Pandemic prevention and biosecurity

When COVID-19 first began spreading rapidly in 2020, we didn’t know much about the virus. We didn’t know whether we could get infected from the air we breathed or the surfaces we touched; we didn’t know how likely transmission was outdoors, whether masks would be effective, or how quickly we could develop, produce, and distribute effective vaccines and treatments.

In short, we were unprepared. As a result, millions of people died. And the next time something like COVID-19 comes along — or something far, far worse — it’s not clear we’ll be much better off.

This review explains how you could use your career to do something about that.

At the most basic level, this means ensuring that humanity is better prepared, so the next virus won’t catch us with our guard down. We should have a much better understanding of how viruses spread so we can stop pandemics out of the gate. We need better systems for rapidly rolling out vaccines, treatments, and non-pharmaceutical interventions that will work against a wide range of threats. And we need policies, practices, and institutions to reduce the risk that new pandemics — particularly those caused by artificial pathogens, which we believe pose the greatest dangers — will devastate the world once again.

Why work on pandemic prevention?

It could save millions of lives

We’ve argued that pandemics can pose global catastrophic risks — especially because advances in bioengineering could enable the development of engineered pandemics that are even more deadly than the worst natural pandemics in history (like the 1918 flu pandemic or the Black Death).

Thousands of people already work on mitigating the danger of pandemics in general, and the world spends billions of dollars each year on this problem. Nonetheless, this spending wasn’t enough to manage COVID-19, and it seems likely to remain inadequate; surprisingly little has been done to prepare for the next pandemic.¹

Also, while existing efforts usually prioritise naturally arising pandemics over outbreaks that could be caused by human mistakes or malice, the latter are much more likely to pose an existential or global catastrophic risk — for reasons explained in our problem profile.

It isn’t very speculative

While we think the rise of advanced AI poses catastrophic risks, we’re highly uncertain about what shape these will take or how severe they’ll be. Modern AI is an unprecedented technology, and it’s hard to predict how fast its capabilities will increase, how it will change society, or what should be done to manage it. Many people are sceptical about core facets of the argument for risk, and we can’t definitively say that they are wrong.

The argument for working on catastrophic pandemics is much less speculative. We’ve seen pandemics kill tens of millions of people, we’ve seen people deliberately produce pathogens, and we’ve seen that AI makes it easier to acquire knowledge and carry out experiments. We also believe there are many clear ways to address this threat — as we explain below.

There are many tractable approaches

Many pressing problems are very difficult to make progress on — they might be highly abstract, or require making predictions about technology that doesn’t yet exist. Though we often advise working on the most promising issues you can find, even when success is unlikely, some people find it frustrating to work in a field with few tractable solutions; it can be hard to know when you’ve made a difference.

Biorisk, however, is one of the most tractable problems on our list. Much of the field is based on well-established science (virology, genomics, public health). There are many concrete interventions that experts broadly agree are worth pursuing, and that have high potential ROI — for example, creating better PPE stockpiles could prevent trillions of dollars in damage for a tiny fraction of that cost.

If you want to make tangible progress on an issue of global importance, without the risk that your work turns out to be misdirected, you may find biosecurity work to be highly satisfying.

It doesn’t require working on AI

You’ve probably noticed that we think advanced AI could be very dangerous, and that we think most people trying to maximise their impact should consider careers in that space.

However, we wouldn’t expect every visitor to our site to end up working on AI risk. If you have no interest in that field, or don’t expect transformative AI to be very dangerous, biorisk is a strong option that doesn’t necessarily involve AI. For example, you might work on growing PPE stockpiles or improving detection technology.

We rate biorisk as a less pressing issue than AI safety, mainly because we think biorisks are less likely to be truly existential, and AI seems more likely to play a key role in shaping the long-term future. However, working to prevent catastrophic pandemics still seems very valuable to us, and could be your best option if you have a comparative advantage in this path (e.g. a background in biology, physical engineering, or entrepreneurship).

What does this path involve?

Preventing pandemics is a massive global endeavour that requires expertise across many domains, from public health to business and manufacturing. Whatever your professional background, there’s a real chance you could make a difference.

Working in biosecurity might look like:

• Conducting research or building tools that improve our ability to identify the source of an engineered pandemic.
• Designing ways to use far-UVC light to disinfect public spaces, or engineering a new kind of respirator to lower the cost of effective PPE.
• Working in a government office or think tank to promote the creation of PPE stockpiles or the use of metagenomic sequencing in airports and sewer systems.
• Founding a company to manufacture one of these new technologies, so it can become widely available before the next pandemic.

