#164 – Kevin Esvelt on cults that want to kill everyone, stealth vs wildfire pandemics, and how he felt inventing gene drives

80,000 Hours Podcast

"Imagine a fast-spreading respiratory HIV. It sweeps around the world. Almost nobody has symptoms. Nobody notices until years later, when the first people who are infected begin to succumb. They might die, something else debilitating might happen to them, but by that point, just about everyone on the planet would have been infected already.

And then it would be a race. Can we come up with some way of defusing the thing? Can we come up with the equivalent of HIV antiretrovirals before it's too late?" — Kevin Esvelt

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez interviews Kevin Esvelt — a biologist at the MIT Media Lab and the inventor of CRISPR-based gene drive — about the threat posed by engineered bioweapons.

Links to learn more, summary and full transcript.

They cover:

• Why it makes sense to focus on deliberately released pandemics
• Case studies of people who actually wanted to kill billions of humans
• How many people have the technical ability to produce dangerous viruses
• The different threats of stealth and wildfire pandemics that could crash civilisation
• The potential for AI models to increase access to dangerous pathogens
• Why scientists try to identify new pandemic-capable pathogens, and the case against that research
• Technological solutions, including UV lights and advanced PPE
• Using CRISPR-based gene drive to fight diseases and reduce animal suffering
• And plenty more.

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio Engineering Lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore