Grace Braithwaite: The Doctor Who Left Medicine to Stop the Next Pandemic #24
Could the next pandemic kill ten percent of humanity, and what would it take to stop it? JD explores this with Grace Braithwaite, doctor-turned-biosecurity-field-builder and founder of the Cambridge Biosecurity Hub, whose journey from the front lines of COVID medicine to the cutting edge of pandemic prevention brought her to one of the most urgent and neglected problems facing humanity. Grace unpacks the terrifying gap between COVID and what pandemics can actually become, the three-part framework of prevention, detection, and response that could save millions of lives, and why the most powerful thing an ambitious Christian can do right now might just be learning to think seriously about the disease that hasn't emerged yet.
Articles, Scripture, organisations, and other media discussed in this episode
Cambridge Biosecurity Hub - The biosecurity field-building organisation Grace co-founded with Sandy Hickson, working to get people into biosecurity careers through reading groups, fellowships, career advising, and community coordination.
Coefficient Giving - Referenced as by far the largest funder Grace is aware of specifically focused on preventing the next pandemic, currently running a call for applications with over $100 million available.
BlueDot Impact - The largest and most competitive biosecurity course available, described as how Grace originally got excited about biosecurity, which puts participants in groups with impressive people from across the field.
High Impact Medicine - A career advising organisation for medics considering high-impact careers, whose multi-week course Grace found particularly valuable when transitioning out of clinical medicine.
80,000 Hours - The effective altruism career advising organisation.
SecureBio - An organisation working on pathogen-agnostic early warning systems, including wastewater surveillance, to detect new pandemics as early as possible.
Amodo Designs - A biosecurity startup founded by Tom Milton referenced as an example of the entrepreneurial opportunities emerging in the space.
ERA (Effective Altruism Research Assistant) - The organisation Grace partnered with to run the AI bio fellowship, the first cohort of which saw at least half of participants move into direct biosecurity work.
Oxford Biosecurity Group - Referenced as running local biosecurity reading groups with a four-week syllabus available for others to use.
Sir Andrew Pollard - Lead researcher for the Oxford COVID vaccine and speaker at the Christians for Impact London Conference 2024.
Episode Highlights:
How Bad Can It Get?
“There's definitely room for things to be more fatal even within nature before you look at people designing something especially scary.”
The Three-Part Framework
“I like to break down the problem in this prevention, detection, reaction timeline. I find it much easier to get my head around.”
Why Early Detection Matters
“A way that COVID could have been worse was like, what if people hadn't lost their taste and smell? So it was less obvious it was COVID… we would have just taken much longer to figure out it was much worse.”
What Biosecurity Needs Most
“Often the thing people say to me that they want the most is agentic or self-motivated people.”
The Joseph Principle
“The bit that actually saves Egypt is the storing of the grain, taking rations — really boring maths and science and long-term planning. But that is the bit that actually saves all those people.”
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JD (00:00.375) or
Grace (00:00.804) Braithwaite.
JD (00:03.502) Braithwaite, okay.
Grace (00:04.73) Braithwaite with a TH.
JD (00:11.532) Okay, say it one more time.
Grace (00:13.552) Braithwaite.
JD (00:15.96) Braithwaite, okay, good, it's coming through the microphone now. Is your head cropped on your side or are you able to make sure your head's — that's good, we want that angle, yeah, okay. Okay.
JD (00:39.8) Hi everyone, welcome back to the Christians for Impact podcast. And I am really excited to be here today to talk about something serious. COVID killed roughly upwards of 20 million people. And my guest today considers COVID a four out of 10 on the scale of how bad pandemics can get. So if we're overdue for the next pandemic, how bad can it really get? And what can individuals like you listening or watching do?
So Grace will give her an introduction in a second, but she's an expert in biosecurity. And she's also a Christian who believes that this is part of our calling as Christians is to be healers and to be preventers of diseases. And we'll talk about that. We'll also talk about career advice and also how you can get one-on-one advising if you want a career that has a maximum impact at preventing the next pandemic or mitigating all of its harms.
So yeah, let's jump into this. Grace, thanks so much for being on today.
Grace (01:36.484) Yeah, thanks for having me.
JD (01:39.37) So we were talking a moment ago about pandemics and how bad pandemics are. COVID, you said, was roughly like a four out of 10 in terms of how bad pandemics can get. How does it get worse than COVID, right? We had 20 million deaths and we had all of society locked down. Does it really get worse than COVID?
Grace (01:59.212) Yeah. So it definitely gets worse than COVID in terms of, even if you look at similar conditions like other flus, you can end up with death rates or mortality rates that are much higher. COVID was around 1%, I believe. Some that were really worried about like H5N1, which is a really scary bird flu that can't transmit into humans at the moment,
is estimated to maybe be as high as 30% mortality rate, as well as other pandemics we've seen historically reaching sometimes up to a million people dead, if you look at the 100 million even in the 1918 Spanish flu, or things like HIV, which is a pandemic in a different way than COVID is at 40 million plus and still out there and killing at really high rates.
So I think there's definitely room for things to be more fatal even within nature before you look at people designing something especially scary.
JD (03:09.72) So do you mind taking a minute to share a bit about your background? You're a doctor. You're also a biosecurity expert. So how did you get to where you are today?
Grace (03:18.008) Yeah, so I studied medicine here in the UK. I also did a degree in public health and international development. In the middle of that, I was told we were overdue for a pandemic at that course in 2019. So studied public health just before it was trendy and graduated in 2021. So sort of the back end of the pandemic, like clinically on the front line as well. I then left clinical medicine to try out
other career options — left for a quote unquote year out, which is now at like three plus. And found biosecurity really interesting from this perspective where it's trying to prevent the like disease X that kills us all. But you also get these short term wins by preventing the next COVID or even making the next flu season not as bad and having a lower impact on humanity. And I liked that
it didn't have to be this one event to do good in the way that some existential risk work is, as well as keeping the science. And I really love that it's very multidisciplinary as well. So I started the Cambridge Biosecurity Hub with a friend who's a genetics PhD, Sandy Hickson, about two and a half years ago, because I was in Cambridge with some extremely impressive names in biosecurity who were just PhD students at the time.
We were really, really part-time for a few years, like five hours a week or something. But I have been full-time since November, which has been great to be able to do all the things we've been wanting to do now that I actually have time.
JD (05:03.438) So what is it that you do at Cambridge Biosecurity Hub?
Grace (05:07.312) So in general, we're trying to get people to learn about biosecurity through things like introductory reading groups. We've lectured at the uni occasionally as well. We try to get people who are interested in biosecurity more up skilled. So I've helped with a few fellowships, like the SPA fellowship has a biosecurity stream now, an AI bio fellowship that's just finished that was full time,
and things like this, as well as more part-time projects, career advising, networking, creating resources, and then help with the coordination of the existing biosecurity world as well through things like conferences, retreats, getting us all actually onto the same email thread so we can share resources. So like trying to get people into it, get into jobs once they're interested and then help us be more effective as a group,
because there aren't many field builders as people call us at the moment. I think, last I heard, yeah, my funders tell me I'm the only full-time one. So there's lots of low hanging fruit. There's loads of part-time people out there that are doing great things. So yeah.
