Media Coverage of the Dream of Biosecurity Infrastructure

Politico reporter Krista Mahr published a great article a few months ago outlining how a global network of biosecurity infrastructure is being built via the CDC’s program to monitor airport travelers. (Full disclosure: Ginkgo does run the core program referenced in the article.)

Mahr reported that the White House, NSC, and CDC are using airport based pathogen monitoring programs to build strategic biosecurity infrastructure for the world — despite recent articles (from The Economist for example) that this isn’t being pursued during this late/post-COVID phase.

I’m optimistic that biological threat monitoring infrastructure is actually being built/expanded through the types of programs referenced by Mahr and in a number of other recent articles.

In Politico: Airplane lavatories deliver new hope for the CDC’s variant hunt

“The small but growing Traveler Genomic Surveillance program, run by the CDC with a biotech firm and a company that collects samples, is seen by administration officials and public health experts as part of a revolution in biosafety infrastructure.” (Emphasis mine)

In the New York Times: A C.D.C. airport surveillance program found the earliest known U.S. cases of Omicron subvariants

“This is a new tool in the C.D.C. tool kit that works, and we’ve shown it’s effective and it can be layered with all of our other mitigation measures,” said Dr. Cindy Friedman, chief of the Travelers’ Health Branch at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In Wired: How to Detect a Man-Made Biothreat

From Emily Mullin: “The US government is funding tech to determine whether genetic alterations in a virus or pest are an evolutionary quirk — or a lab-engineered danger… To determine whether an organism’s genetic code has been tinkered with, scientists need to know what its genome — and those of its close relatives — normally look like. Then they can search for areas that look out of the ordinary.”

In The Atlantic: Airplane Toilets Could Catch the Next COVID Variant

“Your best contribution to public health might happen at 30,000 feet,” writes Betsy Ladyzhets. But to us at Concentric by Ginkgo, that “blue juice” could be the key to preventing the spread of the next pandemic.

As the General Manager, Biosecurity at Ginkgo Bioworks, I reflect on the broader world of biosecurity / intelligence / national security more than anything else. These are my personal opinions as someone who is thinking about this topic 24 hours a day.