Biosecurity: An Impact-Focused Overview

The threat of pandemics is one of the most important issues facing the world right now. Historically, pandemics and large epidemics have taken an enormous toll on human life and occurred with surprising frequency. Because of technological advances, the spread of deadly pathogens is becoming an ever-more pressing risk.

Because of this, biosecurity is likely among the highest-priority of the cause areas we’ve explored. Thankfully, there’s an array of projects we could pursue that could meaningfully reduce the risk of deadly pandemics in the future.

Read on to find out how we reached this conclusion.

What is biosecurity?

Biosecurity encompasses measures designed to prevent and mitigate the effects of biological risks. This includes a wide range of activities, from large-scale projects like disease surveillance, vaccine development, and quarantine protocols, to more mundane but still important activities like waste management, food safety, and screening imported produce. 

Biosecurity isn’t just about protecting human health. Significant work in this field addresses risks to animal and plant life. Diseases in livestock can lead to mass culling and financial damage, and invasive non-native species threaten both plants and animals in nature. 

However, this article addresses biosecurity’s role in handling large-scale biological threats primarily to human life. This includes mitigating pandemics, where a disease spreads across large parts of the world, often killing many and causing significant economic impacts. It will also cover epidemics, which are more localized in their effects but can still cause significant harm. 

These biological risks are the most significant in the size of their impacts, and as we’ll discuss later, they’re also disproportionately neglected by existing work in biosecurity.

How important is biosecurity?

We think biosecurity is one of the most important goals for the world to pursue. There are three main points driving this conclusion, which we’ll elaborate on below: 

1. Pandemics and large-scale epidemics occur with surprising regularity.
2. The negative effects of these events are enormous.
3. Technological advances could lead to even more serious biological threats in the future.

Deadly biological events are surprisingly frequent

There are 19 epidemics and pandemics on record that have killed at least a million people. Some of the deadliest of these include:

• The Black Death – The Black Death was a pandemic of bubonic plague that swept through Europe in the 14th century. It’s estimated to have killed more than 50 million people, with some regions seeing their populations reduced by more than half.
• The Spanish Flu – From 1918-20, a strain of influenza ran rampant across large swathes of the world. During this period, somewhere around 17 to 50 million people died.
• HIV/AIDS – First officially reported in 1981, HIV and AIDS spread rapidly throughout the 1990s, killing millions throughout the world, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. The disease still kills over 700,000 people per year, and the WHO estimates that over 42 million have died since HIV first emerged.
• COVID-19 – The world’s most recent pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus is estimated to have killed over 26 million people as of mid-2024.

Perhaps more importantly, the majority of these outbreaks have occurred in the last few centuries. This makes sense given how novel pathogens emerge and spread. Pandemics and epidemics start primarily through viruses transferring from animals to humans—known as zoonoses. For instance, HIV may have been first contracted through contact with an ape or monkey whilst hunting, and strains of influenza common in pigs and birds have caused numerous outbreaks, including the 1918 Spanish Flu.

As the human population has grown, so has our contact with animals, both domesticated and wild. This means there are more chances for zoonotic diseases to emerge. 

Access to travel and increased urbanization have also played a part in the increased frequency of outbreaks, since viruses can spread much more widely and more quickly than they used to.

In fact, since the start of the 20th Century, there have been six epidemics or pandemics that have killed at least a million people (though exact death tolls are uncertain). This makes for a rough frequency of once every twenty years.

Future biological threats could be even worse

Unlike historical pandemics we’ve covered, future pandemics may not have natural origins. Our growing ability to study, design, and manufacture pathogens has created a new host of risks—those posed by the unintentional or malicious release of deadly pathogens.

Unfortunately research labs studying pathogens can accidentally leak them. This is something we’ve come close to more often than you might expect. Though various international measures are in place to ensure that pathogens under study don’t escape into the public, lab leaks still occur with surprising frequency. Here are just a few examples:

• In 2022, a lab employee in the Netherlands became infected with an extinct variant of polio. 
• In 2019, 65 people were infected with brucellosis from an animal research lab.
• In 2014, up to 86 people in the Centre for Disease and Control Prevention were exposed to anthrax.

No laboratory leaks have yet led to a large-scale epidemic or pandemic that we know of (though there’s some evidence that COVID-19 may have originated from a lab). Nonetheless, the surprisingly porous history of labs means caution is warranted in the future.

Similarly, there have also been attempts to intentionally deploy harmful biological threats, including a Japanese terrorist cult in the 1990s that enacted several chemical attacks on the public—thankfully none leading to severe outbreaks.

Unfortunately, due largely to advances in synthetic biology, these risks are becoming more pressing. For a number of years, scientists have been able to synthesize and modify viruses and bacteria in labs. There are good reasons driving this scientific work, such as modifying viruses to better understand how they function, how they might naturally develop, and how we might combat them.

But they also exacerbate the dangers of intentional and unintentional biological threats.

The first part of this problem is that modifying and synthesizing pathogens opens the door to viruses much more dangerous than those that occur naturally. In nature, conventional wisdom in biology suggests there’s a tradeoff between a pathogen’s virulence and its transmissibility. In other words, the more a virus can spread, the lower its fatality rate is likely to be, and vice versa.

Human-made pathogens may not be as strongly subject to these limitations, though. Malicious actors can engineer a pathogen’s transmissibility and contagiousness to artificially increase the chances of starting a lethal pandemic. Moreover, these pathogens could also be designed to evade the treatments and vaccines we’ve relied on in the past. 