JD (06:10.188) Yes, you're the first I've met doing field building in biosecurity.
JD (06:24.46) That's one thing we'll talk about — how do folks enter a career into field building for something as important as biosecurity. But I want to drill into the importance of biosecurity because it can get kind of technical and jargony quickly, but at the end of the day, these are human lives we're talking about and people made in God's image. And it seems like COVID was sort of just a bad dream, right? But when you talk about how bad pandemics can get, it sounds like we still have a nightmare waiting for us if we're not ready.
Grace (06:38.725) Yeah.
JD (06:54.38) You know, there's some experts say there's some chance — and you know the research better than I — there's some chance that by the end of the century, 10% or more of humanity would die from some pandemic. So maybe walk me down that dark path, that sobering dark path. What does it look like that we — what are the signs that we are on that path for that nightmare scenario?
Grace (07:09.38) Mm-hmm.
Grace (07:17.264) Yeah. So some is that the like base rates of pandemics are already quite high. I think it's every 10 to 50 years, a significant pandemic is due. What significant means can vary. There was a forecasting tournament in 2022 that a lot of people point to as where a lot of the
forecasters and domain experts met. And yeah, they predicted a catastrophic event — which people talk about being 10% or more of the population dying, enough so that you would see changes in how society exists, like food supplies going down, hospitals going down — is what people tend to think about as this catastrophic level, as a level before extinction, because people still really don't want that to happen.
by the end of the century, being around one to 3%. And they put human extinction — some people were as high as 1%. A lot were much lower, about one in 50,000. But one thing that comes up a lot in biosecurity right now is that this was in 2022, which was before the big boom of how artificial intelligence interacted with the
explosion in biotechnology to make tools much better at making biology. So there's that as well as the whole, yeah.
JD (08:51.704) So I was amazed by this. I had a conversation with someone named Anna Karina Pitol, who's a Christian working in immunology and studying diseases. And she explained to me that during COVID, they couldn't ethically source COVID from a live person. So what they did was they engineered COVID in their lab, and it took them a day to do this, a day or so.
And I mean, I was terrified that you could synthetically engineer COVID in a few days time, right? That just sounds like science fiction to me as someone who's a non-technical expert. So like, can we engineer any disease we want?
Grace (09:38.64) So there are some limitations about what is biologically possible. I don't know that much about it. And this is also being debated because you're not allowed to build horribly scary viruses — if you've signed up to the biological weapons convention and things like that. Whether people do is up for debate. I heard my friend Richard Melon talk recently about
a really important paper that came out a while ago where one of these biological design tools as they're called — which are like AI but specifically for biology — called EVO2, managed to make bacteriophages, which are things that eat viruses, that were better than anything that had ever been in nature. They were better than any of the bacteriophages that were
coming up in nature. So I think people think that nature is the best at it, but obviously nature has different priorities to what a bad actor would be wanting to do.
JD (10:49.228) Yeah, yeah. So what are at a high level the career paths that are highest impact in your view at stopping some of the risks here? So it sounds like there's risks of some pandemic emerging from nature, but there's an even greater risk of a human-engineered pandemic. And how do we stop that? How would you outline the best paths for careers, especially?
Grace (10:56.549) On your
Grace (11:14.744) Yeah, so I like to break down the problem in this prevention, detection, reaction timeline. I find it much easier to get my head around. In prevention, you tend to have things that are more policy focused in terms of more classical things to do with trying to prevent zoonotic spillover if you do want to go the nature way, things around
biosecurity technology rules and controls over who can access certain things if you are particularly worried about this manmade thing. This tends to be more policy focused or more computationally heavy. Like if you're from a more AI or tech or computational background, there are a lot of safeguards and people that work on trying to make the tools safe at doing good biology and bad at doing bad biology.
Prevention, detection — early detection for me personally is my favourite. I think because I could see it from my clinical point of view. Places like the NAO and SecureBio team are very good at this, like trying to catch things early so that you know what it is and respond to it quickly. This was one of the things with COVID. Like a way that COVID could have been worse was like, what if people hadn't lost their taste and smell?
So it was less obvious it was COVID, or it would happen in a flu season — we would have just taken much longer to figure out it was much worse.
JD (12:40.963) Right.
JD (12:46.392) So NAO is the Nucleic Acid Observatory, now SecureBio? Yeah. So these guys are like processing wastewater to see if there are any pathogens in the wastewater, which would give us like what, an extra few days or weeks lead time to know if there's some disease out there, is that right? And that translates into like thousands or potentially millions of lives saved if you can actually act quicker, right? Like we saw with COVID,
Grace (12:50.0) Yes, they've just rebranded to a name that I've just thought of.
Grace (13:04.397) Yeah, yeah, this is wonderful.
JD (13:14.03) the places that acted quicker in getting the ball rolling usually had better outcomes. Yeah.
Grace (13:21.284) This is especially true. Wastewater is much better if you have a longer period of time where you're contagious but not symptomatic. Because if everyone is already getting sick, the wastewater is not as helpful — you're likely to pick it up clinically. But if people are sort of invisibly passing it around, you're more likely to pick it up in wastewater. They're also working on some things to do with picking up samples from the air, or what if you routinely tested
blood samples that were going to the hospital anyway, things like this. Yeah, so there's early detection, which is a lot more of like a physical problem to solve. So I know some engineers, or obviously some policy thrown in here as well. And then the response is things like, what if you just had a vaccine that protects you from all viruses? So you didn't have to do the — find out it was COVID,
make the vaccine for COVID — you could find out there was a pandemic and just deploy the pandemic vaccine or have given it to people before, which is much more of a technical, very skilled biology problem that I would not know anything about solving.
JD (14:33.93) Yeah, so there are three arms of what to do. There's the prevention, stopping it from ever coming about in the first place. There's the detection, like spotting it quickly. And then there's the response or mitigation, right? How do you weaken its influence or its proliferation?
Grace (14:47.994) Yeah.
And lots cross over between these — like PPE is a bit of both — but I find this easier to break down the problem and think about where the intervention is most likely to help.
JD (15:01.902) So I want to ask about James Lin's map of biosecurity interventions. And I trust you've seen it. It's that big blue rectangle. I'll link to it for those who are listening or watching. And it shows sort of a breakdown of mitigation and prevention. And there might even be a response arm, with tons of bubbles. Because there are dozens of things people are doing in this space. And you wouldn't have — I wouldn't have guessed it. Like on the
Grace (15:11.599) Yeah.
JD (15:29.006) mitigation side we have — I'll just list some things. Actually this is detection rather. You have NAO, you have better biosensors, you have better filtering, you have agricultural disease monitoring, right? Like checking whether on the farm something's popping up. You have
disease surveillance apps. You have PPE, personal protective equipment — I think that's what that stands for — and stockpiling that and designing better equipment. You have sterilizers for the air. You have drills and protocols in governments and institutions and schools to try to help, I suppose, control or mitigate if there is some kind of outbreak.
You have no factory farms or like controlling the antibiotic use on industrial farms. You have the development of vaccines, right? And like you mentioned, a pan-virus vaccine, and all sorts of other — I mean, dozens of other things. Like this is just such a huge space. It's actually kind of overwhelming. So when you see something like this, what do you think? Where, right there, is that
especially impactful or especially important?
