The biosecurity data framework proposed by Jossie Panu and her co-authors would only apply additional restrictions to an estimated 1% of all biological data, specifically data that connects pathogen s...

Jossie Panu co-authored a paper calling for access control systems for functional biological data to prevent AI models from learning to design or modify highly contagious and deadly viruses.

The GenBank repository, which is supported by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), holds over 40 petabytes of DNA sequencing data, much of which is unannotated and of poor quality...

The UK's OpenSafely platform uses a "code-to-data" model, allowing researchers to run analysis on secure data without ever directly viewing or downloading the private patient information.

A significant gap in biosecurity oversight exists for research conducted in private labs, as there is no legal mechanism for inspection beyond the Federal Select Agent Program registration.

Organizations such as Blueprint Biosecurity are researching built-environment defenses like far-UV light and glycol vapors to create systems that can passively sterilize air against airborne pathogens...

A key vulnerability in the current gene synthesis screening system is the lack of information sharing between provider companies, which would allow a malicious actor to order a full pathogen by splitt...

The Protein Data Bank (PDB), the dataset used to train AlphaFold, is relatively small, containing less than a terabyte of protein structure data.

An estimated 80% of gene synthesis companies voluntarily screen DNA orders to prevent the creation of dangerous pathogens like smallpox and Ebola.

After being trained on a dataset that excluded sequences from human-infecting viruses, the EVO2 model's performance on viral protein tasks and functional virus generation was reduced to an effectively...

There is no global or national automated alert system for detecting new viral outbreaks, unlike the radar systems used for detecting ICBMs.

Biology foundation models such as EVO2 and ESM3 are general-purpose, require large amounts of data and compute, and are generally developed by large organizations like Google DeepMind and Evolutionary...

The UK's National Health Service established the OpenSafely research platform in 2020, granting researchers access to the clinical data of 95% of the UK population.

The cost of DNA sequencing has decreased exponentially, a trend known as Carlson's Curve, which has surpassed the rate of improvement described by Moore's Law.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) previously discovered forgotten, yet still viable, vials of smallpox in a freezer, highlighting lapses in biosafety protocols.

In 2012, two separate research groups found that avian influenza, which had a 60% case fatality rate, could be made transmissible between ferrets (a mammalian model for humans) with as few as five mut...

The voluntary nature of gene synthesis screening presents a significant security loophole, as malicious actors can place orders with the minority of companies that do not screen sequences.