We need biosecurity tools to be much more accessible (than biorisk-enabling tools)
A lack of “tacit knowledge” is often treated as the barrier that stops biological misuse. But we think that assumption is doing more work than the evidence supports. Drawing on ~60 years of collective lab experience, we unpack what “tacit knowledge” means and how much of a barrier to harm it actually poses: securebio.substack.com/p/myth-of-taci…
The problem is that one term—“tacit knowledge”—covers a broad spectrum of skills that differ enormously in how hard they are to acquire and whether they’re needed for a dangerous outcome. Pipetting and plating sit in the same bucket as adapting a protocol to a new organism or virus. Lumping basic lab skills and expert judgement together makes the barrier look stronger than it is.
Basic lab skills may be all that the simplest paths to harm require, and they are the easy part: training resources are widely available, competence can be achieved in just weeks (in one wet-lab uplift study, ~80% of novices nailed a serial dilution in 4–8 tries), and many protocols tolerate substantial imperfection.
It’s still true that novel failures and optimization problems are difficult to overcome without expert judgment. But in assessing biological risk, tacit knowledge may be less of a fortress wall than a collection of low fences that can be hopped with public resources, automation, and, increasingly, AI.View quoted post on X
