 Sekuritātou no mai haini mai, and greetings to all, and welcome to this month's EHF Live session, our dangerously unambitious plans to prepare for the next pandemic. Edwin Hillary Fellowship is a collective of entrepreneurs, scientists, storytellers, creatives, and investor changemakers who want to make an impact globally from Aotearoa, New Zealand. Now in this session you're going to hear from Rob Reid, an EHF fellow who's an experienced entrepreneur and in December of 2021 made a presentation at the White House in the US about urgent priorities that can help the world fend off a future devastating pandemic. Now we'll be hearing a shortened version of this talk and there will be plenty of time for Q&A with Rob during this 60-minute session. So as I've just mentioned, this session is being recorded and it will be up on our website if you want to view it later. Just stay muted while Rob is talking and there will be plenty of time for the Q&A so you can either put the questions in the chat box or you can just put your hand because it's a nice small group and you can ask those questions directly to Rob. But firstly, Rob, why don't you tell us about yourself and what gives you the agency to talk about this big topic today? Great, and just one quick aside, this shortened version of the talk is going to map less directly to the title. I'm actually going to focus on one pretty dangerous research program that's going on right now, but it will tee up Q&A to really go to the broader question of what can and should we be doing to prevent pandemics right now. So my background is I'm a long-term Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur and investor and I'm currently in my second stint as a full-time venture capitalist. I'm also a New York Times best-selling science fiction writer which is an unusual thing for a VC and I based my novels very deeply in present-day scientific knowledge. So in other words, I try to make them almost as much science as fiction, scientific components a big deal. And on top of that, I host and produce a deep science podcast in which I interview world-class scientists about their fields and their work and currently only able to squeeze out a couple episodes a year with it because I've been very busy with my VC stand and also actually more importantly, I've been really intensely focused on the topic that we're about to discuss, but over the years, there's times when I have a lot more time for it and over the years, I've done over 50 of these interviews, each of them the scientific interviews, each of them reaching 50 to 100,000 people, that's my rough audience. And I spend a good 30 to 35 to 40 hours preparing for each of my interviews with the guidance of my guests, them telling me, like, if you really want to get deep in the subject, you know, watch these university lectures on YouTube, you know, read these five scientific papers, et cetera. And so that's just to say, I'm very, very deep into science and very pro-science and pretty much the opposite of a lutei wearing a tinfoil hat. So I do not say the following at all lightly, which is that there is a domain of bioengineering in which it's become quite common to conduct stupefyingly reckless experiments, experiments that could easily kill tens or hundreds of millions of people or even literally, and I'm not exaggerating, billions of people if something goes wrong. And unfortunately, these experiments are happening in places where things routinely go wrong, which is to say in laboratories run by human beings. And so, yeah, I mean, like any lab is a place where either things do or can go routinely wrong. Even at the very top biosecurity levels, there are way too many documented instances of profoundly dangerous pathogens leaking out into the community. Many of these lab leaks have killed people, sometimes a lot of people. There are a couple of cases where it's almost certain that lab leaks have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and one in which it's quite probable that the death toll runs into the millions. So this does happen a lot more than most of us realize. And given that all labs are prone to leaks, that's historically evident and it's hard to refute it. There's really, in my view, no conceivable moral basis for this new category of wildly dangerous research to occur, research in which profoundly dangerous things that would otherwise not intersect with society, human society come into labs where they may leak from or even worse, experiments in which really, really deadly viruses for the most part are made vastly more deadly in order to kind of satisfy somebody's curiosity. And unfortunately, it's not for much of a higher purpose than that. Now, someone could make an argument that it's worth risking a huge number of lives in order to perhaps save even more lives. But unfortunately, this category of experiments we're about to discuss really do have zero lifesaving potential. Even though they're usually presented as having hypothetical lifesaving benefits, those benefits are typically so hypothetical that justifying a dangerous experiment with them is essentially an act of deceit. But yet these experiments are happening at an ever-increasing pace and they're happening for a few reasons that they're all frankly disturbingly trivial. First, there is ego and a reckless thirst for narrow scientific fame, which amounts to careerism because these experiments often land on the covers of the very top scientific journals and that can transform an academic career. So the incentives that anybody faces in a high-pressure career are there and we all know people who have probably done something they shouldn't in order to advance their career, but they're not on a profoundly many orders of magnitude basis. There's also a kind of sense of entitlement that comes from cherishing science to a degree that it's a place above all other things. And again, I just need to stress, I am hyper-proscience and I tend to do that to a degree myself, but it gets a little bit crazy when there's an attitude that's kind of like my field's quest for scientific truth and no noble, that society almost has no right to prevent the priesthood that runs this field from going where our curiosity takes us. And there's also a certain lack of humility, which practicing scientists in this domain literally have to tell themselves or they would not do these things, that there's never going to be a lab leak on my watch. It just won't happen. That's probably true in