Grace (16:44.976) So you especially want things that are —
as well as the classic — like you want it to be tractable, like actually possible. So there are some more moonshot-y ideas. But I think one thing that's really important with pandemic prevention is that it is across multiple organisms, that it's organism-agnostic is one of the words people use. So things like washing your hands is obviously much better than if you had a hand sanitizer that only worked on
E. coli or something like this. In general, a lot of these are pretty disease-agnostic, which is good, but that's one thing that people particularly look out for because you don't know what the next pandemic is going to be. BlueDot has a great — in their course, I remember you had to rank different interventions across a lot of things about like how expensive it was, how quick it was to make these things,
was the public going to go along with it? Because one thing that Blueprint Biosecurity works on now is that one thing — glycol vapors, which is basically the thing in smoke machines — capture and destroy viruses. But all of the, yeah.
JD (18:08.43) Nice.
JD (18:12.94) Oh my gosh. This is just such a win for the charismatic non-denominational churches with the smoke machine. I mean, like, we are so protected against the next pandemic if we just go straight to the like all smoke machines. Yeah.
Grace (18:16.624) Yeah.
You —
Grace (18:24.728) Yeah, yeah, true. Much more tractable in these groups than like if you decided to pump things into the tube — like maybe the public wouldn't love. To clarify, there's not that much evidence right now — only papers are from the 40s, which is why they're working on it right now. And the thing in the smoke machines is water that makes it all foggy. So it wouldn't be like literal smoke. It would just be in the air that you can't see.
But yeah, you need public buy-in for a lot of these interventions in most societies, which is one thing that people have to think about, like the branding of the product. Yeah.
JD (19:07.318) Yeah, yeah. So, but you wouldn't say there's like a handful of interventions that you're most excited about or that experts in the space are most excited about. And if there is, I imagine it changes relatively often, but what can you say to that?
Grace (19:15.844) Please.
Grace (19:21.986) Yeah, there's one thing — let me pull them up so that I'm not misspeaking — but Andrew Snyder-Beatty, who is the head of biosecurity at Open Philanthropy, which is one of the funders within the effective altruism space, sort of laid out his four pillars hypothesis. This is specifically about preventing these catastrophic level pandemics,
because one thing to clarify with biosecurity is that this word can mean a lot to different groups. In my world, I usually mean pandemic prevention rather than things like agricultural safety, or sometimes biosafety, which is like lab safety specifically — these get mixed up with biosecurity. But in general, I'm talking about pandemics.
JD (20:16.162) What's the difference between lab safety and biosecurity? Biosecurity is broader and lab safety is just the lab, or?
Grace (20:20.856) Yeah, yeah, biosafety is like the rules around what you can do in the lab and the donning and doffing of personal protective equipment, or how high the regulations have to be.
JD (20:34.902) I would be so clumsy in these labs. Like I'm the most clumsy person. I'd probably give everyone Ebola. Do not put me in one of those labs for the record. Yeah.
Grace (20:43.69) Yeah, I've seen videos, it's insane. And I had to do some fairly high level PPE stuff in COVID in the full suits and masks.
JD (20:53.538) What's — can you say the most dangerous disease you've had physical contact or proximity to? Is that classified, or?
Grace (21:01.744) No, not classified. I haven't been that cool.
Probably the most dangerous — well, COVID was obviously super susceptible to everyone. I have been around some drug-resistant TB, which everyone's in full PPE for. Yeah, tuberculosis — and the drug-resistant one. And this one had spread to the person's brain as well, which is particularly bad. I spent one week on an infectious disease unit here in Cambridge and there was some more wild and wacky stuff, but yeah.
JD (21:20.696) Tuberculosis, yeah.
JD (21:37.634) But you were just a doctor when you were interacting with that person. You named a person, right? So apparently, yeah. Did they get better or was this —?
Grace (21:41.464) Yeah.
Yes.
Grace (21:48.304) I don't know. So tuberculosis has a really long treatment course. Normal tuberculosis is I think six months — you're on several tablets a day. But because this person had such a resistant strain, it was so contagious they had to be in the hospital for the long haul. So I didn't see what the outcome was.
JD (22:12.141) Yeah.
Grace (22:16.804) They weren't in the best place. Unfortunately, most of the deaths from drug resistance are in low and middle income countries where you have fewer resources and missed prescriptions and things. I found the...
JD (22:32.076) So we should check out the four pillars. Yeah, name the four pillars of biosecurity. Yeah.
Grace (22:34.768) Yeah. So yeah, these are specifically around — yeah. So there's personal protective equipment — that these are better and more wearable and stockpiled. I think we have fewer stockpiles now than before COVID in some places in the world. Bio hardening, which is like pervasive physical barriers or layers of sterilisation. So things like
far UVC, which is a particular form of UV light that all evidence shows is safe on human skin but destroys pathogens — so could you just have this up in rooms as a baseline? Then detection, things like pathogen-agnostic early warning systems like we spoke about, and then rapid reactive medical countermeasures.
So things are often divided into medical countermeasures and non-medical countermeasures — non-medical being things like lockdown. But yeah, he has a really good 80,000 Hours post on this, or a blog post if you don't want to listen to the many hours.
JD (23:47.198) So are these viewed as like each very worthwhile areas to go into with somebody's career and there's not like a strong preference for one or the other — they're all really good options? Is that what I'm hearing?
Grace (24:01.986) Yes, yeah, this is true from especially this funder's point of view. Like I said, they're one of the biggest in the space I work in. They are doing a call right now actually — they have millions in pots that they are calling for applications and it's quite a short application form to try and attract as many good ideas as they can at the moment.
JD (24:28.024) How many other funders are there in this space? And like, who's funding this? It seems like obviously there's government stuff or national security concerns, right? Lest Russia create some new smallpox, right? As some kind of bio weapon or whatever. But like, are there really any other funders who are doing things here?
Grace (24:42.202) Yeah.
Grace (24:47.418) There are a few — I should have pulled up my document on this before — but if you're looking at specifically biosecurity in the sort of mindset I'm talking about, I think there's maybe eight that I found right now. There are probably more, but like you're saying, biosecurity is so broad and you end up with people that wouldn't even brand it as that. Like the WHO does really great pandemic things.
JD (25:13.015) Yeah.
Grace (25:16.772) Places like AstraZeneca and Pfizer — just huge pharma companies. We all know their names from the vaccines from the pandemic. But specifically with the focus of preventing the next pandemic, I think I found a few — Open Philanthropy is by far the biggest that I know of.
JD (25:34.646) And how much do they spend on bio every year?
Grace (25:38.85) I would be guessing. I can tell you what their current call is for. Yeah.
JD (25:44.746) I mean, it's like the hundreds of millions, like low hundred million, right? I mean, it's a big, big ballpark stadium sticker price number.
Grace (25:56.4) Yeah, definitely.
Grace (26:11.63) Yeah, a hundred million plus is available in this call that they're currently doing.
JD (26:18.368) Yeah. So you do career advising in the biosecurity space and you do it in the UK and you know about US opportunities as well.
Grace (26:20.281) It's like a huge —
Grace (26:28.694) Yeah, I do it with people all over the world, really.
