Dr. Richard Moulange

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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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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

Sure.

But nevertheless, they created lots of designs for putative ricin.

Now, unlike the Evo case, they did not, in fact, make these in a lab because this would deeply contravene international law.

It would contravene the Biological Weapons Convention.

It would contravene an awful lot of national laws.

I think they were based in the US.

But what they did do is they can use other tools to estimate what's in silico, other tools to predict, would this thing probably function?

And through a lot of sort of careful design, they got to putative sequences that are different than current ricin, so modified ricin, however, that were coming out as very likely still, in fact, to work.

And then the ones that they guessed that were likely to be functional, they sent off to gene synthesis companies.

including ones that do industry best practice screening.

So screening that is meant to detect if a customer is wishing to order ricin or part of the smallpox genome, the company is meant to refuse to do so, in fact, flag this order and potentially even report it.

And they got them through.

because they'd modified it enough that the existing screening systems didn't spot the change.

They had what's called obfuscated the design, but they kept the design true enough to the underlying biology that they are pretty sure that this would in fact work.

This is never going to be as good as an experiment where you could actually prove that rice and wood function, but that would be deeply unethical.

So that can't happen.

This is really the best sort of proxy experiment we can do.

There's a reason it was written up in Science, you know, one of the top journals.

That deeply worried me because this is something that I and others in the community, you know, sort of worried about these sorts of risks.

have been thinking about for a number of years.

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