One type of risk you’ve been very interested in for a long time is “biorisk.” What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen? Take us through that.
I started out in public health before I worked in national security, working on infectious disease control—malaria and tuberculosis. In 2002, the first virus was synthesized from scratch on a Darpa project, and it was sort of an “oh crap” moment for the biosciences and the public health community, realizing biology is going to become an engineering discipline that could be potentially misused. I was working with veterans of the smallpox eradication campaign, and they thought, “Crap, we just spent decades eradicating a disease that now could be synthesized from scratch.”
I then moved to working in biosecurity, trying to figure out,…
