For much of my time in biosecurity, talent work was at odds with my identity as a technical domain expert.
I am a medical doctor by training and, as a result of a series of bad decisions, also spent a lot of time standing in the lab stabbing cells with glass pipettes to figure out how neurons communicate with brain cancer cells. I did all of that fairly successfully and therefore was pretty sure that my role in the world would be to be the technical person that deeply understands a topic. I saw my path to impact roughly as:
find new ways to solve problems through (academic) research,
tell policy people about those solutions,
maybe skip step 2 and write technocratic policy directly.
Besides liking science, I also deeply care about the future going well. After attending a biosecurity workshop in 2023 I got really worried about engineered pandemics and started thinking about how I could contribute to the field. Throughout 2024, I tried out policy research with the Alliance for Reducing Microbial Resistance (ARMoR) and facilitated the BlueDot Biosecurity course. During that time I became more convinced that being a technical domain expert is not good enough and that, to do the most good, I should become a technical domain expert who builds things, which for me was equivalent to ‘founder’.
I had no idea how to be a founder, but Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) seemed like they would be really good at making me one. According to CE’s Steve Thompson, at the time, the most promising archetypes for high-impact founding were medical doctors (✓) and management consultants.
So, when in September 2024 I had offers to join BlueDot full-time or to start a job in management consulting, I chose management consulting. This was despite my work with BlueDot having been the best team experience I had ever had. All of my reasons for not joining BlueDot at the time tied back to my identity as a technical domain expert, loosely broken down as:
Me doing talent work is not as impactful as me doing direct technical work, because
technical work is more neglected than talent work.
more people could substitute for me in talent work than in technical work.
my ceiling for contribution is higher in technical work.
Talent work is a worse personal career fit for me than technical work, because
I would enjoy solving technical problems more than doing talent work.
I would dislike feeling locked into that career path.
Fast forward to 2026, after I quit my job in consulting (I am skipping many long nights and PowerPoint slides with very little thinking about biosecurity). Despite facilitating the BlueDot Biosecurity course again, I felt confused about what my next best step towards doing impactful work could look like. Charity Entrepreneurship was not incubating biosecurity organizations and I did not want to found in classical Global Health, because biosecurity felt much more pressing.
I spent a couple of months working on drug-free nasal sprays, but became increasingly worried that, whatever technical work I and others in the field would do, it would not be happening fast enough. Put simply, I felt viscerally that the number of exceptional people in the field would not be sufficient to pandemic-proof the world in time against AI-enabled bioweapons, no matter how well we prioritized and how hard we worked. This was really overwhelming and I know that others felt the same.
The tension between my desire to make the future go well and my identity as primarily a technical domain expert led me to the realization that the best thing for me to do is to be the technical person that orients exceptional people in the field.
This view was still forming when I applied to BlueDot in May. My conviction has strengthened over the past few months, and I now believe:
Right now, talent work is much more important than solving technical problems in a niche.
We need many, many more exceptional people to pandemic-proof the world.
Finding great people is better than trying to do all the work yourself.
5 people doing full-time biosecurity talent work is not enough.
Talent work is the most enjoyable work I have ever done and builds great career capital.
Helping people have an impact is incredibly satisfying.
Talent work (probably) builds a lot of career capital.
I genuinely believe my work at BlueDot is the most impactful thing I could be doing. If I stopped believing that, I would leave and return to technical work. I want to know if my reasoning is flawed and I invite you to disagree - you can reach me at chris@bluedot.org.
We need many, many more exceptional people to pandemic-proof the world
We are experiencing rapid progress in both general-purpose AI and biological AI models. Although the risk of a biological catastrophe from AI-enabled bioweapons today is low, this rapid progress is decreasing the total amount of time we have to pandemic-proof the world. There is already a substantial increase in the funding that is available in the space and this will likely continue increasing. However, this funding can only be put to good use if there are enough scalable interventions and talented people to fund.
Right now, the number of people working on reducing biological existential risk is pretty small, with fewer than 200 people working on it full time. Most of the current work is focused on the U.S. and despite that I am not confident that even the U.S., as a single, well-resourced country, is on the right path to be fully protected against catastrophic pandemics. 95% of the world’s population live outside of the U.S., and we have a moral obligation to protect everyone, and even in well-resourced, geopolitically important regions like Europe, no one is on the ball.
