Jeff Kaufman

Every pandemic in history that we've learned about has been because we've seen people be infected and have symptoms. “There are now more than 118,000 cases.” And those symptoms, especially unusual clusters of symptoms, are what have allowed us to put the pieces together and put plans into action.

One thing that goes wrong in biosecurity is some people are approaching things from a perspective of nature as the adversary. If you're only fighting nature, that's useful. It helps you get ahead of the game. But once you start taking into account that there are also humans who are paying attention to what you're doing, and some of those humans have less positive motivations, collecting more information about the kinds of things that could potentially cause pandemics, and especially trying to predict which ones of those would take off as pandemics, I think would make us less safe.

I'm Jeff Kaufman. I lead the Nucleic Acid Observatory, which is a pandemic detection and mitigation project at SecureBio. If you think of something like HIV spreading through the population, where there's a long gap between when you become infected and when you become infectious, and then when you start to show symptoms, our normal methods of detecting and knowing that something is spreading wouldn't work. The Nucleic Acid Observatory is a project to improve humanity's ability to detect pandemics and especially what we call stealth pandemics.

Our idea is we try and get samples from as wide a range of people as possible through a combination of wastewater, which is really nice because everyone contributes, and nasal swabs, which are really nice because they're much higher quality samples. We bring those together and we use a technology called metagenomic sequencing, which lets us see the range of nucleic acids in the sample. We don't have to say in advance we are looking for flu, we are looking for COVID. We just want to see whatever nucleic acids happen to be in the sample. And then once we get them into the computer, we can analyze them and we can look for evidence of something unusual, evidence that something might have been engineered, and evidence that something might be becoming more common.

So when I think about all of the risks to humanity, there are many, many risks, but within biology, one of the larger risks is this sort of stealth path that I've been talking about, where you might not know until it's too late. And so I would say that this is a pretty substantial priority because if you look at these different biological risks, if you have something that's infectious but also really noticeable, like some sort of super Ebola, you don't have the problem that something is spreading and you don't know about it. You know you have the problem, you can start working on it immediately. But if something were spreading and we didn't know about it, we really get to a situation where basically everyone is infected and then basically everyone dies, all without time to do anything about it. And that seems really important to avert.

I've been concerned about risks from pandemics for quite a long time. In 2017 I considered working in this area after becoming reasonably convinced that, okay, people are really pretty vulnerable. We breathe stuff in and then it can reproduce, so we breathe it out again, and biology is getting easier, engineering is getting easier. But when I was thinking about this a while ago, I talked to some people and I came to the conclusion that there wasn't too much I could do to work on this because my background was as a software engineer.

I had been earning to give at Google. This allowed me to earn more money than I needed. With my wife, we donated 50%. So I got into effective altruism very early, at a time when it wasn't even called effective altruism yet. The ideas were coming together from different places and I got into it very much from the altruism side. So at the time I was engaged to my now wife Julia Wise, who has felt from a very young age that it is important to help others, and quite strongly. She felt from a very young age that money she earned should go to whoever most needed it and not her just because she happened to be in a rich country where it was possible to earn money on a global scale relatively easily. And together with Julia, we were able to donate $2 million over the time that I was doing earning to give.

I think what we were doing with the money was very useful, but I did think it would be more useful if I were doing something more direct, if there were a way to directly apply my skills. And then in 2022, I was in a conversation with someone from 80,000 Hours where they pointed out that the situation in biosecurity had changed and people had done a lot of thinking about different ways that we could try and make progress on these problems, and there now were a bunch of projects where someone with my background actually could contribute pretty heavily. This is actually not that far from the kind of area in which I've spent my career. How do you work with very large amounts of data? How do you make things efficient? How do you write programs that convert people's somewhat vague idea about what they're looking for into, okay, this program will actually bring these sequences to human attention. And I think this did come to pass and I am really proud of what we accomplished over the last three years.

When I think about what would make the Nucleic Acid Observatory be something that I considered a success, different people at the project have somewhat different goals, but for me, the thing that most motivates me is removing stealth pathogens from the set of global catastrophic risks. I think right now it's very much in there. There are a lot of ways that someone could cause a lot of harm with biology using one of these stealth pathogens with a long delay from when you become infected until you start showing symptoms. But I think it is achievable to get to where this is not a feasible way to attack humanity, where if someone tried it, we would catch it and they would not succeed. And then ideally we actually deter them from trying at all because if they know that they will not succeed, then they don't even try and we can avoid a lot of harm.

I also think this is something that there's no reason to restrict to the US. This is a global problem and I think we're quite interested in solutions that involve other countries also working on detecting this sort of thing. So success for me is that this sort of pathogen is no longer a global threat of some sort of global catastrophe. And then, yeah, could happen through us. It could happen because of us. But the important thing is that it's off the table.