These are just a few examples. Our job board offers dozens of others, and someone with an entrepreneurial mindset could create their own job by starting an organisation or applying for funding.

Here’s more detail on a few major categories of biosecurity work:

Technical careers

Technological advances over the past two decades made it possible to deploy a vaccine within the first year of the COVID pandemic — a historically unprecedented feat that saved millions of lives. Further advances in our ability to prevent, detect, and respond to emerging outbreaks could reduce or even eliminate the danger of catastrophic pandemics in the future.

Biotech and pharmaceuticals are important for developing medical countermeasures such as ‘platform’ vaccines and broad-spectrum therapeutics. But there are also promising interventions outside of these fields. AI could help us develop better methods for detecting the use of genetic engineering and identifying the origin of engineered organisms; physics and engineering are key to producing better personal protective equipment (PPE) and highly effective sterilisation (e.g. far-UVC).

Many technical interventions need work across multiple disciplines. For example, developing a biosurveillance system, which uses metagenomic sequencing on genetic samples to get an ‘early warning’ of an outbreak, may require:

• Computational biology to find the warning signs of an outbreak in genetic sequence data
• Engineering to develop appropriate sequencers
• Disease modelling to figure out where samples should be taken
• Tech policy to navigate potential risks of misuse
• Entrepreneurs and operations experts (see below) to ensure that the system is actually built out and implemented in cities around the world

Technical interventions at an earlier stage may require more ‘pure’ research and theoretical work to determine feasibility and shape strategy, while those at a later stage may require clinical experts or businesspeople to establish efficacy or bring a product to market.

Policy careers

A lot of the risk we face from pandemics could be reduced or mitigated with appropriate policy — for example, funding for PPE stockpiles, restrictions on dangerous experiments, or advanced market commitments to speed vaccine development.

The main actors in this space are national governments. They have a near-monopoly on some kinds of interventions (e.g. security, intelligence, diplomatic, legal, regulatory), and are major players in many others (e.g. science and technology funding).

The United States, as arguably the most influential actor in global biosecurity, probably offers the most impactful opportunities — but other nations are also important (especially nations with large populations or economies). You’re more likely to be able to get roles working on security-related issues in your country of origin or citizenship, since governments may be less trusting of foreign nationals. And different agencies within a government are responsible for working on different aspects of biorisk, so you’ll want to be deliberate when choosing where to work.

You can also have an impact on biorisk policy outside government. Positions in academia, think tanks, and civil society can play an important role in advising, partnering with, or lobbying governments to improve policy. International bodies such as the World Health Organisation, EU, and UN also have roles to play.

Entrepreneurial and operations careers

Many technical breakthroughs take far too long to reach a broad population due to operational issues — like the R21 malaria vaccine, whose rollout was hindered by issues around financing, public communication, and training for healthcare workers.

While people in policy and technical roles can lay the groundwork for many interventions, actually bringing those interventions into widespread use involves other skills. To accomplish nearly anything on a large scale, you need founders to create and lead organisations, as well as skilled managers and operations staff to help run them.

For example:

• Setting up an early warning system for pandemics requires deploying the system across many locations, each with their own rules around key steps like procurement and sample collection. These are easier to navigate if the organisation behind the system employs people with relevant skills, like legal expertise and experience applying for government contracts.
• Providing high-quality personal protective equipment to essential workers means testing different equipment to determine efficacy and ease of use, arranging to mass-manufacture the top-performing equipment, and ensuring that adequate supplies are available across many population centers.
• Rolling out a new vaccine requires delivering millions of doses of medication to countries around the world, ensuring they withstand high temperatures and rough handling, and providing clear instructions (in the right languages!) to the people who will administer them.

We think biosecurity is more bottlenecked on these skills than AI safety:

• Biosecurity is a more mature and developed field — much of the opportunity lies in scaling up ideas we are confident can work, rather than looking for new ideas through research.
• Several promising biosecurity interventions involve the large-scale manufacturing and deployment of technology, which is far more operationally intensive than most AI safety work (which tends to centre around research, advocacy, programming, and writing). It also requires capital — hence the need for founders who can raise the necessary funds.
• Compared to the software sector, healthcare tends to be slow-moving and heavily regulated. This makes it especially valuable to speed things up: shaving weeks off a six-month wait beats shaving days off a one-week wait. Biosecurity organisations need operations staff who can move quickly and find scrappy ways to work around bureaucracy.

Operations roles could be suitable for people from a variety of backgrounds (including business, manufacturing, or any form of management).

