Bioengineered Pandemics - Can You Design a Virus That Is More Than Contagious?

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We are in the middle of t pandemic now, right with covid and in many ways, it's like a warning pandemic. Even though it's been extremely terrible and deadly, it could have been enormously worse. And if you wanted to design a bug that would a bug in the in the a casual sense of iris, that would be very, very deadly. You know, could you design it to lurk inside people without any effects for months, and then turn on and become extremely fatal? That's the worry. Once you're at the level of designing d and a, why not? Yes, that's the risk.

We’re pretty well-calibrated when it comes to dealing with common, everyday-level setbacks. But our brains aren’t naturally equipped for dealing with unlikely but world-catastrophic disasters. Yet such threats are real, both natural and human-induced. We need to collectively get better at anticipating and preparing for them, at the level of political action. Andrew Leigh is an academic and author who now serves in the Parliament of Australia. We discuss how to move the conversation about existential risks from the ivory tower to implementation in real policies.

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Andrew Leigh received his Ph.D. in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a member of the Australian House of Representatives representing Fenner. He was previously a professor of economics at Australian National University, and has served as Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury and Charities. His recent book is What’s the Worst That Could Happen? Existential Risk and Extreme Politics.

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