[Linkpost] “Scaling Our Pilot Early-Warning System” by Jeff Kaufman 🔸

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/

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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