what keeps you up at night: biorisks

There are myriad problems in the world that could induce insomnia. The largest elephant in the room is Covid, but fatigue with the realities of a pandemic have somewhat pushed the focus towards other things (e.g. war in Ukraine). But viruses don’t just go away, and the next biological risk is out there somewhere. From genetic manipulation to sequencing data to pharmaceutical synthesis to drug-resistant microbes – plenty of problems to worry about.

Coming off two plus years of a global pandemic is perhaps the perfect time to lean into the biorisk sharp points. We have a lot of data, lessons learned, and potential insights into how we avoid and/or deal with the next catastrophe. The problem space is vast, as are the players and the data, so how to deal with the complexity involved? Conceptual frameworks often provide a way to abstract some of the complexity involved, and focus-down on some key aspects to be explored. At a recent Conclave,