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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: Biosecurity needs engineers and materials scientists, published by willbradshaw on December 16, 2021 on The Effective Altruism Forum. TL;DR: Expertise in engineering physical systems is critically needed for some of the most important and neglected biosecurity interventions, including improved PPE and designing pandemic-safe buildings. If you have that expertise and are interested in getting involved, you should contact me. Disclaimer: All uses of "engineering" in this post refer to the engineering of physical systems (e.g. materials engineering or civil engineering). Sorry, software engineers. The problem Historically, the EA-adjacent biosecurity space has been dominated by people with backgrounds in biology, epidemiology, medicine, and public policy. Most of the junior people thinking about working on biosecurity also have these backgrounds. These seem to be the people who the EA community thinks of as having something to contribute to biosecurity. This makes sense: the creation of biological threats is a political & social problem, and the threats themselves are, well, biological, so people with expertise in biology & medicine seem well-equipped to think about countermeasures. All of these areas of expertise will be needed to tackle the biosecurity threat. However, many of the most important interventions for reducing catastrophic biological risk are neither biological nor social in nature. Instead, these interventions use physical means to block, capture or destroy pathogens. Such technologies are much more threat-agnostic than most interventions that rely on biotechnology, providing broad protection while necessitating far less dual-use research and infohazardous threat modelling. Rather than biologists and policymakers, the people best-equipped to drive these interventions forward are materials scientists, building engineers, and others with strong backgrounds in the applied physical sciences. Unfortunately, people with these backgrounds are currently severely lacking in biosecurity. The interventions There are many ways people with applied physical science expertise could have an impact in biosecurity. I've outlined a few of the most important and/or salient for me below; I'm sure there are others I'm not yet thinking of. (For more on these and other exciting technological interventions, read Appendix A of The Apollo Program for Biodefense.) Physical protection against pathogens As mentioned above, the most important biosecurity interventions engineers could work on are those intended to stop disease causing agents getting into people in the first place. In roughly descending order of importance, these include: Improving personal protective equipment (PPE): The design of face masks and other PPE has barely changed for many decades, and still receives relatively little attention. PPE that was highly effective, easy to use, and cheap to distribute would be perhaps the single most transformative technological intervention to overcome biological risks, but is currently laughably neglected. Suppressing pathogen spread in the built environment: Indoor spaces are far more dangerous than outdoor spaces for transmitting respiratory infections. While not as general or powerful as improved PPE, interventions to reduce transmission in building could significantly slow the spread of severe biological threats. Proposed interventions in this area include improvements in ventilation, far-UVC irradiation, and upper-room UVGI. However, many of these have significant difficulties to overcome before widespread adoption, and relatively little time and money have gone into either implementing these technologies or identifying promising alternatives. Improving biosafety in high-containment labs and clinics: As with PPE for general use, the technologies and systems used to maintain b...