How to keep up with biosecurity

I read a lot of biosecurity news, because we make a free weekly briefing on it. It's one of the most interesting fields I know, and one of the hardest to keep up with. This is what I've learned about doing it without it taking over your week.

The short answer: pick a small number of sources you trust, check them at a regular time, and write down why something mattered when you save it. Most of this guide is about why that's harder in biosecurity than it sounds, and the ways people usually go about it.

Why is biosecurity hard to keep up with?

Mostly because it isn't one field. To a policy researcher it means pandemic preparedness. To an AI lab it means whether a model could help someone make a pathogen. To a DNA synthesis company it means screening orders, and to the Australian government it means keeping pests out at the border.

Look at three weeks of this October. DeepMind released a way of watermarking AI-designed proteins. California became the first US state to require gene synthesis screening. UKRI put over £54 million into 18 biosecurity projects, China revised its lab biosafety rules, and a Nature Communications paper showed a better way of finding H5N1 in wastewater. That's a tech company, a US state, a UK funder, a Chinese ministry and a journal.

The stories keep moving too. At the start of October, the UN's declaration on pandemic preparedness was reported as not adopted. On 13 October the General Assembly adopted it, 153 votes to 3. If you only checked once a month, you'd have caught one of those and missed the other.

How do people usually keep up?

Most people use some mix of these:

• Newsletters. Good for a weekly overview, because somebody else has done the selecting. The catch is that it's their selection, and the one that matches your corner of the field is rarely the biggest.
• Journal alerts and preprint feeds. The closest you get to the source. They're also the noisiest, and an alert takes some tuning before it stops flooding you.
• Podcasts. Easy to fit into a commute, and good for context. Less good for anything you need to look up later.
• Conferences and meetings. The best way to hear what people are working on before it's published. They only happen a few times a year, so they can't be your only source.
• Colleagues and communities. Often how the most useful things reach you. It works until the person who normally sends them is busy.

None of them covers everything, so most people end up with a patchwork.

What tends to work

• Keep the list short. Three or four sources you trust are better than fifteen you feel guilty about. If one hasn't given you anything useful in a month, drop it.
• Pick a time. Fifteen minutes on the same day each week works better than catching up whenever you can.
• Write one line when you save something. Why it matters to your work, in a sentence. A bare link rarely gets looked at again.
• Go back to the source for anything you'll act on. A summary tells you what something is about. For the exact figure or the caveat, read the original.

That's most of it. It takes discipline, and in a field that moves as fast as biosecurity it's hard to keep up for long.

One more option

This is why I built Iris. You describe your work in your own words, something like "DNA synthesis screening policy in the US and UK", and every week or month it reads across the field and writes you a briefing on what changed for you, with every source linked so you can check anything yourself. If you'd like audio, the weekly plan comes with it.

It's one option, and a good routine with a couple of newsletters works well too. If you want to see what a briefing looks like first, our free weekly biosecurity briefing is the general version, and our free monthly podcast covers the month's biggest stories in five minutes. When you'd like one built around your own work, you can set up your own briefing.

If you work in biosecurity and think I've missed something, I'd like to hear about it: joe@irisbriefings.com.