the case of most experiments and probably true in the case of most scientific careers over the entire course of the career. But we have all these lab leaks and when we start tangling things, which could be almost omnicidal if they get out, the consequences are much higher than if we're actually doing something of value with say smallpox. I raised smallpox because actually the last person in human history to die of smallpox died because it leaked out of a British lab and leaked out of that lab just months after a global decades-long campaign to exterminate smallpox had succeeded. And so we think about how high the security and sensitivity of smallpox must have been at that moment in the late 70s and that it got out anyway. You start to appreciate the fact that we can't keep anything in. And so devising things that could be absolutely cataclysmic, there is no justification for that because no way can we guarantee it won't get out. Now anyway, again, I'll reiterate, I'm saying this is a person with really strong pro-science credentials going back many years and I'll add, and this gets to Michelle's question of agency here, I'm basing this on an enormous amount of research. Basically my public service side is in pandemic resilience. I've never done that for work, but I've done thousands and thousands of hours of research over the past few years. Actually started with a sci-fi book that I was writing, led to a TED talk that I gave about pandemic risk actually just a few months before COVID. And then when COVID hit, it knocked me into a thousand-hour rabbit hole of research, which ended up, I got it out in the world in a variety of ways, including through some very high tonnage podcasts that reach many millions of people. You guys might have heard of Lex Friedman or Sam Harris, both of those and others. And eventually it got to the White House. I came in and as Michelle mentioned, I gave a, actually it was a 250 slide presentation. Don't worry, you're not going to have to sit through that last December. So it's gotten out there and I've worked very hard on it. So that's kind of the context of this. So with that preamble, I'm now going to share a presentation that I've given once before, the sort of slim down version and about a one US government program that really exemplifies this category of danger. And it's an important example. First of all, because it's a very big program and has $125 million budget. And also because it's the product of a democratic open society where a free press and whistleblowers like me are likely to make this sort of thing less likely than in an authoritarian closed society. And on top of that, it's coming out of what you'd think would be one of the most benign arms of the US government. So this is all to say that I think we can confidently say that there's a lot more of this stuff going on out there that we don't know about if what I'm about to describe comes out of USAID. A little more on that in a second. We're going to discuss this one example. We can extrapolate from this to something much bigger. So under the presentation, a quick aside, I'm not going to be terribly polished in or rehearsed because I last gave it, I think, four or five months ago. And tomorrow morning, I'm going in for two hours of orthopedic surgery. So rather than polishing up my delivery over the last, you know, last night or today, I've been frantically tying up every loose end and I can think of before I enter several foggy days of painkillers and Netflix. And the other thing is kind of funny. I first gave this for a gathering of life science investors and entrepreneurs in the Bay Area. So there'll be a couple of times when I probably will say, because I'm going to be looking at my notes heavily, I'm going to probably imply that you're all American taxpayers. I know that's not the case or life science people. And toward the end, I'm going to be much less of a sort of transcendent note than I normally strike at a little bit more of a, oh my God, think of the money you can make vibe because I felt that was the best way to motivate that particular audience. But you know, the market economy is an incredibly valuable way to marshal resources. So that's why that's in there. Okay, so on to slide one, which is already up there, USAID. This is a $20 billion government, government arm that mostly distributes America's foreign aid. Does a lot of noble things, you know, just kind of education, agricultural help, all kinds of stuff. But it has some oddball programs that don't fit the main mission. So next slide, including a very nascent one, which is called deep vision. Next slide, which goes by this bizarre spelling literally nobody in Washington knows why. I've asked everybody I can. And unless some of us, and there are a few of us who are working on this, stop it. And a spoiler alert, I do think we will. Thank God. And hopefully that is a spoiler. But unless we stop it, deep vision will spend the next five years and $125 million doing three things. Next slide. The first is called virus hunting. Deep vision plans to unearth about 10,000 yet undiscovered viruses in the hope that at least a few of them will be capable of starting devastating pandemics. Next slide. Many of the viruses will come from places like isolated bat caves, where as I kind of mentioned in my preamble, they have essentially zero odds of ever intersecting with human society. Next slide. Unless deep vision hauls them into our cities and suburbs to store them in leaky containers called next slide laboratories, bit of a rerun for my preamble. And I say leaky because I mentioned upfront, every category of lab of every biosecurity rating leaks a steady flow of things they shouldn't. And we've had deaths from smallpox, SARS a lot more as a result of lab leaks. So many of the new viruses is a lot to add to the global laboratory inventory. It's more than you might think. In fact, deep vision, if they proceed, will literally expand the world's archive of mammalian viruses that are not currently known to infect humans by over 1,000%. And we've had a lot more virus exes, incalculably more, than are currently living in labs. And that's a scary prospect. Next slide. So American tax dollars will be filling up an awful lot of these leaky things over the next five years. Next slide. Now as it finds these viruses, deep vision will perform a process called characterisation. It's a complex and expensive suite of experiments that relatively few people can do at scale, which