Founders Pledge - NTI Bio Assessment

### Related research

[**Safeguarding the future report** \\
Learn more](https://www.founderspledge.com/research/existential-risk-executive-summary)

Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan global security organization focused on reducing nuclear and biological threats imperiling humanity.

### What problem are they trying to solve?

For most of human history, the greatest risk of mass fatalities has stemmed from pandemics. The poor health, deaths, and economic and political disruption caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic shows the scale of damage that pandemics can cause. Compared to the worst pandemics in history, however, COVID-19 is relatively mild. In the 1300s, the Black Death plague outbreak killed 30-50% of the European population.1 The 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ killed 50 million to 100 million people,2 more people than died in World War One. These events are outliers, but history is punctuated by episodes of mass death from disease outbreaks.

Improvements in biotechnology will bring great gains for human health, enabling us to cure genetic diseases, create new vaccines, and make other important medical advances. However, biotechnology will also allow humans to modify the features of pathogens. For example, Figure 1 shows that the cost of gene synthesis has fallen by many orders of magnitude in recent years.

**Figure 1.**

![CHS_Fig_1_a4f8a75a75.png](https://dkqj4hmn5mktp.cloudfront.net/CHS_Fig_1_a4f8a75a75_084c796feb.png)

Source: Carlson, On DNA and transistors.3

Cheaper and more accessible biotechnologies like gene synthesis could potentially greatly increase the probability of Global Catastrophic Biological Risks — global catastrophes involving biological agents.4 Researchers have, accidentally or otherwise, demonstrated the ability to design pathogens with dangerous new features.5

NTI drives systemic change that creates a safer world by galvanizing large-scale institutional adoption of proven global security practices and programs. Their institutional objectives address both nuclear and biological weapons,6 but we are specifically recommending their work on risks from biological events, such as the outbreak of an engineered pandemic. Biological weapons pose a serious threat to humanity’s long-term future and we believe efforts to reduce this risk are relatively neglected.

### What do they do?

NTI’s biosecurity team (abbreviated as “NTI \| bio”) has four main approaches to reducing global catastrophic risks from biological events. These are:7

1. Reducing the risk that a sophisticated person or group could misuse biotechnology to deliberately or accidentally cause catastrophic harm;
2. Identifying and catalyzing urgent actions and new solutions to prevent, investigate and rapidly respond to high-consequence biological events, including potential future events that are orders of magnitude more severe than the COVID-19 pandemic;
3. Addressing the root causes of potential bioweapons development by powerful actors—in

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