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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Concrete Biosecurity Projects (some of which could be big), published by eca on January 11, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Andrew Snyder-Beattie and Ethan Alley This is a list of longtermist biosecurity projects. We think most of them could reduce catastrophic biorisk by more than 1% or so on the current margin (in relative[1] terms). While we are confident there is important work to be done within each of these areas, our confidence in specific pathways varies widely and the particulars of each idea have not been investigated thoroughly. Still, we see these areas as critical parts of biosecurity infrastructure, and would like to see progress building them out. If you’d like to be kept up to date about opportunities to get involved, please fill out this Google Form. Early Detection Center Early detection of a biothreat increases the amount of time we have to respond (e.g. designing tailored countermeasures, using protective equipment, heading to bunkers, etc). The current approach for early warning of novel pathogens is severely lacking—it typically relies on a particularly astute doctor realizing that something is strange combined with negative tests for everything else. Existing systems are also almost exclusively focused on known pathogens, and we could do a lot better using pathogen-agnostic systems that can pick up unknown pathogens. One concrete goal would be something simple where a small team of people collects samples from volunteer travelers around the world and then does a full metagenomic scan for anything that could be dangerous.[2] Even collecting and analyzing only 100 random samples per day could make a big difference in some scenarios, since that would mean we would still expect to catch things before they infect too large a fraction of the global population. We think that with the right team, this could be done with close-to-existing technology for less than $50 million per year.[3] There are a handful of bottlenecks and a number of ways to decompose this problem. To get started on subproblems, one of us (Ethan) is working on a list of suggestions, which we will backlink here. Super PPE Most personal protective equipment (PPE) is not good enough. Things like masks and suits require training to fit properly, lack reusability, and are generally designed for routine uses rather than for the most extreme events. The small minority of PPE that is designed for extreme use cases (e.g. BSL4 suits or military-grade PPE) is bulky, highly restrictive, and insufficiently abundant—not the kind of thing you could easily put millions of healthcare/pharma/essential workers into if needed. It seems plausible that with good materials science and product design we could come up with next-generation PPE that is simultaneously highly effective in extreme cases, easy to use, reliable over long periods of time, and cheap/abundant. One concrete commercial goal would be to produce a suit (and accompanying system) that is designed for severely immunocompromised people to lead relatively normal lives, at a cost low enough to convince the US government to acquire 100 million units for the Strategic National Stockpile.[4] Another goal would be for the suit to simultaneously meet military-grade specifications, e.g. protecting against a direct hit of anthrax. PPE has the advantage of being truly ‘pathogen-agnostic’—we can stockpile it in advance of knowing what the threat is, in contrast to vaccines or many medical countermeasures. It is also ‘defensively stable’ in that physical barriers can’t be easily bypassed using pathogen engineering techniques (whereas many medical countermeasures might be defeated with some creative tinkering). See Carl Shulman’s post here for more on this. To get started on subproblems within PPE, one of us (Ethan) will publish a PPE deeper dive a...