that risk.

Everyone was wrong: biorisks are defence dominant in the limit

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: I think there are a lot of different things that you could mean when you talk about an offence/defence balance.

One thing you could talk about is the cost of the attack and the cost of the defence. There is an example where I think the attacker has a huge advantage. One very concrete example of this is that after 9/11, the United States bought well over 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine to basically cover the entire US population. That cost well over $1 billion.

Then there’s the question of how much would it cost to create smallpox? One number here is there was a postdoc that synthesised horsepox, a very similar virus, for about $100,000. And you know, even if you added an order of magnitude onto that for evading synthesis-screening mechanisms and acquiring the expertise, you’re still looking at an offence/defence ratio of 1,000 to 1. If you take the $100,000 number, that’s like 10,000 to 1. So it’s very skewed, and it’s hard to think about any other area of national security where there’s a 10,000 to 1 cost ratio.

So that’s one thing that’s quite scary. And I think that’s what we mean when we say biology is potentially offence dominant.

There’s a separate question though. Take any given person or any given city: could you protect that city or the majority of the people in that city if you really had to, and you were willing to spend that money? Because you could imagine there’s another type of offence dominance, which is: no matter how much the defender spends, they [can] get through. I think nuclear weapons are a good example of that. Maybe we have missile defence now, but before that, basically there’s almost nothing the defender could do.

In biology, I do not think that is the case. I do think there are tractable things we can do — and in fact, I think some of them could be surprisingly affordable, at least to buy time for the more expensive countermeasures to come online.

Another way you could think of offence/defence balance is through kind of a silly thought experiment: imagine there’s a person in a box, and both the attacker and the defender get to release some sort of biological or chemical agent onto that person in the box. The question is: can the defender successfully keep that person alive? Here I think the answer is probably not. I think the attacker has the big advantage.

But I don’t think that’s a realistic thought experiment, because people are spread out, and it’s quite hard to get physical things delivered to people — and I think that’s fundamentally the thing that the defender has the advantage on.

So you could imagine an alternative thought experiment, where there are like 10 people in 10 different boxes that are connected, and the attacker gets to infect the first person, but the defender is trying to protect as many of the other people as possible. Maybe trying to protect the first person, but maybe that’s hopeless. But what the defender can do is just build a wall and prevent the disease from spreading. I think that’s an area in which the defender has a real fundamental advantage.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Is that basically the core weakness that you have? If you’re a bacteria or a virus trying to kill everyone, basically you just have no way to penetrate through walls or through physical barriers. And I guess you’re also vulnerable because you’re so small. That creates the advantage that people can’t see you – you can sneak into people’s lungs without being noticed — but on the other hand, you’re so small you’re completely vulnerable to heat, to UV, to chemical attacks that would just disintegrate you. You basically just aren’t large enough to defend yourself.

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Basically, yes. The other thing I would add to that is just straight-up filtration. And maybe you would say that maybe in the future we could have nanotechnology, and these little microscopic robots that could burrow through your filters and burrow through your walls. But that also has a lot of other constraints, like just the simple amount of energy that each of those things would need to be holding. It’s also not clear that you couldn’t use similar countermeasures — like you could have your nanobot pesticide that kills it in a similar way.

So I think these are a lot of ways that the defender basically is fundamentally protected.

Rob Wiblin: I suppose the other way in which they have a disadvantage against humans is that we’re kind of intelligent, and we can use science and technology to think up specific countermeasures that can target them in particular. Whereas a bacteria can’t be doing science in order to figure out how to outwit us. It does have evolution as an option to try to move in a more dangerous direction or to evade our countermeasures, but that probably would be slower, basically.

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Yeah. And evolution is not going to be optimised for killing people. So if there’s some pathogen that’s evolving, probably it’s going to be evolving in a direction that’s less lethal.

In fact, this is interesting. During the Soviet weapons programme, they were generating these gigantic vats of anthrax. What they would find is that the anthrax would evolve to get very good at growing in these giant containers and less good at killing people — which is like exactly what you would expect from evolutionary pressure. So I think there would be a similar dynamic if there’s something spreading through the environment.

The "four pillars" plan — and how listeners can help

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: The four pillars plan is basically a plan to buy time. You want to basically intervene at the earliest possible stage and make sure that society and civilisation can keep running while we buy time for medical countermeasures — which I think is eventually the way that we would need to get out of a really bad scenario.

The four pillars, in order, would be:

The first is personal protective equipment: things like really good elastomeric respirators, masks to keep people protected from respiratory pathogens, possibly other types of PPE.

The second pillar is basically protected buildings: eventually you’re going to need to take off your PPE, and you need to do that in a clean, safe environment.

The third pillar is detection: you want to make sure that nothing is spreading without you knowing about it, so having really good detection systems is very important.

And then finally, medical countermeasures. I think there’s a question about where the offence/defence balance eventually bottoms out with medical countermeasures, and hopefully it bottoms out with the defender winning. If that’s the case, then I think medical countermeasures would be very promising.

Rob Wiblin: OK, so pillar one is personal protective equipment to protect individuals. Pillar two is biohardening of environments like homes and offices to prevent anything from getting in that might infect people. Pillar three is detecting the pathogen as early as possible, and being able to observe if it’s spreading where you thought you had prevented it from doing so — and the earlier we know, the sooner we can put in place these other measures and the less it’s killed people in the meantime.

And the fourth one is trying to escape from this situation where everyone is in their biohardened homes, where ultimately we want some more permanent medical fix that can actually just get rid of the pathogen or protect people forever.

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Exactly.

Rob Wiblin: You’re trying to hire for a whole lot of roles, including some pretty senior roles, to make this plan happen. What are the roles that you’re trying to recruit for at the moment?

Andrew Snyder-Beattie: Yeah, recruiting for a lot of roles. At Open Philanthropy itself, we’re going to be on the hunt for grantmakers: people who could deploy tens of millions of dollars to reduce these biological risks, who can learn about a new field, get information, talk to people.

I think it’s a common misconception that grantmaking is about sitting in a chair and reading grant applications coming in. We make very few of our grants that way. The vast majority of our grantmaking is you have to spend the first 5% of a project doing it yourself to understand what it is; you have to get to know people in the community to understand who’s doing good work here; and then you want to be headhunting the top people to do the things that you need to have done in the world.

On that note, we’re also looking for many roles outside of Open Philanthropy. For example, on the PPE project that we’ll talk about, we need someone to lead a really good nonprofit — who’s going to basically run that, run the manufacturing, run the distribution, think through all the things that need to be done there. It’s a very senior role.

On some of the other things that we’re looking for: people to basically just own very large components of the problem. We’re looking for more researchers, and we’re also looking for even people who are just pivoting their career and don’t know quite what they want to do. We have a scholarship and fellowship programme for people to transition into biosecurity.

So we’re going to have an online form — there’ll be a link to that — and I would encourage you to fill that out if you’re interested in transitioning into biosecurity.