The second part of the problem is that increased development and research in synthetic biology has made it much easier to synthesize dangerous pathogens, and for a wider range of people. 

In fact, these barriers are lower than ever. DNA synthesis is now readily affordable, and the technical knowledge needed to synthesize pathogens is reducing. Frighteningly, in 2018, a PhD student was able to recreate an infectious horsepox virus with just a small budget and limited expertise. The easier this research is to conduct, the higher the chance of an accidental leak (at least without further restrictions).

Because of these advances, it’s also easier than ever for malicious actors to access the tools needed to cause large-scale harm.

These risks are also very likely to be exacerbated by advances in AI, which will make it easier to discover, synthesize, and produce deadly new pathogens.

There’s precedent to this: AI has already helped make breakthroughs in biology and chemistry. The AI system AlphaFold even earned its creators a Nobel Prize for its ability to predict the structures of proteins at previously unachievable levels of accuracy.

While these tools can allow for all sorts of beneficial breakthroughs, in the wrong hands they could pose a dangerous threat. In 2022, researchers prompted an AI system to generate over 40,000 examples of potential bioweapons. The machine learning tool was intended primarily to check for the toxicity of potential pharmaceutical drugs—with the intention to weed out harmful drugs. But this same technology was easily used for sinister uses instead.

Thankfully, these researchers had no harmful intentions and published their findings as a warning. But as similar technologies become more accessible, this may not hold true in the future.

Career Journey – Jake Pencharz

Jake thought about becoming an artist, or an engineer, but ended up completing medical school. A few career changes later, and he’s now an AI researcher at the UK AI Safety Institute, working to prevent possible biosecurity risks from new forms of AI.

‘LLMs are excellent at retrieving and synthesizing complicated information. So instead of needing to read countless papers and fully understand their methodologies, the model could potentially package that information into a clear recipe for the user.’

Read our full interview with Jake here!

What can we do to improve biosecurity?

There are important gaps in funding

So far, we’ve made the case that biosecurity is a very important cause area. But how much is already being done to combat pandemics? One helpful indicator we can use is the total funding received in the area.

According to one rough estimate made in early 2024, global spending on biosecurity may lie around $130 billion USD per year—an estimate that covers only biosecurity projects focused on disease outbreaks. This estimate accounts for both governmental spending and private philanthropy. On its own terms, this is no small amount. However, we’ll briefly highlight two reasons why biosecurity is still likely a neglected field. 

First, current spending is still small relative to the costs of pandemics. COVID-19’s cost to the global economy was enormous, plausibly exceeding $12 trillion—the cost of about 100 years of biosecurity spending at current levels (given the prior estimate). And, as damaging as COVID-19 was to the world, future pandemics may be significantly worse for the reasons we’ve explained above.

This doesn’t tell us exactly how much we should spend each year on preventing pandemics and relies on uncertain estimates. However, levels of current spending seem to imply an underestimation of the risks.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, most biosecurity spending isn’t directed toward the most serious biological threats or the most promising solutions. According to research by Founders Pledge, current spending unduly ignores these types of threats, focusing on more common, but lower-stakes biological risks. Elsewhere, they estimate that U.S. government spending relevant to combating global catastrophic biological risks may stand at only $500 million per year. 

This point is echoed by others. For instance, the author behind the $130 billion spending estimate given above also points out that very little of this spending goes towards the most promising novel interventions we could pursue.

There are promising solutions

Of course, money alone isn’t the answer. It matters whether or not there are useful things we can do with it. Fortunately, there are a number of actions that look promising.

The following are a few examples to illustrate the sorts of projects we could pursue (or expand) to help combat biological risks:

• Improve air safety. Improving air quality can substantially reduce indoor transmission of diseases. Promising interventions include expanding the use of ordinary technology like ventilation and filtration systems, as well as more novel techniques, like germicidal ultraviolet light. Research by Rethink Priorities and 1 Day Sooner indicates that implementing these measures at scale could reduce the transmission of a pathogen similar to measles by 68%.
• Increase vaccine capacity. The ability to quickly develop effective vaccines for emerging pandemics is vital. We were able to produce a vaccine for COVID-19 quicker than most expected, but there’s further hope for the development of vaccines that work against whole families of viruses (and therefore potential strains we haven’t yet encountered), rather than specific existing strains. This would eliminate the time needed to develop new vaccines in response to each new threat.
• Expand biological surveillance. Biosecurity surveillance involves the monitoring of potential biological threats to help catch them earlier and develop an adequate response. Expanding existing systems, like wastewater surveillance, as well as developing effective new surveillance techniques and warning systems can help mitigate threats early on.
• Regulate access to synthetic biology supplies. Supplies needed for synthesizing pathogens are surprisingly easy to attain, at least in some cases. For example, there are loose restrictions on selling synthesized DNA sequences, making it easier for bad actors to create dangerous pathogens. “Benchtop DNA synthesizers” have also made synthesis (albeit currently limited in scope) more accessible to a wider range of people. Tighter controls on who can access this equipment would reduce the chance of misuse.
• More responsible research practices. As we’ve covered, research in synthetic biology can often carry risks of unintentional harm. We can mitigate these risks by ensuring we fully assess the risks of potentially harmful research, as well as controlling AI’s ability to assist this research. 
• Develop better personal protective equipment (PPE). Effective PPE is necessary for protecting people from infection, and is especially important for frontline workers like medical staff and law enforcement. Current PPE is unlikely to be effective enough to protect people under high-lethality pandemics, making research and development for more resilient equipment a potential priority.