Rob Wiblin

But yeah, is it the case that we would be fairly likely to know if a country was or a major country was having a large bioweapons program or if they had a significant, they had gone out of their way to release a bioweapon deliberately for strategic purposes?

So that's the main thing that we can do to discourage major countries from pursuing or releasing biological weapons is just to create, I guess, the potential for very severe consequences after the fact.

Do you have a proposal?

This is as good a time as any to ask.

Do you have a top way of reducing the risk that AI enables mirror bacteria to be created sooner or released?

Yeah, I think that's a good one.

So as I said earlier, you think that an important project is trying to develop broad spectrum vaccines and broad spectrum antivirals that we could stockpile or deploy ahead of time that would give us protection against new bioweapons that might create it from that virus class.

Tell us more about why that stands out to you.

So we won't be brought to our knees, basically.

Precisely.

So presumably people have been interested in broad-spectrum antivirals and broad-spectrum vaccines for a long time.

It's a great idea for obvious reasons.

But why do you think it might be actually technically feasible in the near future in a way that it hasn't been so far?

Okay, so the basic idea with the broad spectrum or universal vaccine would be that you give people a ton of different antigens, or you expose people to lots and lots of different flu-like shapes in the injection, and that will prompt an immune response against many different, slightly different, what do you call it, like antigen, the proteins that are outward facing on the virus.

So that's one way of doing it, yes.

And I guess another one might be to do mRNA, and you put in lots of somewhat different sequences.

But if there's like one part of it that doesn't change, why weren't we targeting that already?

Okay.

And I guess with the antivirus, I mean, we have like shockingly few antivirals, I guess, to start with compared to antibiotics.

We do.