Other careers

Some careers lie outside these paths, such as grantmaking or strategy. Biorisk also intersects with other cause areas, so people in these related fields may contribute to biorisk reduction without working exclusively on it. Examples of such fields include forecasting, improving institutional decision making, mitigating great power conflict, and journalism.

Fieldbuilding work is also important for growing the biosecurity community. You might look for ways to attract more talented people or strengthen networks within the field — say, by organising events and workshops or providing mentorship to people with less experience. For more on this kind of work, see this call for more biosecurity fieldbuilding from grantmaker Abbey Chaver, or our AI fieldbuilding career profile — much of that advice also fits biosecurity.

Could you be a good fit?

The best backgrounds and skill sets

Because biosecurity offers promising interventions at every stage of development (from basic science to manufacturing and distribution), it can accommodate people with many different backgrounds and skill sets.

If any of these sound like you, you might be a great fit for this work — consider applying for jobs or career guidance.

Practical builders: Many top interventions exist as theoretical research or small experiments, but need to be scaled up to make a real impact. This requires ‘builders’ and ‘doers’ — people skilled at running businesses and navigating real-world problems. The founder who figures out how to sell far-UVC lighting to municipal transit agencies could prevent multiple cities from shutting down during the next pandemic. The engineer who helps airports install biosurveillance systems might stop an outbreak altogether.

Related skills:

• Entrepreneurship (creating a business or nonprofit with ambitious goals)
• Sales (particularly enterprise sales or B2B more broadly)
• Partnerships and relationship building
• Recruiting and talent discovery
• Engineering (mechanical, chemical, etc.)
• Manufacturing
• Business development
• Project / operations management (helping technical experts make faster progress, helping organisations develop better systems and workflows)

Our operations management review shows some of the traits that might fit this background, like an ‘optimisation mindset’ or high attention to detail.

Scientific experts: Researchers like Katalin Karikó and David Baker did breakthrough work to speed up vaccine development. We need other breakthroughs, across many fields, to more effectively ward off pandemics.

Because so many areas of biosecurity are relatively neglected, even early-career researchers can make vital contributions by conducting research or translating research into actionable recommendations. The Apollo Program for Biodefense, a set of biosecurity recommendations that helped influence the Biden administration’s priorities, incorporated research from Cassidy Nelson and Georgia Ray, neither of whom had a PhD at the time.

Related skills:

• Biology (especially wet lab skills, computational biology, microbial ecology, and virology)
• Computer science / software engineering (even without much bio experience)
• Other STEM fields (physics, chemistry, engineering)
• Health security / biorisk management
• Public health / medicine

While it isn’t required, one useful sign of ability is whether you’d have a chance of getting a PhD from one of the top ~30 global programs in your area of choice.

Policy specialists: Scientists design and develop interventions. Builders scale them up. But many interventions also need support from governments to succeed. Cheap, mass-manufactured PPE is less useful if governments won’t set aside the money to build stockpiles. Vaccines only work if health officials let people take them.

That’s where policy specialists come in. To reach and persuade the right people, biosecurity needs individuals who understand politics, policy, and coalition building — like Donald Henderson, who leveraged his role at the CDC to form the global initiative that eradicated smallpox.

Related skills:

• Public policy / international relations
• Electoral politics
• Security studies

Within policy, it’s useful — and sometimes essential — to be able to obtain and maintain a security clearance.

Communicators: To make an impact, ideas need to reach the right people. Sharp messaging and well-produced content make life easier for everyone else in the field.

Op-eds and white papers can help policy specialists persuade lawmakers and major officials to focus on pandemic prevention. Videos and podcasts can build public awareness and demand for new technology. Articles like this one might even convince brilliant readers to apply for biosecurity jobs!

Related skills:

• Communication (naturally), including content creation
• Journalism
• Marketing

In case you aren’t sure about dedicating your career to biosecurity, policy and communications roles let you hedge your bets because they often span many areas at once.

What do you want from a job?

While your career options depend on your skills and experience, you should also look for jobs that match your own preferences. If you find work more satisfying, you’ll do a better job and reduce your risk of burnout.