JD (26:32.718) So how does that conversation usually go? And who are you usually talking to? Are they policy people? It sounds like there's a big focus on policy careers, engineering careers, and science careers, especially for researching and measuring, detecting, and innovating. Seems like that's where a lot of the focus is on those skill sets. But share with me more about what that looks like and who your ideal audience is.
Grace (26:52.848) Yeah.
Grace (27:03.16) Yeah, I think because it's so interdisciplinary in biosecurity, I actually end up talking to a lot of different people, but I end up talking to a lot of biologists or immunology and virology people. One thing I'm trying to figure out right now is I don't know how many wet lab opportunities there are in like, you know, branded biosecurity work.
I meet a fair few policy people. They're from a wide variety of backgrounds. I think you really don't have to have been a doctor before. Biology is fairly easy to learn, in my opinion, especially at the level that you need to be speaking to, like the general public or someone in the government. So I meet people from a wide variety of backgrounds in that, whether that's humanities, global health, public
policy, systems, or also maths people that have pivoted. I also meet some people that are younger, that are earlier in their career, learning about biosecurity. I've also met some people that are pivoting when they're extremely experienced. Yeah, some engineers and physical scientists — I think this will be growing.
Yeah, but I think it definitely depends on the problem. Like, do I think someone without a biology background is going to build that broad spectrum vaccine? Probably not. But could you very quickly become the expert in the next intervention, like glycol vapors or far UVC? Yes, because there isn't that much background and you could upskill on this really quickly. So I think it depends on what sort of thing you want to do, but
the backgrounds are extremely varied, which is one reason why I like it.
JD (28:57.442) Yeah. So could you give me a list of some job titles that you hear of in this space? Because my mind just keeps going back to researchers and policy experts and maybe some communicators.
Help me get a sense of the range of titles and responsibilities of folks in this space. Because I know listeners who are interested in this as a theoretical risk, who might not have been the type that cared about public health or biosecurity, but their ears are perked up because they hear, wow, there's a chance of 10% death of humanity from this, right? So like, can the humanities person find a career in here? Can the general ops person find a career in here? Maybe you could speak to that more general background.
Grace (29:18.17) No.
Grace (29:31.344) Just —
Grace (29:42.904) Yeah, I think general ops or just a generalist background is important, especially for these more discrete interventions where you could learn a lot quickly and research whether this is even worth doing as an intervention. You also meet the people that are doing the funding and some more big picture field analysis.
One big question at the moment in biosecurity is where the gaps actually are for the talent because it's quite new — especially if you compare to the science world that it fits in as a specialty, it's fairly new. And the question of who do we need more of and why is a big open question. I know some people are working on this. As well as
there are people that are pivoting to try a lot of startups on some of these things. This is newer and I don't know of crazy success stories yet. But I know some people that are just entrepreneurial types that are agentic, that are like, maybe there should be a platform for these different things, or we should try and make this an actual product, or yeah, things like this.
JD (31:08.066) Well, I know our friend Thomas Milton has created this startup. It's now, I don't know, revenue like low tens of millions a year, but employs 30 to 50 people, maybe more now. The guy's in his mid to late 20s, right? I mean, and he started it just a couple of years ago. So it seems like more Amodo Designs are yet to be founded.
Grace (31:10.703) Yeah.
Grace (31:15.984) Yeah.
Grace (31:20.526) Yeah.
Grace (31:26.415) Yeah.
Yeah, Amodo Designs comes up probably once a week in my calls — not from me, from the other people in the calls. Yeah, Tom's a very good friend. But yeah, people — they work with the British government, they work with some of the names I've mentioned in this call. The gap from the research to the physical is obviously a huge part of biosecurity. Like a lot of the things we mentioned are tangible physical things that have to exist in the world. So
maybe this could be a for-profit situation to make it move faster.
JD (32:05.134) I don't know if I can — I'll share this. I remember meeting Tom when he was visiting in DC and he was meeting with a big funder in the biosecurity space. I think it was like a VC firm or philanthropy. And I was just driving him from place to place because he was visiting my city. And he looks at me, he goes, JD, I flew over here for one conversation.
Grace (32:10.586) Mm-hmm.
JD (32:28.09) And I fully expected the expected value of this conversation was a million dollars. There is funding in this space and there's a high probability of getting it if you have the right focuses and team. Like that was kind of a shocking conversation. It just made me think like this is
Grace (32:42.382) Yeah.
Grace (32:52.183) Yeah, I think so.
JD (32:56.332) this is a space where it's quite specialised, but there is funding and there is interest and opportunity for those who are agentic, who are willing to discern the needs and create something that solves them. So how would you think about working in biosecurity versus like a traditional public health or global health context? Because for me, I was always concerned about the lives of
Grace (33:08.144) Yeah.
JD (33:25.626) the health of people around the world and people losing their lives due to some preventable disease like malaria or whooping cough or what have you. And to me, the number that always comes up is, I can work any job and donate 10% of my money and over my career save dozens of lives from common neglected tropical diseases, right?
So when I was discerning whether I should pursue a biosecurity path, I always wondered, how would this compare to taking a normal job and giving 10% to Against Malaria Foundation and saving those dozens of lives versus how would it compare to going to work directly in the public health space? And that seems especially muddy because there is kind of crossover, like you mentioned, especially with some of the mitigation — like the same kinds of pandemic
vaccines that could treat a future disease pandemic might also work for a flu or a COVID or something. So help me get some clarity on discerning amongst multiple career paths, including normal earning-to-give paths or public health career paths.
Grace (34:44.462) Yeah, I debated all of these, to be honest. Global health was like my first love — why I became a doctor. Yeah, earning to give is like — I often find it interesting because people compare these as either or. Also, earning to give as a doctor is not the most effective path in the UK. People may have heard about many strikes, but when I first was working,
I think my starting salary was £26,000 when I was responsible for like 250 patients working in A&E.
JD (35:19.01) Wow. But you were a trainee doctor, right? It's like the first stage, but still, I mean, that's different than in the US.
Grace (35:25.966) Yeah, and also our first day, like fully responsible for patients — yeah, I managed 250 over a night shift alone. Yeah, so earning to give was not really on the cards in a high impact way for me for a long time. Whereas you can still earn normalish salaries in these types of impactful jobs. So I definitely donate more now than when I was a doctor.
JD (35:30.19) Mm.
Hmm.
Grace (35:54.64) Public health — I did debate doing that as like specialising as a public health doctor. I think within a healthcare system, public health is unlikely to have that high an impact. You're looking at things like — there are obviously some really big ones like tobacco taxation in the UK. I don't know how much low hanging fruit is left or how critical you would be to that change. If you want to look at counterfactual things —
I think public health in a high income country setting is not that impactful. In low or middle income countries, I think it falls differently. I think this is more likely to be more neglected in low and middle income countries, which is why you see certain charities emerging for things like lead elimination or
JD (36:36.108) Because it's just not as neglected, you're saying. Yeah.
