Dr. Richard Moulange

speaker

1,784 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 31 Mar

Dr. Richard Moulange’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #241 – Richard Moulange on how now AI codes viable genomes from scratch and outperforms virologists at lab work — what could go wrong? · 31 Mar 2026 podcast

And he talked publicly in the open record

that there was evidence of strategic use and the desire for strategic use of biological weapons on the classified record.

So he couldn't go into details, but that is already additional evidence that when people say, no one has ever wanted to use this for wide scale harm, because people always say, oh, but then the virus or the bacteria or whatever would infect you as well.

My understanding of this is not true.

It is very hard for us on the outside to know, but I think there is strong evidence to suggest this is a real concern.

First category is that of respiratory pandemic viruses.

So things like COVID-19, but a lot worse than COVID-19, things that maybe spread faster, they spread more robustly, but especially viruses with a much higher mortality rate.

We were lucky, as far as I can say that, in COVID-19 that it wasn't more virulent.

The original SARS virus did kill more people at a much higher rate than SARS-2.

So that's the first category and one that I think we really should be very concerned about.

It gets worse.

The second thing I would point to is actually something more like mirror biology.

And I think you had a former colleague at Center for Long-Term Resilience, James Smith, who now leads work at the Mirror Biology Dialogues Fund, talking about exactly this problem.

There are real concerns that currently...

We are some number of years away, people often say 10 plus, from getting anything close to a viable mirror bacterium.

We won't rehash the whole episode, but roughly mirror biology is terrifying because pathogens in the mirror world don't interact with our natural world very easily.

And so

evolutionarily, the immune system of humans, but lots of other species, would not, in fact, be able to fight.

It wouldn't even recognize that a mirror bacterium were around.

We won't necessarily get into that more, but suffice it to say, it is an extinction-level concern.

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