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

of ability to obfuscate that you were sponsoring that attack.

We have not seen that as much in biology because cyber is a lot cheaper.

You need a laptop, whereas biology needs a whole lab.

But I am worried about a world where states do covert chemical and biological warfare attempts through proxies much more.

And so I somewhat agree with you, but I don't think that necessarily holds.

Yes and no.

So first I should say, yeah, I don't have access to classified information.

I'm not wrong on any of that.

This is all open source.

I think I want to talk about two different examples that can give listeners a sense of where we're at here.

One is the positive example is...

the Russian attack in Salisbury in 2018 in the UK, where Russian military intelligence members of the GRU attempted to kill a former Russian intelligence officer who had defected and was living in hiding in the UK.

And they did in fact, they used a chemical weapon, Novichok, which did in fact kill a UK civilian as collateral damage.

This was an excellent example where forensics and attribution was possible.

Scientists at Defense Science and Technology Laboratory were able to acquire samples of the Novichok.

They were able to analyze it.

And they were able to give enough certainty to the prime minister and to the most senior decision makers that then Prime Minister Theresa May was able to stand up in Parliament and say, we assess, we are confident that this was Russia.

And then they were able to take that evidence to the OPCW, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, to support an international response against that.

Now, the details are not well known, but drawing on public reporting in newspapers, it is said that later, I think off the record, officials said not only were they confident it was Russia, they actually knew which lab it came from and that lab was named.

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