Visions of a Viable d/acc Biosafety Strategy by Vitalik Buterin | Devcon SEA

Okay. Um, so, welcome to Degen BioDefense. Uh, so, I think uh, I'll start off by uh, just briefly recapping like how the hell I even got here, right? Uh, because uh, you know, basically uh, you know, I started off being the uh, Ethereum guy and uh, I'm historically uh, you know, not a bio person and more of a math and computer and economics person. I was definitely interested in longevity almost uh, since the beginning.

I read uh, Aubrey de Grey's book uh, Ending Aging back when I was 13 and that just uh, really uh, impressed me uh, both uh, like the uh, sheer importance of uh, solving aging, but also the fact that there is uh, a road map to actually get us there. And so, I was uh, excited about longevity the the whole time ever since. Uh, but then for Degen BioDefense in particular in uh, 2021, there was this a big meme coin mania that I'm sure you guys all uh, remember. Uh, so, first in 2016, there was Dogecoin and uh, Dogecoin went up really high and then during the 2020-2021 bubble, a bunch of people basically started like copycatting Dogecoin and making their own dog themed coins and hoping that they'll go up too. And so, some of these people decided as a strategy that they would put a large portion of their supply into my wallet balance and uh, then publicly say Vitalik Buterin supports this coin even though I never touched it.

And some of these coins just like went up way higher than they should. And so, one of this one of those big coins was called Shiba Inu. There were also others and I sold a bunch um, um, a bunch of uh, them and uh, I donated some uh, to a couple of uh, organizations and one of which is uh, Crypto Relief India. So, at the time in India, there was this big COVID uh crisis that was happening. Lots of uh people were getting sick.

It looked very bad from outside. It looked like no one was really caring about the situation. And so, I came in and uh donated to this uh group that originally Balaji introduced me to. And uh first I donated a little bit and I donated an amount of Shiba tokens that I thought would be worth a few million dollars at most, but then and they ended up managing to cash out like literally 470 million dollars. And so, after that uh we get So, 470 million ended up being like more than Crypto uh Relief India needs for its uh whole road map.

And uh I was also started uh researching and understanding COVID uh and uh bio and pandemic-related topics more heavily. And uh Balvi between myself and some of my uh science advisors like basically slowly formed and uh ended up uh uh spending a significant chunk of that meme coin funding on uh basically moonshot topics that would that deal with all kinds of uh anti-pandemic uh related efforts in general. So, biodefense is important, right? So, compared to the natural environment, population density is way higher than before. Urbanization continues to increase.

We have very easy worldwide air travel. In the best case scenarios, we might even have like rockets that'll take us from New York to Bangkok in 1 hour. But uh I mean Eli Dorado told me that like that's probably not going to be a uh commercialized anytime soon because rockets are a little too dangerous. But we have supersonic jets. They might take us there in like 4 or 5 hours.

And so, I expect air travel to just be even more ubiquitous. Factory farming creates a lots of pandemics. Man-made pandemics. Uh so, uh gain-of-function research uh you know, continues to happen and uh basically continues to be a uh a source of risk. And also synthetic biology as a science growing potentially making artificial pandemics even more of a problem.

So, biodefense is a big deal. Toby Ord in his book The Precipice talking about existential risk, his view is that the number one risk is AI and the number two risk is a pandemic. So, pandemics are important both because of like big picture reasons and because of very clear near-term reasons. COVID showed how humanity was underprepared for pandemics and how centralized biodefense fails. So, we saw this happen at every stage of the pipeline.

We saw at the very beginning of the pandemic December 20 20 2019 January 2020, a lot of early information suppression and heavy censorship from people speaking out about the pandemic at the beginning. Then, in the spring there was this very crazy situation where the World Health Organization very publicly and stridently announced that COVID-19 is not airborne. And of course, at the beginning this was like and this often gets defended as being a well-intentioned effort to basically stop people from trying to stockpile and like grab up all of the masks because the like pandemic emergency care workers need the masks. But as often happens with these kinds of social engineering tricks, it it ended up over-fitting to a particular situation and as time progressed, like this basically just turned into like this massive misinformation that just confused people for years and we saw years of delay on basic air precaution measures and at the same time people just pointlessly wasting hours wiping surfaces. We saw failures of centralized social distancing mandates.

So, mandatory quarantines, mandatory closing of everything. Lots of people in lots of countries just freaking hated it and uh I think uh if you took the if you imagined social so the social distancing that was forced on humanity in 2020 and you imagined it as a pill and you think about the kinds of side effects that it might have in terms of the social fabric, the collective psyche and so on, it would have never passed um FDA approval, not even as an emergency treatment. Um so also vaccines and I think vaccines are good but at the same time there's a lot of things about how vaccines were done that can and should be criticized. So vaccines were mandated and at the same time there was this very closed source information culture, both the closed source process of actually developing these vaccines but also the process of safety testing them. And again this was this effort to try to create this centralized message that would be a have basically very clear and much cleaner than anything is actually possible in reality, right?

They basically tried to say vaccines have no risk and you and you basically have to take them. The reality of course is that vaccines have some level of risk. COVID itself has even more risk and so if you're interacting with people, you pretty much should take a vaccine anyway but at the same time vaccines do have like non-zero risk and like basically over time the like trying to craft this overly clean message actually ended up sacrificing a lot of credibility, right? So centralized biodefense has lots of problems that we saw. DIAC shows better solutions.

So the things that you'll hear about over the next two hours include one, a lot of work on clean indoor air. So in this room you see a lot of these boxes, they're passive air filters. They make this room much more COVID safe than pretty much any other room in this conference venue and most other venue rooms that that you'll see. Technologies for clean indoor air, ventilation, filtering, um, ultraviolet light. Um, so, then we have that ubiquitous passive testing.

So, the past of COVID testing is sticking things up your nose. The future of COVID testing is either personal sensors that you can breathe into or just passive sensors in rooms that can just detect when viruses um, even exist. Open epistemics, uh, so open public dashboards that can help people understand where pandemics are happening. Open vaccine research, open vaccine development, the development of types of vaccines that can be easily manufactured anywhere in the world. And, uh, also research and, uh, treatment.

So, a lot of, uh, work needs to be done in better understanding long COVID. So, for COVID in particular, the long-term symptoms are basically the primary reason why you should take it more seriously than something like the cold or the flu. And, there's a lot of, uh, very important research happening in like actually deeply understanding the underlying mechanisms, and then finally actually treating these diseases. So, the collection of these solutions that we outline here basically will make humanity much more pan- resilience to pandemics passively as a matter of default. Regardless of what kind of pandemic it is, regardless of whether it's a repeat of an old one or it's gain of function or it comes out out of a factory farm or if someone created it intentionally to start World War III.

Regardless of what you think your threat model is, airborne diseases are the example the most, uh, dangerous, uh, category in terms of causing catastrophic harm, and these and this will just across the board passively make humanity safer. Um, and, uh, there are some active solutions, but they only need to be turned on while pandemics are actually happening, and even they are vastly less intrusive than what we saw in the, yeah, past. Finally, bridges between DEAC, longevity, and BCI. So, this bio is a connected field, and a lot of the work that is being done here is work that is also valuable in these other fields. Viral persistence, a mechanism that it's is the source of long COVID, also explains mitochondrial dysfunction, inflammaging, cognitive decline, better understanding of microbes in general helps everyone.

Better open imaging technology is good for medicine and good for treating and understanding diseases, also good for brain computer interfaces. So, technology that I will talk about here will improve our ability to understand disease, understand aging, and understand our