Dr. Richard Moulange

Because it is virology that could lead to transmissible pandemics.

It's much harder for bacteria spread.

You do have bacterial pandemics.

I think the black death is a good example.

But that was spread by vectors of fleas on rats rather than spread human to human.

And so that's the virology part.

The dual use part is the fact that there really are very important scientific activities that people should do in labs in careful control settings to do with making, say, influenza vaccines.

So this is research that does take place every day around the world.

It's dual use because they're both beneficial applications, but also relevant to misuse.

And then that last bit is, it was both troubleshooting and tacit knowledge.

And these are particular barriers that we at Center for Long-Term Resilience and others identified as especially important for constraining existing biological weapons attempts.

Yes, I think it will be important to really get into what tacit knowledge is, the different types of tacit knowledge, how much they really are or aren't barriers to biological weapons development.

But stepping back, what did VCT really do?

It's a really great eval.

And it's an eval that's a set of questions.

And the questions are often accompanied by an image.

So a lot of the benchmark is multimodal.

And they'll show an image or they'll provide a paragraph that describes some sort of modern virology experiment.

Maybe literally a picture of a dish with some virus in it.

And then there'll be a question like, hey, this thing looks like the wrong color or something has gone wrong with this experiment.