will determine which of these 10,000 viruses, probably at least a few, are pandemic grade monsters. In other words, which ones, if they did sneak out of the lab, could kill millions, tens of billions or more people. Against which we have no natural defences because these will be new labs that we have, viruses that we have cleverly bought, and that will be used from the bat cave into human society. Viruses in this category, pandemic grade novel viruses, are not merely weapons of mass destruction. They're the worst weapons of mass destruction in history if we find them. Because no nuclear weapon could kill like COVID. And COVID is mild compared to the viruses that we can and could find. And by the way, these viruses would not just be WMD in the wrong hands, but also in what you might think of as the right hands, like the US Army, not known as a terrorist organisation by all in the world at least. Reasonable minds can disagree. Next slide please. And I cite the US Army because they somehow allowed anthrax or their own top security lab at Fort Detrick to find its way into the office of the Senate majority leader, somebody who's in line for the presidency, and several other places killing five people literally a week after 9-11. So you probably have the most powerful military in history at that moment at its highest level of alert in generations. And it literally couldn't stop that from happening. Its own deadly substance that it created and had under the strongest lock and key from almost killing somebody who was in line for the presidency a few days after 9-11. If that can happen, anything can leak out. And if that can happen, this is going to become relevant as you'll see in a moment, how do we like the thought of a third-rate university lab with no armed security storing things that are incalculably more dangerous than anthrax or hundreds of labs in dozens and dozens of countries storing such things. Some of those countries with brutal and unstable governments. Now, this will be the state of the world if deep vision attains its goals because as soon as this program starts finding pandemic-grade viruses, next slide, please. Step three is to immediately publish their genomes, their genetic recipes to the entire world. In other words, to respected scientists everywhere, but also, next slide, to Kim Jong-un, ISIS, Maros, Columbine kids, et cetera, et cetera. Anybody. And at this moment right now, the best estimate that's out there is that there's probably about 30,000 people in dozens of countries who already have the tools and skills necessary to assemble these viruses from scratch as soon as deep vision makes their blueprints, pardon the pun, go viral. Next slide. And that number, the 30,000 people will immediately be able to summon a terrible apocalypse if they wish, will inevitably explode because synthetic biology like computing is often called an exponential technology. It improves at rates that are completely nonlinear and that means not only does it get more powerful and that means not only do the top people get more capable, but most importantly, the number of people in the world capable of things that even the top people in the field would find almost impossible today may easily explode by a factor of multiple orders of magnitudes over the course of about 10 years. And there's many, many examples of this from the history of computing, which we can talk about in the Q&A if you guys are interested. But this means literally, next slide please, the most astounding feats that only the top practitioners in this field can perform today. Next slide is going to relentlessly and rapidly spread to grad students. Next slide, I'm very proud of this multiplying effect. It took me a while and then to undergrads and then beyond. Huge numbers of people will have the ability to do terrible things with this information if we're dumb enough to gather it and then publish it. So next slide. It spooks you that nine people out there have nuclear launch codes. Imagine 30,000 of us having potential doomsday buttons and then 300,000, et cetera. Next slide. And I don't say doomsday lightly because there are viruses out there that kill over half the people they infect. That's two orders of magnitude more deadly than COVID. Next slide. Something called H5N1 flu is that nasty. Kills about 60% of the people it infects. But it's also barely contagious or we wouldn't be here. I mean, it's so contagious that there are entire years that pass with a lot less than 10 cases. Thank God. Next slide. But what if Deep Vision finds something that's equally lethal but just as contagious as Omicron or something that could be made super contagious with a few genetic edits. That improving technology and toolset are continually enabling more and more people to make. People who could eventually include folks that we don't usually think of at all in our calculus of doomsday because they simply don't have access to atomic weapons. People like, I don't know, humanity loathing eco-terrorists or animal rights maximalists or omnicidal crazies like the ones who shoot up our grade schools and theatres and concerts. More in America obviously than New Zealand but they're out there. Next slide. Nothing and certainly not COVID has prepared us for anything like that and by that I mean that thing on the two by two matrix in the upper right corner which has profound lethality and profound contagiousness because unless we start making the right investments and we're going to talk about those toward the end the release or escape of a virus like that and I promise you after this we're going to get to the end of the doom and gloom part. Next slide. The escape of something like that, a pathogen like that would be a civilization cancelling event because with that thing on the rampage. Next slide. There are no frontline workers because who's going to take even odds of death or of killing half their families for low wage work. Next slide. And the very few workers who do show up would be immediately overwhelmed by panic buying mobs and by stampede on health services. At any given moment and this is at least true of the US our grocery stores contain maybe two to three weeks of the calories that the country needs and all of that could be cleared out in just a few hours of looting. Next slide. There are no frontline workers supply chains everywhere would shut down along with now this is a little bit melodramatic to say next slide a few times apologies along with next slide. Most