Grace (36:52.592) tobacco taxation. I've seen tobacco taxation come and go over the few years I've been. My fiancé started tobacco taxation policy work in late 2019 and then suddenly in 2020, everyone in Asia didn't want to talk about tobacco anymore and they wanted to talk about COVID. So it didn't really become viable anymore. But I think global health is more of where I was really unsure
JD (37:22.058) about this because you obviously get more direct impact that's definitely going to do something, whereas still a lot of the pandemic prevention is a bit more of a gamble. I felt biosecurity was more neglected. I think I'd seen a lot of people working in global health and I think we'll always draw people because of this.
JD (37:44.354) and the kind of bleeding heart that wants to help dying children today, right?
Grace (37:46.156) Yeah, exactly. Yeah, whereas biosecurity felt more neglected. And obviously the world can neglect the poorer countries that need these interventions more. Luckily, from a political point of view, I personally think you should be looking at interventions in every country in the world and there should have been vaccines equally
distributed, etc., but pandemics that emerge from nature are often coming from poorer areas. So you have to get the interventions and the early warning systems in those places. So as well as an ethical drive, you have a practical drive to have these sorts of implementations everywhere because pandemics are a global issue in a way that some public health issues — it's easier to just stick to the population that
is politically cared about.
JD (38:47.714) Has it been helpful to be a doctor in your current work now and in other biosecurity work? Does it help to have those doctor credentials? That's maybe different than asking, should somebody who wants to work on biosecurity go to med school, right? Because that's a long journey.
Grace (39:03.01) Yeah, I think yes — this was also a big debate I had about whether I should stick it out to become qualified in infectious diseases and then I'll have more weight. I think in reality, from my friends who work in policy, if you've got the word doctor, this does a lot of the heavy lifting outside of medicine — they don't know the different levels. And then I think that ticks the main box. And then having worked clinically, especially during the pandemic, is another
helpful addition here. I do have this on-the-ground perspective that is helpful when talking about some of these implementations. Like I remember speaking to somebody who was working on tabletop metagenomic sequencers — one of the big tests for viruses at the moment is PCR. People probably remember getting PCRs during COVID, which is like, you look specifically for one bug and it tells you if that bug is there or not.
Whereas metagenomic sequencing tells you everything that's in there, more or less. And this idea that you could have something that was small enough to fit in every laboratory — and they said, yeah, because then you could, every time someone came in with a cough, figure out what it was very quickly. They were like, we want it to be as common as PCR. And I was like, yeah, that would be great. I work half an hour from Cambridge, you know, famous city for science.
It takes me three days to get a PCR. And they were like, oh — they just hadn't realised the realities. Or I'll talk about, you know, how an A&E works and where testing would be best and things like this. This comes up a bit. I think if I worked in practical policy, that would be especially useful. But I don't know how out of date I am now.
JD (40:56.174) So I want to talk more about the career advisories in this space. So there's High Impact Medicine, there's 80,000 Hours, which has long done career advising for biosecurity paths. Do they get generally the same advice or are there important differences? And then of course, Cambridge Biosecurity Hub, right?
Grace (41:03.952) Mm-hmm.
JD (41:16.174) So would you say those three career advisories give generally the same sort of advice or are there nuances of who should talk to whom? I mean, all of them sound like good places to go, but are there specific specialities among the three that you would name?
Grace (41:33.36) Yeah, I think in general, the type of advice or like bottom lines of the advice are probably going to be quite similar. I tend to just have like, rather than a formal advising, it's just me, and I tend to know more maybe about the nitty gritty or the particular fellowship or something like this and the others, which I do have a landing doc that's full of these things that will be on our website very soon, so that
people can find these things more easily. I think HiMed, CamBioHub — like all smushed together — but CamBioHub.org. But I think HiMed was very useful for me because I did their course that was like multiple weeks talking about your career. And as an external processor,
JD (42:03.862) And what's the URL for the website?
Grace (42:28.174) that was very helpful to me to have like come back to it time and time again. I think there's also a bit more of the understanding around the like weight of leaving a career like medicine, which is so wrapped up in your identity — it's easier when you're all from that same background. And also there was definitely a time within effective altruism and 80,000 Hours that tried to push people away from clinical medicine.
This was very trendy. I don't think it's as heavy-handed as when I was there, but I found that quite hard. So I liked being in HiMed where there were still some people that were clinical and balancing this with other things, or just trying to make their clinical work as impactful as possible.
JD (43:17.398) Yeah, yeah. And how did that look — the career advising you got? So HiMed had a course, 80,000 Hours has a one-off career call. Did HiMed also have one-off career calls? And do you do one-off career calls? What's your structure looking like?
Grace (43:34.382) Yeah, I do one-off career calls. I get referrals from HiMed. I get referrals from Christians for Impact. People stumble across me. Like I commented on a forum post recently about biosecurity field builders and I've probably had like five or six calls from that. Yeah, mine is quite unstructured. I think there are one-off calls with HiMed as well.
JD (44:05.656) So say I'm — I'm going to give you two scenarios. I want to get some of your high level advice that you would give me in a career advising session. So scenario one, I'm a medical student in the UK. I'm considering completing my medical studies and becoming a doctor or doing some version where I stop short and pursue a biosecurity career more directly.
What would you advise me? That's all you know about me. Maybe you have some follow-up questions so you can fill in some details. But what are some pathways that you would outline for me?
Grace (44:39.408) I've had this person in front of me. In general, depending on how far off they are from the end and how much they dislike medicine, I generally say finishing is better. I am a fairly risk-averse person. So I think having the completion — so that you could change your mind — is better, as well as having the title. There are lots of things like fellowships and part-time projects or internships
that help bolster your CV that you would probably need anyway, that you can do alongside studying. This is generally the advice I gave them — and especially to try fellowships in the things you — you know, try a policy one, try a more technical computational one, things like this, try projects in the different areas to see what's a good fit.
JD (45:33.238) And say I've just graduated, what are some of the top recommendations you would give for where to go, where to apply, what to do?
Grace (45:35.578) Yeah.
Grace (45:42.882) If you don't want to do medicine — okay. The big ones, the full-time things right now are the AI bio fellowship that I helped run with ERA. Applications aren't live actually for the summer one, which is 10 weeks long full time. You work on it, you're paired with some of the biggest organisations in biosecurity with mentors.
JD (45:44.555) Right, right.
Grace (46:12.236) And we just ran the first cohort of that with 15 people. And I think at least half are already working on direct biosecurity things, which is great. There are more part-time things emerging. There's not a full-time thing, but I think the career bolstering, the CV bolstering — write things, read things, try and do part-time.
JD (46:40.108) How much does the civil service Fast Stream make sense, and UK civil service make sense, for careers in biosecurity?
Grace (46:43.93) Music.
Grace (46:48.676) I know of this a bit. I'm not that confident, to be honest, on my view on this. I think it depends on what sort of biosecurity you want to go into. I do know some people that work within the AI Security Institute, specifically on the AI bio intersection, which seems to be much faster moving. But I'm not that sure. So I'd research more before.
JD (47:13.334) Yeah. And then there's all sorts of free courses about biosecurity. The one that comes to mind is the BlueDot Impact bio course — and they have one or two, I don't remember. And there are others as well, right? So could you share more about the best courses to take for someone interested in biosecurity?
Grace (47:25.902) It's always — they all sound the same.
