David Baker

So I think in general, having everything open

Is is really a big advantage.

Now, if you're at a company, there's that has to be moderated by the fact the company needs ultimately to make money.

And so there are different constraints.

But at a public institution like the University of Washington or really in any university, I think making everything open is the right way to go.

And we've seen that really from the beginning.

We made, well, even for our earlier generation non-AI software called Rosetta, we made it widely available.

And that just created this whole community around it, which has really been wonderful.

some people are you know there are some bad actors and looking to use things for yeah that's a that's a very good question and we are um let me first give you an overall framing for it and then i'll tell you about specific actions we're taking

The things that are really dangerous, the types of pathogens, are like viruses, like the 1918 Spanish flu or Ebola, which obviously can cause death and destruction on a huge, huge scale.

Those are extremely complex.

um things um and because they have to do many many many different things and even um even with the advances in protein design it's still very challenging to uh to make a protein that that has one function whereas a virus has to do many many things and so if you want to cause death and destruction on a large scale you don't really the design methods don't help you you just go to nature and you can

that you can remake the 1918 Spanish flu.

And so what the protein design methods are really good at today is blocking, for example, viruses either

pandemic viruses or new viruses, the idea of making a synthetic virus is still, well, first of all, there's not really any reason to do it because viruses, I said at the beginning that

design is very powerful where there hasn't already been extensive evolutionary optimization so or viruses there's been extensive optimization for really rapid spreading and uh infection so um the the first point is that the if you want to about for bad actors there already are many many bad things all around all the way around ranging from

you know things like botulinum toxin to major viruses and i really think the primary role of protein sign will be to protect against these threats and new threats but of course it is possible that um

a bad actor really has their mindset to try and create something new and dangerous.

So we had a workshop at the University of Washington a year and a half ago that we convened together with the National Security Council in the White House.

convened a panel of experts to really think about this problem.