information services. No way along with law enforcement. Sorry. Next slide. Most information services and the next slide to the totally black slide and then eventually the power which would cause a lot of looted food to rot. Let's go ahead to slides actually back to this two by two matrix. In light of that publishing the assembly manual for something like this next slide or the I think up one up one. Yeah. Or even for something relatively benign like covid may not strike everyone as an ideal use of public funds although deep vision has a lot of arguments for all why all of this should really kind of be fairly safe. So next slide. This is where a lot of this is coming from I've spent a fair amount of time discussing these arguments with people like a guy named Kevin Espel who runs an evolutionary engineering lab at MIT subsequently after Kevin and I got to know each other and discuss this a bunch. He and I ended up recording a two-hour conversation in which I posed basically every devil's advocate position that I could come up with that either of us heard of or even could think of in favour of deep visions program and I'll save you 159 minutes although if you want to listen to the interview if you want to saturate the stuff more than you have already apologize it's so dark it is up there both Sam Harris and I published it you can Google it easily but I will save you the two hours by saying these arguments are ultimately grounded the arguments in favour of deep vision are ultimately grounded in a certain naivete about how the world outside of academia works in a certain belief that bad guys are so much less intelligent than the good guys who are inventing this field that you know it almost doesn't matter what they know because the good guys can always out compete them and solve anything that they might create or might unleash and sort of these warped incentives that I mentioned before this regulatory capture situation when you have a community that rewards itself with abundant grants and cover stories in prestigious journals for this sort of work basically it's a fox and henhouse's situation where the people are in a position to say no to certain categories of experiments and frankly the people who are on the investigative review board the people who are in a position to lionize something and make that line of work incredibly desirable by putting it on the cover of nature or science the two leading journals in global science there are also the people who in many cases are part of this community and have the same incentive structures for the community to succeed again a classic case of regulatory capture next slide please I mentioned Sam Harris as I already said also posted this thing out there and subsequent to that and I'm going to go over this pretty briefly we kind of thought that that act of whistleblowing with millions of people hearing it Sam's got a really big audience would almost immediately lead to this thing being shut down because it's so crazy and it was existing in this really narrow obscure corner of the US government and nobody who wasn't part of this the scientific community was even aware of it but kind of astonishingly that didn't work many many many months went by and we were doing everything that we could all three of us have pretty good networks and I know we got the podcast in the description of it to Samantha Power who runs USAID to her husband who had done on Sam's to her husband before to a lot of people but Ukraine was just starting to kick off I guess that kind of explains it but even so it's like this is like a freaking asteroid heading toward our planet anyway it was strange how little traction that we got but finally this summer a whole bunch of things lined up started meeting one person who freaked out and introduced us to another and another without going into a whole lot of detail I'm pretty darn confident that division will not pursue this catastrophic program and that confidence is only a few weeks old actually so this is sort of like that example this terrifying example I'm pretty sure we've stopped it but this type of work is going on in a lot of places right now and in fact there's a larger arm of the United States government than the National Institutes of Health that kind of wants to pick up the ball because we we made the ball carrier fumble and now there's a risk that another US government arm that's got a lot more power than USAID might proceed with this work it's crazy so next slide let's assume and I think we can that deep vision doesn't do what we're worried about assuming no one else is doing something this insane and we don't know about that but let's assume that, let's be optimistic we should in my view and more importantly in the view of people like Kevin Esvelt who are actually scientists that should give us 5 to 7 years of runway before some inevitable improvements in proliferation in the underlying science creates the kinds of dangers that deep vision threatens to accelerate let's go down two slides this is one of those repeated slides so what should we be doing well as I'm sure you know our COVID vaccines shattered all development speed records for instance Moderna shipped their vaccine literally well not let it be this is pretty impressive but the jaw dropper comes in a moment they shipped their vaccine 342 days after China under significant release the genome of COVID to the rest of the world that's an astounding timeline which actually but the important thing it actually understates what Moderna pulled off by an enormous margin next slide please because this was a two step process step one the shot was developed then step two that was testing and regulation and unlike the segments on this slide which I made 50-50 those steps were of highly unequal lengths specifically next slide please Moderna literally needed just two days to develop its final COVID vaccine candidate which hit the market almost a year later with initially 95% efficacy in other words testing and approval took up over 99% of the time and that represents a vast opportunity not just for regulators well it just let's just say this it represents a vast opportunity for reasons that I'll get into but first next slide please the bad news which is that we can't currently count on a two day development cycle for the next pandemic what I'm going to submit is we need to get ourselves into a situation where we can reliably count on two days or less for almost anything that nature or bad guys throw at us but