Grace (47:52.228) Yeah, the biggest course definitely is BlueDot's. This is how I originally got excited about biosecurity. It's a very good overview. They put you in groups with really impressive people. They're heavily oversubscribed — I know their recent round was really competitive. But there are some other smaller ones that exist. I know that...
JD (48:16.696) So do people take these courses just to learn more or is it a professional credentialing thing? It does seem like if you have BlueDot on your CV when you apply to the in-the-know organisations, they see BlueDot and they know that you have the relevant kind of theory of change around this. That's been my sort of outside view of how this is working.
Grace (48:39.406) Yeah, I think because it's competitive, you end up having to be fairly committed if you get on. I do think it's such a CV bolster because there's so little else out there officially for biosecurity. I know that some different organisations, especially university groups, run intro groups. I know Wisconsin University has one. We run some a few times a year. I know that
JD (48:53.154) Mmm.
JD (49:08.086) Nice. You share more about yours as well.
Grace (49:09.112) The Oxford Biosecurity Group also has a call for people to run local ones, and they have a syllabus that's four weeks long. Mine has looked very different over the years. Our first one was just like the in-person version of BlueDot when BlueDot didn't run it for a few years. Then we ran one that was a series of speakers rather than a reading group. And the one we're running next term
is probably going to be a mixture of both because it's exam season, so I don't want to overwhelm people with reading. But my group tends to stick to in-person in Cambridge to try to build the community aspect. Some people do come from London for that, but I know that some of the groups run online.
BlueDot's is definitely one.
JD (49:59.577) Yeah.
So we have CamBioHub's course, we have BlueDot Impact course, there's some EA courses at universities, and I think the eight-week introductory fellowship that the Centre for Effective Altruism does online — they have a week or two where they discuss bio risks. And are there any others that come to mind?
Grace (50:10.64) Okay.
Grace (50:19.992) Yeah. And there's more project-based fellowships that are coming out of like effective altruist hubs where they run sort of cross-cause areas and you can do projects in a few. I know that London definitely runs this. I've heard of some in the US — the Cambridge in the US
has an AI group that are doing an AI bio fellowship as well over the summer. I know that St Andrews in the UK also does project-based fellowships. So I think biosecurity is starting to come into the more general fellowships as well. And there's definitely lots of introductory readings online — if you can't get into a fellowship, BlueDot does have their syllabus available to just view. So if you wanted to,
if you're more self-motivated than me, you could read it yourself.
JD (51:23.478) Yeah, nice, nice. Any other things people should read or explore if they're interested in learning more about the space, maybe giving towards it, using their career to tackle it?
Grace (51:36.854) Yeah, there are some good overviews of biosecurity. There's an 80,000 Hours page on preventing catastrophic pandemics. I'm looking at my doc that will be on our CamBioHub website for good overview things. What was the second part of your question?
JD (51:57.423) Just good resources. We did actually have Sir Andrew Pollard, who's the chief researcher, lead researcher for the Oxford COVID vaccine. And he spoke at our Christians for Impact conference back in 2024.
I don't know why he came because he's such a big deal, a wonderful person. Maybe it's because Christians for Impact is awesome. And we also promised him an opportunity to meet the Archbishop if he came. So he had a little handshake with Justin Welby. But it was really cool having Andrew in the room. And you can still — if you're a listener and you're interested — find that on YouTube, our conversation with Andrew that Adam Winfrey led in the fireside chat. And he kind of told the story of what it was like —
Grace (52:15.482) Yeah.
Grace (52:22.8) Mm.
Yeah.
Grace (52:33.092) Mm-hmm.
Good night.
JD (52:39.504) the months, the weeks, the days, the hours following the announcement of COVID and how they whipped into shape a COVID vaccine and the entire journey — it's just kind of riveting hearing in real time, hearing him talk about it, what it was like. But yeah, any others come to mind? Any other resources?
Grace (53:00.592) One that is really helpful, especially if you're trying to figure out the players in biosecurity, is biosecurity.world — that's the URL — and it's a huge Notion database and you could filter by think tank or by government agency or by individual. And I know a friend — I won't say
JD (53:14.231) Whoa.
JD (53:21.134) That's cool.
Grace (53:26.948) their name in case they don't want to — but they're making a visualisation of that at the moment. Like the AI one. Yeah, exactly.
JD (53:32.052) Nice. Like the AI world map with all the relevant AI governance and safety organisations, which is helpful. Yeah, that's very helpful.
Grace (53:40.911) Thanks.
Grace (53:49.584) Yeah, I find it a bit more stimulating than the huge Notion page, but it is useful, especially if you're trying to figure out whose newsletters you should follow or LinkedIn profiles to follow.
JD (54:03.725) Right.
JD (54:07.296) Right, right. And then how effective do you find the EA conferences — the effective altruism conferences — at networking among relevant persons, learning more about the biggest biosecurity risks, finding out about the jobs?
Grace (54:14.959) Yeah.
Grace (54:22.8) Really good. Especially since I've switched to a biosecurity role, I find them really helpful compared to when I was in more of an operational role. I still loved going, but I found it harder. Whereas I think you're definitely getting face to face with lots of people, asking different opinions, learning the — sorry, I have to walk around. Lights come on over here.
JD (54:46.732) No problem.
Grace (54:51.16) Is that going to distract me?
Grace (54:56.718) I thought that would happen. Yeah, I find EAGs really helpful, especially now that I'm in the more biosecurity space than when I went generally before. There are generally lots of people there from the orgs and at lots of different levels. So you might meet — maybe you don't want to book a one-on-one with Jeff Kaufman, who runs all the metagenomic things at what used to be the NAO —
but you see somebody else with SecureBio who just started and they're happy to talk to a new person. And you can figure out how they got into that job. Because I did a lot of that — asking the more junior people how they got to the job — to try and figure out what resources I can offer people. I think you're more likely to get really candid discussions about what's up and coming in biosecurity. Yeah, I really love it. And there's more and more people at the conferences, which I like. At one point you could
search for who had biosecurity and there were like five people. But yeah, I find them really, really useful. And there are often speed meetups as well.
JD (56:00.247) Yeah.
JD (56:08.44) Do you think biosecurity as a space is kind of like other highly sought-after EA spaces where for every job opening, there's like dozens or hundreds of applications? So realistically, most people that want a job in biosecurity now are not going to find one and they should upskill in some other area first.
Grace (56:24.432) Mm-hmm.
Grace (56:29.432) I think it's fairly competitive. This was one of the reasons why I think trying to map exactly what the gaps are is useful. But then, you know, we did this fellowship and half of them already have jobs. So there clearly are gaps. I think you will need to be competitive, which is why I think showing dedication and trying to upskill and learn more about biosecurity before is useful — and having
definitely something to offer. And I found this even with ops jobs — like having to muddle along and boost your CV for a bit, then suddenly the opportunities open, which is hard to hear and hard to figure out, especially when not that many opportunities to upskill exist. But that's why.
JD (57:20.526) Because you understand the frustration, right? It's like, here's a problem that's so important, right? So important it's worth dedicating your life to, even if it's not what you're extremely passionate about. And here I am, I'm ready to sacrifice my career for this cause and dedicate it, right? And I've applied to all the open biosecurity roles and I haven't gotten any acceptances. What should I do — despite my undergraduate major in biology or something, like what am I to do, right? I've read a forum post or two that went like that.
