This is a link post.
Summary: The NAO will increase our sequencing significantly over the next
few months, funded by a $3M grant from Open
Philanthropy. This will allow us to scale
our early-warning system to where we could flag many engineered pathogens early
enough to mitigate their worst impacts, and also generate large amounts of data
to develop, tune, and evaluate our detection systems.
One of the biological threats the NAO is most concerned with is a
'stealth'
pathogen, such as a virus with the profile of a faster-spreading HIV. This
could cause a devastating pandemic, and early detection would be critical to
mitigate the worst impacts. If such a pathogen were to spread, however, we
wouldn't be able to monitor it with traditional approaches because we wouldn't
know what to look for. Instead, we have invested in metagenomic sequencing for
pathogen-agnostic detection. This doesn't require deciding what [...]
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First published:
April 2nd, 2025
Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AJ8bd2sz8tF7cxJff/scaling-our-pilot-early-warning-system
Linkpost URL:
https://naobservatory.org/blog/scaling-our-early-warning-system/
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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