we can't currently count on that because another arm of the US government the US government does great things as well through sheer happenstance had spent six years leading up to COVID deeply researching a coronavirus called MERS Middle East Respiratory Syndrome and in that research they were worried about MERS busting out as a pandemic in that research the US government arm focused heavily on the spike protein which more blind luck here is very similar to COVID's spike protein so unbelievable coincidence and blessing but also unbelievable technology the unbelievable technology is only going to get more and more unbelievable that's great news what we need to do is engineer our own luck on making sure that whatever comes down the pipe we've done the six years of research on that so next slide um let's see I've gotten a little bit lost here sorry I'm going backward on my own slides here so anyway that was the massive head start that Moderna and others leveraged and ongoing blind luck obviously can't be our future pandemic strategy so what we need is a lot of public and private finance to expand our defensive what I'll call our defensive knowledge beyond a single family's most famous protein and that's daunting but surprisingly of the hundreds of known viral families hundreds and there's probably thousands out there only 26 in fact humans are on the slide and that's not an intractably large number and a head on assault against this entire spectrum would cost about a billion dollars per viral family like about 26 billion dollars spread over seven to ten years so couple billion dollars a year so society has to ask itself is it worth spending two to three billion dollars a year to collapse the vaccine path for any likely pandemic and obviously I think the answer to that should be a resounding yes and that's definitely within our means that's basic science next slide you know particularly in light of these 16 trillion dollars that COVID is estimated to being costing the US economy alone it's and you know 45 billion or something north of that for the world economy it's kind of hard to imagine an IQ test that would be easier to pass but so far next slide please we are flunking this IQ test because it is just astonishing how little public investment there has been in this basically the by the administration when I went and gave the presentation there about a year ago they were asking me to talk to them about this 60 billion dollar proposal that they had made for pandemic preparedness and it had a lot of great elements in it including a near cousin to this one but the US Congress couldn't be bothered to pass it it is such a bizarre thing but we can't give up I mean this is something that is definitely within reach of the science and is kind of a drop in the bucket when it comes to the public health benefit budgets of just the United States let alone you know the world combined so next slide that's one thing we need to do is that basic science now in addition to viral family research we also need to pour resources into further advancing mRNA vaccine technology because it is really a truly profound breakthrough and for all the vaccine hesitancies that's out there and so forth nobody it would be very hard to present an honest data set that estimates that the vaccines did anything other than save a stupefying number of lives so to be clear less than two years after the first mRNA were given there is a lot of room for improvement here and this is a place where entrepreneurs and investors have an enormous role to play not governments don't start brilliant startups that create more and more new technology and this is something that's really really incumbent on the private sector next slide we also as we invest in this technology yes with some public funds but hopefully with the private sector stepping up in a huge way there's an urgent priority to collapse this time frame that we're depicting here why is my slide next slide please before something like this comes along next slide please you guys are probably realizing the way that Michelle and I are synced up she's arriving in the slides and there's a good reason for that I won't bore you with normally when I'm presenting live I'm kind of like speaking and clicking so sorry if there's a little bit of a lag here anyway we need to really collapse this approval timeline and the distribution timeline which we'll talk about in a second because think of it looting blackouts and pending social collapse and then everybody just sits tight for 300 days while the government goes through an approval cycle we would be doomed which means that we need to come together public and private sector to make all kinds of investments until we have enough conviction we need as a society to get to a point of conviction about the effectiveness dosing of a future day 2 vaccine candidate and to be clear I'm in no way suggesting that the Moderna or other vaccines should have been released on day 2 that would have been lunacy because we didn't know anything about their safety or efficacy or dosing but we are in a position now with that basis of knowledge and doing some of the basic science that I'm calling for to have incredibly high confidence in a day 2 vaccine which even then we would administer on day 2 unless it was a real crisis and we were facing possible toppling of society so next slide please the goal would be something that regulators could sanely approve in days not months and that does sound preposterously ambitious but exponential technologies deliver sudden outlandish results all the time and it's an existential imperative in my view because there's no stopping the proliferation of tools and techniques that will be existentially dangerous in the hands of careless people who routinely let dangerous pathogens escape from labs or reckless people who start mind spinning programs like deep vision or evil people like suicidal mass murderers or the person behind those anthrax attacks next slide please there are countless problems for tiny private and giant public companies to tackle here and also for the public sector as well like how do we deal with mutagenesis and make vaccines increasingly robust against mutating variants there's a lot of work to be done here or link vaccine development to the thousand fold improvements we're hoping to make in viral surveillance during the wastewater public spaces the air and diagnostics lots of exciting work here happening and there's so much more that could be