Grace (57:25.52) Yeah.
Yep.
JD (57:50.774) So do you have any words of comfort or encouragement or advice for someone in that kind of situation?
Grace (57:57.954) Yeah, I think —
one thing with the forum posts or when people say this is that maybe you do need to upskill, or the bar used to be lower to get in because the field was smaller, but as it grows, you have to be more talented to get in because they've filled the low hanging fruit. It was like some of my experience with ops especially, where any medic could pivot into ops a few years ago. But I think one thing to encourage people that I will —
JD (58:29.73) You mean biosecurity operations roles or, yeah.
Grace (58:31.96) Yeah, one thing I would say to encourage people is that the tide and what people are looking for also changes over time. And just because you didn't get in in one season doesn't mean you won't later. Like I applied for funding when I first transitioned out of medicine to support being out of work, trying to get into biosecurity, and it wasn't the right time — I didn't get it. But now I have.
And also we struggled for funding for certain things for the Cambridge Biosecurity Hub for a time. But now that we have more experience and the landscape's a bit different, we are able to get the funding that we need. So just because it was a no once doesn't mean it will always be a no. Like you don't know what the other applicants looked like or what the pool of people for the fellowship was like that time. I think trying to do things —
often the thing people say to me that they want the most is agentic or self-motivated people. So if you are writing the blog posts or clearly trying to get internships at organisations and reaching out, this is like a signal in and of itself that you're committed and passionate and have this motivation that a lot of people are looking for.
JD (59:45.283) Mm.
JD (59:54.091) So the most important qualities about someone who wants to enter the biosecurity space is caring a lot about the issue and having relevant knowledge and being able to show that on your CV through the courses, through the associations, through your degrees. But then being agentic, being able to chart your own course, make things happen, show initiative, and have examples of that.
Grace (01:00:09.999) Yep.
Yeah. Yeah. This agenticness — which I think is why you're seeing more startups as well — is that this is getting —
JD (01:00:20.152) Some of my friends joke with me that they only hear the word agentic from me and from EA circles — it's the only place where they hear it. I think, well, I don't know. I mean, startups say this too. But yeah, it seems like an important secret ingredient.
Grace (01:00:30.923) Sorry.
Grace (01:00:37.998) Yeah.
JD (01:00:39.51) Yeah, well, I want to close with just some questions about what it's been like for you and also from your faith perspective working in this space. First of all, for you — like you said, it took a while to get into the community builder role that you're in. Are you on a one or two year grant or what's that like? Yeah, and that's like a full-time grant plus some extra to cover events and other costs.
Grace (01:00:59.76) Thank you.
Grace (01:01:06.82) Yep.
JD (01:01:09.422) And has it been confusing or lonely being the only person in a full-time bio role? Or has it just been exciting — like you get to just chart the course. What's that like?
Grace (01:01:21.164) Yeah, a big mix. I think when the Cambridge Biosecurity Hub was the two of us, very part-time, my role was the make-it-happen role. And then my friend Sandy is like the big ideas guy. And then — I think it was actually the day after I decided to definitely leave medicine that we got the offer for a full-time person, which was very much God's timing.
I was like, yeah, so we can run a hiring round. And Sandy was like, this should just obviously be you. Why would this not be you? And I think there's some imposter syndrome — I'd never been in a strategy, me-being-the-only-person role. So that has been fairly challenging and I've been getting support for that. I think I have always said I would never want to work not in a team,
because I'm such an external processor, team person. And I'm technically alone now, but it definitely doesn't feel that way for like three big reasons. I have my Cambridge Biosecurity Hub working group, which is like 25 people-ish that come regularly — at least 10 people a week. Some people have been around longer than I have.
So they're like my committee, and I do have some money in my grant to hire them to run a specific event or facilitate a group. So I have them. I work within Meridian, which is like the effective altruism hub within Cambridge, which has a few groups — like Cambridge AI Safety Hub or EA Cambridge work out of here. So we have weekly meetings and I have someone that handles all the business ops side of CamBioHub, which is great, because that was my least favourite part of when I did that job
before — I worked for just Meridian before, doing ops, and that's a great support system. And then the biosecurity community more broadly has been incredibly friendly and supportive. Like big names that I have met at a conference are happy to look over my strategy doc or get on a call to advise me about something. So it doesn't feel very lonely.
Grace (01:03:40.644) But yeah, some challenges, but in general, it is really exciting to just be pretty sure this is the most impactful thing I could be doing with my time, which I've been interested in effective altruism since I think summer of 2018. And then I was a med student and then a doctor, and I always felt like I could be doing more. So it is really fulfilling to be like, no, I do think this is the best thing I could be doing.
JD (01:04:06.924) Well done, yeah, that's so exciting. I'm happy about that. And you've recently started attending a Quaker church, right? How has that been? I don't think you grew up Quaker, but how has that been for your faith and also how you think about your impact in your career? Feel free to answer that any way you'd like.
Grace (01:04:28.878) Yeah, yeah, I grew up very evangelical and charismatic. Church and my faith have always been very important. I struggled more and more with the institutional problems in church. That's a whole conversation, but I think people can probably guess. But I —
JD (01:04:48.696) Can I interject here? Oh my gosh, I was at a meeting with this committee on science from the Church of England where they were talking about how can we use science to improve human welfare. And it was a room full of bishops and doctors who were interested in promoting human welfare and wellbeing through science. And like,
it was all about talking about science and nobody was interested at all in public health, in biosecurity interventions, in vaccines, in funding vaccines. I mean, maybe individually people were, but I raised it in the circle — they invited me, long story — but I brought it up and nobody seemed to be interested in this kind of thing. Like they were describing exactly the kind of thing like what you're doing, or like providing vaccines for diseases that are killing people now in our global
Anglican Communion, talking about how important science is and how important human welfare is, but couldn't connect the dots that people like you, or people like those working in biosecurity or giving to GiveWell, are actually making a difference on the ground. So I just left the room quite frustrated and confused.
Grace (01:06:01.742) Yeah. And especially talking about science — I sometimes get frustrated when Christians think the only way God heals is through miracles. And I'm like, have you seen science? This is a very miraculous thing. But I've never heard what you're describing, where they're happily talking about science but are disconnected. That's so odd. Yeah.
JD (01:06:26.55) Like people like Andrew Pollard — I think they should be considered heroes of the church, right? Actually, this is crazy. So I invited Sir Andrew Pollard to speak at our conference with the Archbishop, right? And I told him, hey, it's a Christian conference. We want you to talk about vaccines. And his immediate reaction was one of nervousness, of anxiety, because he's being called by a group of Christians to talk about vaccines. In his context, when he hears Christians and vaccines, he understands
Grace (01:06:32.206) No.
JD (01:06:56.524) hostility, right? He thinks this is like not a safe space to work or to talk. And so I had to be like, no, we are pro-vaccine, we are for science that improves welfare and uses God's instruments in order to improve people made in God's image. And for him, it was such a relief. But the fact that someone like him doesn't even know
Grace (01:07:06.48) Yeah.
Grace (01:07:16.89) Yeah.