Going forward, we will need many, many more talented contributors, especially problem owners who deeply care about the issue, who exercise good judgment, and who will take personal responsibility for agentically bending the universe towards a solution.
Finding great people is better than trying to do all the work yourself
Dewi recently made the point that at BlueDot “we are hiring for the field”. I like that analogy.
In the past I have felt a strong urge to just get to solving problems, particularly because timelines felt short. I think this reasoning is flawed in multiple ways.
It underestimates how many of the most important problems don’t have owners. Executing extremely well on a niche (for example drug-free nasal sprays) may not matter at all if no one owns other important interventions (like securing bench-top synthesizers).
It underestimates how quickly exceptional people can transition to working on important problems. A recent career transition grantee went from casual engagement with the field to speaking with 20+ experts and resigning from her job in the span of 4 weeks.
It underestimates how much quicker exceptional people can transition if they are being oriented by someone high-context. As an example, I made much faster progress on the drug-free nasal spray project because I was collaborating with Max Görlitz, who pitched me on the research question.
To use the hiring analogy: as a founder with technical skills and an awesome idea, you could be doing object-level work all day. But instead, your time is much better spent setting the strategy and convincing (read: hiring) people to execute on it. The same is true for the biosecurity field. There are many, many important technical problems to work on, but with the current people in the field and our rate of growth, we will fail to solve them in time.
So we need to find great people and figure out how they can most effectively contribute to the field: what to work on, how to fund them and who can mentor or manage them - either formally if they join an org or informally if they found one.
Outstanding talent work is like “making copies of yourself.” If you get one person as good as you into the field, you’ve already matched what you could contribute directly. Everyone beyond that is extra.
5 people doing full-time biosecurity talent work is not enough
At the moment, only a handful of people are doing full-time biosecurity field building. All of them have more work than they can do.
To give an example, my goal by January 2027 is to identify and accelerate at least 30 people who have the potential to do exceptional work within biosecurity. Every day, I am making painful trade-offs between
finding ways to attract more exceptional people to the Biosecurity course, which both increases and improves BlueDot’s talent pool.
updating and improving the curriculum, which makes it better at orienting participants and frees up time in 1:1 advising calls.
taking more 1:1s with participants, which increases my surface area for finding exceptional people.
building a deeper understanding, e.g. of interpretability for biological AI models, which makes it easier for me to evaluate grants and effectively support grantees.
thinking about field strategy, which makes it easier to figure out where people can contribute most effectively.
building relationships with biosecurity organizations, which makes it easier for me to get expert opinions and to place exceptional people.
hiring for the biosecurity team, which is time-intensive but unlocks additional capacity long term.
This is very similar for everyone else doing talent work in biosecurity, meaning that additional people would be immediately additive.
Helping people have an impact is incredibly satisfying
Currently, about 40% of my weekly work is spent in 1:1 advising calls with promising people I meet through the Biosecurity course. Much of that time is focused on understanding them: what they care about in life, what they enjoy doing and why they enjoy it, where they want to get to, what has stopped them and what they have tried to overcome those blockers. Understanding people deeply matters a lot, because most of our impact at BlueDot depends on people making big decisions about their lives, like pivoting their research direction, leaving their stable jobs, or moving countries.
In a lot of cases, I can also directly support them: by pointing them to the right resources, making introductions, giving them a rapid grant to unblock a project, or a career transition grant to remove some of the financial risk of quitting their job. I find it incredibly satisfying to be able to both help individuals and the wider field through my work.
Talent work (probably) builds a lot of career capital
I joined BlueDot primarily because I expected my work to be directly impactful. I did not expect it to be as good a learning opportunity in technical matters as it has been. Over the last couple of months, I have built both a very broad overview of the field through my work updating the curriculum and the many 1:1 advising calls, and depth in technical niches through my grant-making work, where I have to understand the theory of change behind technical interventions.
I can already see many ways in which I can improve my own future technical work, some of which are much more strategic than I expected. Most importantly, I feel like I now understand much better how important it is to think deeply about which problem to solve, rather than picking one and then thinking about why it could be impactful.
TL;DR
I expect that many of the best candidates for biosecurity field building, much like myself, really enjoy technical work. With the field scaling, you will have multiple competing offers to do technical work and it will be painful to turn those down.
But I honestly believe that right now, talent is the most important bottleneck in the field. Being the technical person that orients exceptional people in the field may well be the most impactful thing for you to do.
great stuff :)