happening with just a tiny dollop of financing and there's also and these are just huge areas of opportunity next slide please then there's a whole ecosystem to develop around mRNA vaccines like something called adjuvants adjuvants are agents that are injected alongside traditional vaccines active material which can radically boost its power which basically means you need radically less vaccine material which is a big deal when you're in a production constrained environment as we were when the vaccines were first released and many people had to wait months before they could get something that they wanted tomorrow there currently no native mRNA adjuvants but researchers believe that good ones could reduce the effective dose size by at least two orders of magnitude like drop it by 99% and just think about how much more quickly you would have gotten your first COVID jab if the producers needed a hundredth as much product to vaccinate the country so I think there needs to be collaboration and very safe and sane level headed collaboration on figuring out what advances and breakthroughs we need to make to make us confidently issue day two vaccines if it is an urgent situation and to confident to be able to produce 100 times as many doses it's a lot easier I think to find a great adjuvant that will enable that than to actually increase production by 100 acts now the trouble is next slide even if we did have adjuvants we could get jabs out a lot faster but not 100 times faster because it takes a lot of logistics to extend cold chains from a single point of production to tens of thousands of towns which brings me to the next thing we urgently need to scale like mad before the careless or the reckless or the evil become truly dangerous which is a highly distributed vaccine production I would say we have to scale this infinitely because it doesn't exist yet but a kernel of it already is in production so next slide we're getting toward the end here and it looks like this this is called the bio XP it's the world's leading DNA printer and today it can spin out 7200 error corrected to Novo synthetic base pairs of DNA which is a lot but not a ton but it can be done in a laboratory it doesn't have to be done centrally at a lab like at a central service bureau that's a lot though it's getting there it's about half of an influenza genome and only a tiny minority of the researchers who work with nucleic acid could build something that long in their labs those who can hardly ever bother because they want these long strands for experiments or products that are way more interesting than connecting base pairs all day so next slide so currently almost all the long DNA strands out there ordered from scientific suppliers with specialized tools and techniques allowing them to crank out these long strands of nucleic acid and ship them overnight but the future is distributed and justice text messages replace telegraph offices photo labs almost any synthetic DNA will eventually be made at the point of use by bench top printers whose speed pricing and accuracy will constantly improve until one day a biology undergrad will have a viable replicating virus shortly after downloading a simple text file containing its genome which is another reason why division is such a bad idea but next slide but the descendants of this device are not interested unless we harden them up in ways that we can talk about in the Q&A they can also play a game changing protective role for us in fact the bio XP product line which currently dominates bench top DNA synthesis is being developed for literally the express purpose of teleporting vaccines so those are the exact words of its inventor Dan Gibson he developed this to one day teleport vaccines the idea is instead of making billions of doses in Cambridge and then calling FedEx next slide we could have bio printers making vaccines on demand in every pharmacy doctor's office in the hospital vaccine production at the edge now those machines will have to do a hell of a lot more than today's bio XP because there's way more to making a vaccine dose than spitting out a strand of RNA but there's an exponential wave to ride here Dan Gibson is not a science fiction writer that would be Will Gibson who's a great science fiction writer Dan is a legendary and very level headed scientist who also invented something called the Gibson assembly protocol which is a molecular cloning procedure that is basically almost universally used in synthetic biology this is a very credible person next slide Dan told me that he expects to ship vaccine ready units to businesses and as a long-term entrepreneur myself I knew that we simply have to take the long end of any range and double it to get to an accurate estimate so next slide so let's say we could have a 1.0 international well national networks and hopefully international linking our pharmacies in 10 years back to the envelope after doubling the ugly end of at least one other range the cost of this pencils out to mid tens of billions of dollars for the US and we can extrapolate that to other countries spread over a decade again that sounds like a lot of money but you spread it over a decade and you compare it to public health benefits or just government benefits that's something we can sanely afford to make in fact I don't know how we can sanely afford not to make that investment so last slide but we only have so much runway any visionary national leadership calling for this and flooding labs and companies in the space with funding and incentives and also entrepreneurs and investors to shift into high gear and do the heavy lifting so that's the end of the presentation is one final wrap up one of the things that really intrigues me about New Zealand is well it's obviously a smaller market than the United States and it's not it's large of the nexus of synthetic biology development but it does such an efficient and sane government that certain policy innovations not everything that I talked about but certain policy innovations I could see them happening much more rapidly in New Zealand than they would ever happen in the US or most countries and after setting a precedent you know I think a lot of people looked in New Zealand it's a place that got a lot of stuff right over the last few years so it's a really extraordinary potential basically for New Zealand to lead the world in taking some of the measures that we need to do take to really prevent the next pandemic that we're unfortunately not taking