JD (01:07:22.348) from a gut reaction if he's welcome in a Christian space is a huge failure of the church. Like why isn't the church known for being the innovators and for leading the vanguard of scientific developments that improve welfare and heal the sick? We talk about it every Sunday, right? And yet it's right in front of us and so many of us aren't prioritising it. So it frustrates me as well. Yeah.
Grace (01:07:32.432) Yeah.
Grace (01:07:48.186) Yeah. Yeah, I think that's the story I've shared with you before that was really helpful for me in terms of effective altruism, but even this long-term thinking and planning — in the story of Joseph, the bit that people always talk about is him interpreting the dreams and the very spiritual side of it, which I also identify with as a fairly prophetic person personally.
But the bit that actually saves Egypt is the storing of the grain, taking rations — really boring maths and science and long-term planning. But that is the bit that actually saves all those people. And God is moving there as much as he was in the dreams, but people won't see it as spiritual, maybe because it's less dramatic. But yeah, I think God moves in many ways.
JD (01:08:43.894) Yeah, it reminds me of the story of Queen Esther, right, who works providentially to rescue the people of Israel from genocide. And yet God isn't mentioned at all in the story. I love the Bible Project's telling of Queen Esther's story. It's so clear that she saved the nation. Her uncle says of her, who knows but that you were born for such a time as this, right? And it's sort of outlining that this is providential — that God placed you at this time, in this place to save the people of Israel. And yet we don't mention God's name, but we all know that's what's happening, right? Like we all know that God has given you this opportunity and you don't need a dream or a prophecy to see clearly that that's what God has done and that that's what you can do.
Grace (01:09:30.031) Yeah.
JD (01:09:36.142) And I feel like a similar thing can be said for folks like yourself working in biosecurity today. Born for such a time as this — don't need supernatural writing on the wall or some dream in the night. Although that would be wonderful and I love it when that happens. Even just working in this space, it can be like a new story of Joseph or like Queen Esther.
JD (01:10:00.536) But did you have — I mean, have you ever had any moments where you felt like God was speaking to you about your career or about biosecurity? Okay, if not, I don't think God speaks to everyone this way. But if that's the case, this might be the only place it's ever been talked about, yeah.
Grace (01:10:19.032) Yeah. God definitely talks to me in quite a — I get very visual representations. I have a very rich mind and I often meet God in visual spaces that evolve in my mind. Yeah. And I had a lot of that actually in career decision-making where I would be sitting in a garden, looking at trees and —
things like leaving medicine was a big deal for me emotionally. And God would talk about how this tree of doing good is core to my personality, core to my values. But medicine is a big branch of this, which at one point had lots of leaves. But if I leave medicine, the branch doesn't get cut off — it just doesn't grow as many leaves anymore. And actually the leaves were completely shading the ground in
my forest and I was unable to grow some of the flowers of other things in my life that I love, that I had no time for in this crazy medical world. Yeah, things like this. And then moments like deciding to leave and then getting the opportunity the next day — that's like a nice confirmation or a wink from God. And I rely a lot on
JD (01:11:26.574) So it's better that the branch didn't grow too long. Yeah, yeah.
Grace (01:11:45.614) a feeling of peace in hard decisions, like that it feels right. Because I get that a lot from God, I think. I was very uneasy for a long time, but yeah. No vision about a pandemic specifically. Maybe it wouldn't be the nicest dream, which is why he's not done it.
JD (01:12:08.3) Yes. Any closing thoughts or advice or encouragement you'd like to give as we wrap up?
Grace (01:12:19.662) Yeah, I think biosecurity for me has been a really exciting way — if you're worried about existential risks and these really long-term things, but you do still want that short-term win and to know that you'll make tangible changes in your world. And I love that people are driven from this place of wanting to help people
and scientific curiosity. There are also these huge unanswered questions in the science around pandemic preparedness as well, which people really like. And the fact it's multidisciplinary and people are from all these backgrounds means that it's really broad and that lots of different people can be involved in a way that maybe more narrow fields don't allow. And I think this adds a lot to my career and experience as well as helping the
causes.
JD (01:13:21.134) Nice, great. And here's one final question, although I'll probably cut this out if it doesn't fit neatly in the earlier section. I'm kind of curious just personally — if you have an impression of why Jesus didn't tell us more about like germ theory of disease and that we should wash our hands — is it because Jesus didn't know this? And maybe, you know, Jesus in the sense that he's God, but whatever
Grace (01:13:36.367) Yeah.
Grace (01:13:41.381) Yeah.
JD (01:13:48.11) knowledge he had as a human being — fully human — he didn't know something like this and so he wouldn't pass it on. It seems like pretty relevant knowledge that would have saved the lives of millions of children, right?
Grace (01:13:58.672) Yeah, I hadn't thought about this until you asked it, but I had never thought about whether Jesus knew everything. I think I'd always thought of him as a bit more human because otherwise — did he always know how to walk, and then was holding it back until he reached one? Or do they get unlocked at the different stages? That's all confusing to me. But I think —
JD (01:14:18.446) Yeah.
Grace (01:14:27.712) to me, the reason why that wouldn't happen is that he is obviously very socially different in his community in a lot of ways, but he is palatable and understandable to the community he is in. Germ theory isn't talked about until I think like the mid-1800s. So it would have just been completely insane for him to know this or for people to
understand this. Like he wasn't teaching them how to grow penicillin on some mouldy bread. I think because hand washing is seen as very unscientific — this is why it makes more sense that he maybe would have brought it up, but they wouldn't have understood. Like germs are very easy for us to understand, but that would have been —
JD (01:15:14.904) But you can imagine like with communion, for instance, which did pass on, right? Like his meal that he gave and he said, do this in remembrance of me, right? You can imagine him saying, wash your hands and then break the bread, right? And do this every time you eat, right? That would have been wonderful, right?
Grace (01:15:18.5) Yeah.
Grace (01:15:22.468) Yeah.
Grace (01:15:32.208) You just don't believe it.
Grace (01:15:37.562) Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I don't really know. I guess it's this —
JD (01:15:41.519) So I often think it's just that he didn't have this knowledge. Like, because if he had this knowledge, it's hard to imagine why he would withhold it. But then this goes back to the problem of evil — why God allows evil things to happen when God could have prevented it. And I think
that's just one layer removed from why Jesus didn't. But I like to think that Jesus as a man, who is God but is man, has certain limitations — didn't have quantum mechanics running through his childhood brain. That would be kind of strange.
Grace (01:16:11.599) Yeah.
Grace (01:16:16.748) Yeah, yeah, I assume it's probably closer to that. Otherwise, maybe he would have just been washing his hands because he didn't want to die before his time or something.
JD (01:16:24.366) Yeah, yeah, well, yeah. Well, good. So —
Cambridge Biosecurity Hub — we will drop a link in the description. If you listener are interested in getting one-on-one career advice for a career in biosecurity, then please apply to Cambridge Biosecurity Hub or apply through Christians for Impact. We do one-on-one advising for free. And we would love to give you advice if we can. If you're seriously concerned about this issue and if it makes sense, we can connect you with someone like Grace.
Grace, thank you so much for coming on.
Grace (01:17:10.106) Thanks for having me, JD.
