Future Projects

Biocrime Statistics

Biocrime can be thought of as extremely small scale bio-terrorism. That is crimes committed with biological agents, but more analogous to assault and murder than large actions targeting populations, governments, or institutions. Unlike bio-terrorism, there is a wealth of EMPIRICAL data about prevalence and impact of biocrimes as a consequence of existing criminal activity databases. The empirical data can inform the risk space for larger scale deliberate biological events, and yet is largely not investigated to that end. This means that there is a potential opportunity for a relatively small effort of research to achieve a relatively large pay-out of results that could reshape our understanding of biosecurity away from wholly theoretical models or sparsely populated historical models.

The Role of Delibracy in the Impact of Deliberate Biological Events

When COVID first entered the USA, the directors of the CDC, and NIH, and FDA were not patients zero, one, and two. This is because COVID was not being spread by an intelligent malicious actor aiming to cripple the USA's systemic responses to a pandemic. Similarly, efforts to close borders, quarantine infected cruise ships, and social distance at least had some chance of working to some degree because these efforts were not being deliberately sabotaged by covert agents of an attacking party. As these counter-factual examples illustrate, the danger of a deliberate attack with a biological agent has a qualitatively distinct character to a naturally occurring event with exactly the same biological agent. Using a ted-team Delphi-inspired approach, the nature of that qualitative difference will be explored and characterized for scenarios with identical biological agents but varying amounts of deliberacy (Natural event, lab-leak, lab-leak with cover-up, deliberate event with immediate neutralization of attackers, deliberate event with ongoing activity by attackers). Special emphasis will be placed on identifying national responses that are ill adapted to certain levels of deliberacy. (For example, public policy transparency is optimal for most public health responses, but perhaps sub-optimal when it reveals one's play-book to an opponent.)

Registered Reports as a tool for Biosafety Oversight

Most biosafety oversight is handled through limited self reporting and laboratory biosafety officers, or by review of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). IRBs are ill suited to this task because safety and best practices for a given piece of biological research is highly idiosyncratic to individual fields of research, and institutions rarely hire redundant personnel making an IRB, almost by definition, staffed with people who are ignorant of the idiosyncrasies of work that is being reviewed. Also, the IRB is, by definition, staffed with people who have every incentive to see high profile research performed at their institution, and thus are more likely to be risk tolerant. Peers in peer review, on the other hand, are the competitors of the work being submitted to publication and thus have every incentive to look at it with a critical eye. Further, peers are also selected from the entire pool of the world's published scientists for the people with the most expertise in the same idiosyncratic sub-discipline as the reviewed research and thus by definition are qualified to judge the safety of that research. Unfortunately, most peer-review is typically performed after the research, not before making it ill suited for safety review. The exception is an alternative form of peer review, initially developed to partially address some of the underlying causes of the replication crisis in Science called "Registered Reports" in which all or most of the peer-review takes place before the experiment is performed but after the methods and aims of the experiment are established. The project would involve developing a procedure for using Registered Reports as a platform for biosafety review. Such a review process, once developed, would be transformative to biosafety practices as it is an easy way for funders and IRBs to mandate biosafety review without having to possess the bandwidth and expertise to do so themselves in-house.

Biosecurity Ambassadors

The security fields are amazingly silo'd. One result of this is that they are constantly reinventing the wheel. For example, in biosecurity, much concern is invested in screening synthetic DNA orders for sequences that might be put to malicious uses. Naturally, this leads to worry that a given screening method might be thwarted by any of a number of obfuscation approaches. One such obfuscation approach that is frequently cited is splitting orders of DNA between providers. It turns out that split orders is essentially the same problem as split money transfers, a common tactic used in money laundering, and banks have long had a wide variety of tools to detect and counter such tricks. But biosecurity professionals rarely speak to financial security professionals, so they had to reinvent those wheels. The project would involve sending biosecurity experts to present on the basics of biosecurity, and the issues that define it, to professional conferences and meetings in OTHER security fields. This is an incredibly low-cost intervention that has the potential to have disruptive benefit by causing cross pollination of security practices leveraging the immense knowledge bases that exist in older and more established security fields.

Logo Competition (Deferred... the new logo is better!)

The original Archimedes Network logo was designed by Michael Montague in reference to the famous comment by Archimedes "Give me a big enough lever and a place to stand, and I shall move the world!" Of course, the "place to stand". Michael Montague, while perhaps possessing other talents, is not a graphic artist, and a friend recently commented of the logo: "Well, it's not catastrophically bad." This led to a new more streamlined logo being designed which we all agree is much better. Still, at some point we may revisit the question of the Archimedes Logo at which point we may institute a contest with a cash prize to find a better one.