yet so a little longer than I thought I'm sorry I've got less Q&A time but I'm happy to stick around my girl Rob thank you that was so cool so oh my gosh any questions please put your hands up but I'm kind of like how do we get one of those printers those teleportals to come here to New Zealand and how can you then what do you know whether New Zealand is sort of connected into these conversations that's happening up into the US I don't know and when I come down there for my welcome session probably in March but definitely in May if not March obviously I really do want to hopefully with EHF's help I really would like to do some networking with the government down there and talk to some people in public health and get a sense for just where the thinking is right now and what the connections are part of this I would say probably to some degree because the people that I presented to in the White House were the top folks in biosecurity in the US and a lot of this is being viewed through a security lens and New Zealand is one of the so-called Five Eyes in the UK, New Zealand, Australia and there's more intelligence sharing between these five countries than probably any other set of countries in the world so my guess is there's a lot there are certain people inside the New Zealand government who are profoundly wise about this and are profoundly influential with their peers in the other four countries any questions for all or any reflections anyone has well first of all wow quite an eye-opener and just on the deep vision part of preventing some things that are spinning up this scenario that you eloquently outline the unintended consequences what's your take on what it would take around that specific one plus just other vectors that might get started on something similar because it almost makes me feel like civilisation is a Tibetan sand painting where with this type of exponentials around synthetic biology yeah we can't overstate how destabilising it is and so I'll tell you a little bit more we basically ended up with this little ad hoc sort of Scooby-Doo gang of people all of us from civil society although we were made aware of the danger of this program from somebody very very very senior in the US security apparatus somebody who thought he'd be able to shut this down and wasn't able to so he said we need civil society to engage and put a spotlight on it and start doing some lobbying and some networking and so this little ad hoc group of us and I was more the early dominos and other people were more the later dominos so I think there's a really important lesson there about how valuable open societies are I think if we were living in autocracy here raising the a peep let alone a chorus of peeps a thunderous chorus of peeps like this would have landed us in horrible places so I think those of us who are in open societies need to watch this space very very very carefully what needs to happen when our little Scooby-Doo gang talks about what's next we feel like there's three steps step one stop division and they're all pretty hard and having done that the next step is much harder but having done step one you got some momentum and some stuff you can point to so step two is I think at least here in the US and this is where I think New Zealand can have incredible leadership we need a very thoughtful de facto national ban on this type of activity so it's not permitted that stops the National Institutes of Health from doing it again and we also need to say not that there's a lot of private sector incentive to do this kind of work but also say illegal in the private sector too and there's a bunch of other policy decisions that if made would put very significant speed bumps in front of things spinning out of control this common sense set of policies could certainly be passed in New Zealand and in some cases it might seem symbolic because maybe certain aspects of symbio industry don't exist in New Zealand but it would not be missed it would be an astonishingly powerful precedent so I think the next step would be national ban somewhere respected and then the evangelisation and that was a thunderclap that is a really sensible country has banned this and now it's not just a podcaster waving his hands at the powerpoint it is a nation of this earth that has adopted this set of rules which are very pro-science but very pro-humanity and then the evangelisation of that on an international level there are examples of this working I mean the Montreal Protocol we have ozone because of that nuclear test ban treaty for all of the scary leakages that we've had with nuclear proliferation pretty amazing how effective that has been and some people are like wait we need to be doing this full you know full throttle because otherwise North Korean and China are going to do it and that's a scary thought but what's interesting here is I think it's even easier to make the case to let's say a China that this is not in your interest that this work happen even in your own country it's easier to make that case with this than it was with nuclear weapons and the reason for that Fort Detrick example if we in China secretively did crazy stuff like this it's not like only Xi Jinping and Biden would have the blinking red button basically anybody working in those labs would and I think if we that story is told very carefully and correctly the realisation would see then like literally nobody has more to lose from this stuff happening then China and the United States because we have the biggest slices of the world economy in the China's case of the biggest slice of the population I think the story could be told in a way that the world's governments would all say Jesus Christ we don't even want to do this because look at Fort Detrick and many many other examples so it's got to be that it's got to be stop this program step 2 national ban step 3 evangelise national ban and that's kind of my public service agenda for the next 25 years I'm going to say very engaged in this even though it takes a lot of time away from a day job it's important and it's really really really interesting and people are starting to listen this makes me think of when Jeff with Larry Brilliant created the global threats fund to look at these tin that were not necessarily on the radar but if they happen to look out everything else and this feels like at the top of that list Larry is a neighbour here in Mill Valley and I think that that conversation actually spun up at the TED conference and my