Here are some factors that differ widely between biosecurity roles and could affect how much you enjoy your work:

• Early- vs. late-stage work: Interventions vary in terms of readiness — some are still at the basic research stage, while others are actively being deployed. Would you rather join an early-stage project or improve how an existing system operates? Would you rather help a new technology come into existence, or help it reach a huge number of people?
• Time before impact: Some career paths involve longer lead times. Consider how you’d feel if it took years before you could make an impact (e.g. because you needed to get a PhD first).
• Risk and uncertainty: Some work with high expected value also comes with more risk. An entrepreneur might make an outsized contribution — or fail to accomplish anything. If you’re aiming to maximise your impact, you should consider making ambitious bets with higher risk attached, but the uncertainty may affect your personal motivation and the sustainability of your path.
• Work environment: Are you happiest working as part of a team, or would you rather fly solo? Do you prefer the stability of a professional role, or the freedom of freelance work?

Four ways to test your fit

We’ve seen our advisees find success with these strategies:

• Asking people in biosecurity about their day-to-day experience (a great way to build connections, or learn that a certain kind of work isn’t for you)
• Signing up for courses, like the BlueDot Impact Biosecurity course or the virtual biodefense master’s degree at George Mason University
• Learning about biosecurity via self-study, using a list of resources like those written by Chris Bakerlee or Greg Lewis.²
• Joining fellowship programs to explore their top options

Fellowships give you lots of context quickly, and they’re especially useful for getting into policy. Here are the biosecurity fellowships we’d recommend (though other good ones may exist by the time you read this):

• Horizon Institute for Public Service
• American Association for the Advancement of Science
• AIxBio Research Fellowship
• Pivotal Research Fellowship (get notified about future cohorts here)
• Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Fellowship (requires ma deeper biosecurity background)

Guidance for experienced professionals

If you’re later in your career, it makes sense to focus on finding the opportunities that best leverage your prior experience — that is, to lean more towards ‘exploit’ than ‘explore’. The key question is how your particular strengths can best be deployed to reduce biorisk. This may involve changing research areas, moving jobs, or developing additional knowledge and skills, but seldom complete retraining from scratch.

If you are mid-career, your background is a partial but incomplete guide to your options. You should still spend time exploring — as would be true for an early-career person with a strong passion for a particular subfield. For example, a freshly minted biotech PhD should maybe get some policy exposure.

Find jobs in pandemic prevention and biosecurity

If you think you might be a good fit for this path and you’re ready to start looking at job opportunities, see our curated list of jobs open in this path:

View all opportunities

We also maintain a list of recommended organisations in the biosecurity space.

If you’d like to start your own project, check out this request for proposals from Coefficient Giving, the largest funder of biosecurity work.

Learn more

Top recommendations

• If you want to contribute to high-priority biosecurity projects, fill out Coefficient Giving’s expression of interest form. You can also submit a proposal for a project you’d like Coefficient to fund, or apply for financial support to build career capital or transition to a new role.
• BlueDot Impact’s biosecurity course covers valuable information across many of these areas, and is designed to be useful to participants from a wide range of backgrounds.
• Our problem profile on pandemic prevention covers the problems outlined here, and some of the most promising interventions, in more detail.

Other resources

• Chris Bakerlee’s introductory reading list or Greg Lewis’s longer list
  • According to Chris, one good place to start is Richard Williamson’s Pandemic Prevention as Fire-Fighting
• Podcast: James Smith on why he quit everything to work on a biothreat nobody had heard of
  • If you’d prefer a written resource, try The Dangers of Mirrored Life
• Podcast: Andrew Snyder-Beattie on the low-tech plan to patch humanity’s greatest weakness
• Podcast: Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives
• Podcast: The careers and policies that can prevent global catastrophic biological risks, according to world-leading health security expert Dr Tom Inglesby

Further recommendations

• US biosecurity policy resources, think tanks, and fellowships
• The AI Risk Explorer covers AI-driven biorisk in more detail
• Podcast: Howie Lempel on pandemics that kill hundreds of millions and how to stop them (from 2017!)
• Podcast: Alison Young on how top labs have jeopardised public health with repeated biosafety failures
• The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord — see Chapters 3 and 5 in particular
• Our think tank research career review
• Podcast: Greg Lewis on COVID-19 & catastrophic biological risks
• Podcast: Dr Cassidy Nelson on the twelve best ways to stop the next pandemic (and limit COVID-19) (from early 2020)
• Podcast: Dr Beth Cameron works to stop you dying in a pandemic. Here’s what keeps her up at night
• Podcast: Jaime Yassif on safeguarding bioscience to prevent catastrophic lab accidents and bioweapons development
• Podcast: Pardis Sabeti on the Sentinel system for detecting and stopping pandemics
• Podcast: Andy Weber on rendering bioweapons obsolete & ending the new nuclear arms race

Read next:  Learn about other high-impact careers

Want to consider more paths? See our list of the highest-impact career paths according to our research.

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