business partner, my fund is Chris Anderson who runs the TED conference and first gave Larry his TED wish which connected him with Google and so yeah Larry is a very important person in this conversation I'm not going to identify the other people in my Scooby-Doo gang though Yeah I was working with Chris when he bought the TED conference for the Sapling Foundation and then I helped prototype the TEDx movement and so on Were you in future? Publishing or? Yeah I was the venture catalyst with Chris and then often people think Chris really gets a lot done because the two Chris Anderson I talked Chris into spinning out IGN and I was the first outside board member of IGN and this is way way way back ago so I've been friends with Chris in future days as well and I'm sure we probably passed each other in a hallway that's really cool I was at school with Jeff Skoll as well and then I also run the Rhapsody and Listen.com Yeah that was my thing brings back a lot of members Chris and I talked to her three times a week so I'm going to drop your name we're going to be speaking in a couple of days I'm definitely going to drop your name this is so cool Great don't you love it connections from the other side of the world Nice Any other questions for Rob? Otherwise I'm conscious we're getting closer to the hour Janine you've been unmuted you just wanted to say hi so enlightening yes I mean I think the whole thing about shortening approval term of vaccinations is a very interesting one because there are strong pros and strong there are so the jury is out on that as far as I'm concerned but it's just very very important that we know about this so thank you so much Yeah my point on that is we need to make the investments in science and public health the necessary investments to be able to do that responsibly and with confidence we can't do that now we should not do that now but there are very very very plausible advances that could be made if we make the right investments that would put us in that position but I agree with you on its face no let's not do that this year but let's get this work done so when we don't know when the next one's coming let's use the runway we've got to be as close to in that position ideally in that position when the time comes because we are never going to know when the time comes until it's about three weeks too late nice well thank you if there's no other questions at down did you understand anything for you Hi Rob thanks for the open presentation Hi Janie, hi Todd so I was just listening I've got a quick question for you Rob the Christopher the Christopher DNA modification is technologies kind of become mature now feels like people can literally change many things and starting to understand bit more about the DNA I don't know if you played with the chat box that we had open AI with that GPT-3 wait are you at open AI yeah sorry, Rob said again are you at open AI no I am not I wish I do contribute to that with bit more documentation of algorithms oh no I've been blown away by it I've lost many hours to it this past weekend it's amazing it's awesome isn't it so since the AI it's kind of becoming mature now as long as you're feeding information to it it will be able to pick up some key information based on the stuff that you feed into so now there's Christopher for any organizations that actually are linking these two things together to kind of fix the crisis that you are referring to in your presentation yeah, unfortunately there's a very interesting I'll get to the unfortunate part in a moment there's a really interesting and important project called secure DNA which would leverage basically AI and a lot of other technologies understanding of genomic sequencing and synthesis and the objective of secure DNA is to create a system whereby any DNA printer and at this moment DNA printers simple press and print printers are not yet capable of generating viruses the day that they are millions of people in undergraduate labs will have access to them before that day comes we want a layer called secure DNA which will basically be a screening system whereby if somebody is hitting print on something that is dangerous it will be flagged it will be speed bumped it will not print unless there's a very good reason for it to print and there's elements of secure DNA that are sort of semi-anonymized and secured in a way that will give you know users a little bit more you know less worry about being deeply surveilled it's a great great system and it holds on something that's already happening there's a group called the International Genome Synthesis Consortium IGSC had that slide with the sort of central service bureaus that make DNA most of the biggies in that domain are part of IGSC and if you're an IGSC member they are a part of they have a voluntary self-regulating scheme whereby they don't print dangerous DNA for somebody who shouldn't have it and they've developed the system over 15 years and it's very forward-looking secure DNA would be a big big improvement on that I say unfortunately the guy Kevin Esfeld who I interviewed for that interview that set off this whole deep vision thing he's sort of the brain father of it and he confidently told me early on it's like yeah we got all the funding we need for this and when I asked him several months ago where's it coming from he's like well there's this amazing philanthropy arm attached to a company called FTX and its founder is really into effective altruism so for all of the badness it brought into the world FTX was really serious about pandemic resilience and they made a lot of donations substantial ones so things they were kind of filling in to some degree for the freaking governments and that funding source is clearly up right now but I think we'll find other ones right okay so the short answer is no thank you it's under development it's under development really freaking smart people are working but it's not it's not chipping yet thanks Todd okay James I'm conscious that we're just over the hour so if you want to have conversations with Rob feel free to have them offline or another time and Rob did say he will share his presentation and even I think you said the one with the notes I've currently got the one without the note so that is there available and the other one that I sent you didn't the PowerPoint that I sent you have notes in it I don't think so it's okay I have a look at it afterwards I'll share it with anybody for sure yeah great and I'll just stop this so I can