Let's make nice things with biology. Working on biosecurity at iGEM. Also into lab automation, event production, donating to global health. From Toronto, lived in Paris, currently in the SF Bay. Website: tessa.fyi
Happy to pitch in with a few stories of rejection!
2010: I applied for MIT and Princeton for undergraduate studies and wasn't accepted to either. Not trying harder to get into those schools was a major regret of mine for about 5 years (I barely studied for the SATs, in part because I was the only person I knew who took them... it's uncommon for Canadians to attend university in the states). I later ended up working on teams with people who had gone to fancy US schools, such that I no longer believe this had a clearly negative impact on my trajectory.
2018: Rejected for LTFF funding for the biosecurity conference that eventually became Catalyst. We re-applied in a subsequent round and were funded.
2018: I applied to be a Research Analyst at Open Phil in their big 2018 recruitment round, and got through two rounds of work tests before ultimately being rejected after an interview. The interview really didn't go well; I felt like a total idiot, and didn't get the job. This was maybe the most rough rejection; I felt like I wasted basically all of my non-work time for a month on work tests, at a time when I was feeling pretty bad about how effectively I was spending my time.
2018: rejected from the SynBioBeta conference fellowship run by Johns Hopkins, which at the time felt like it could have been an entry point into a biosecurity career transition. Definitely had some angst about whether it was even possible to make such a transition.
2019: I was rejected from a really cool engineering role at Culture Biosciences after a phone screen interview. I got so distressed after this ("I'm not technical enough for a real hardware-y engineering job any more! augh!!") that I did some electronics projects that I really didn't have time for, largely out of angst. They later reached out to me again when they had a role closer to my (more software-specialzied) skillset, and I completed a full round of interviews and received an offer, though I ultimately decided not to leave my job in order to have more time to focus on my part-time biosecurity projects.
These were all pretty painful for me at the time... and I'm realizing I've since come up with stories where the rejections were okay, or part of a fine trajectory. I guess one message here is "just because you were rejected once doesn't mean you will be if you apply again"?
Maybe there’s a huge illusion in EA of “someone else has probably worked out these big assumptions we are making”. This goes all the way up to the person at Open Phil thinking “Holden has probably worked these out” but actually no one has.
I just wanted to highlight this in particular; I have heard people at Open Phil say things along the lines of "... but we could be completely wrong about this!" about large strategic questions. A few examples related to my work:
Is it net positive to have a dedicated community of EAs working on reducing GCBRs, or would it be better for people to be more fully integrated into the broader biosecurity field?
If we want to have this community, should we try to increase its size? How quickly?
Is it good to emphasize concerns about dual-use and information hazards when people are getting started in biosecurity, or does that end up either stymieing them (or worse, inspiring them to produce more harmful ideas)?
These are big questions, and I have spent dozens (though not hundreds) of hours thinking about them... which has led to me feeling like I have "working hypotheses" in response to each. A working hypothesis is not a robust, confident answer based on well-worked-out assumptions. I could be wrong, but I suspect this is also true in many other areas of community building and cause prioritisation, even "all the way up".
I recall meeting Karolina M. Sulich, the VP of Osmocosm, at EAGxBerlin last year, and thought some of her machine olfaction x biosecurity ideas were really cool! I'd be stoked for more people to look into this.
This is great! I think that project-based learning is simply a way more effective way to learn about a cause area than going through a reading list (I know you've written about this before). Cold Takes has quite a lotof writing about how just reading stuff is probably not the best way to form a view and robustly retain things.
It's also super generous of you to offer to review people's fit-test projects :)
Another poem about loss that moves me, this one specifically about grieving a dear friend:
It's what others do, not us, die, even the closest
on a vainglorious, glorious morning, as the song goes,
the yellow or golden palms glorious and all the rest
a sparkling splendour, die. They're practising calypsos,
they're putting up and pulling down tents, vendors are slicing
the heads of coconuts around the Savannah, men
are leaning on, then leaping into pirogues, a moon will be rising
tonight in the same place over Morne Coco, then
the full grief will hit me and my heart will toss
like a horse's head or a threshing bamboo grove
that even you could be part of the increasing loss
that is the daily dial of the revolving shade. Love
lies underneath it all though, the more surprising
the death, the deeper the love, the tougher the life.
The pain is over, feathers close your eyelids, Oliver.
What a happy friend and what a fine wife!
Your death is like our friendship beginning over.
My favourite cookbook right now is The Korean Vegan. Magical, delicious flavour combinations. The bulgogi blew my mind. The cookbook also sets you up to have a fridge full of sauces and banchan to dress up any weekday rice + protein combination into a delicious meal.
This West-African-inspired peanut soup from Cookie and Kate is what I pull out whenever I want to make something impressively delicious, but also fast and low-effort.
I found I Can Cook Vegan by Isa Chanda Moskovitz to be somewhat hit and miss, but the hits (buffalo cauliflower salad, sloppy shiitakes, chickpea tuna melt, maple-mustard brussel sprouts) were really solid. I recommend this over her earlier cookbooks; she has really reined in her desire to have 30-ingredient recipes that take over an hour to prepare.
The Moosewood Cookbook is a classic for a reason, but you gotta get a version released either before or after the 1990s low-fat fad. We like oil and salt! We like calories! Put the fat in!!
This was a beautiful remembering, thank you for sharing it. Often how I want to grieve people is just to remember them in detail, saying: they were here, not like anyone else, but specifically this is the way they were; I remember, and I wish they were still in the world. This post felt like that sort of grief.
This is my favourite poem about grief, which I often return to when grieving the people I've lost (most especially my partner Zach):
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Thanks for this post! I agree with your point about being careful on terms, and thought it might be useful to collect a few definitions together in a comment.
DURC (Dual-Use Research of Concern)
DURC is defined differently by different organizations. The WHO defines it as:
research that is intended to provide a clear benefit, but which could easily be misapplied to do harm
life sciences research that, based on current understanding, can be reasonably anticipated to provide knowledge, information, products, or technologies that could be directly misapplied to pose a significant threat with broad potential consequences to public health and safety, agricultural crops and other plants, animals, the environment, materiel, or national security
ePPP (enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogen)
ePPP is a term (in my experience) mostly relevant to the US regulatory context, and was set out in the 2017 HHS P3CO Framework as follows:
A potential pandemic pathogen (PPP) is a pathogen that satisfies both of the following:
It is likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations; and
It is likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans.
An enhanced PPP is defined as a PPP resulting from the enhancement of the transmissibility
and/or virulence of a pathogen. Enhanced PPPs do not include naturally occurring pathogens
that are circulating in or have been recovered from nature, regardless of their pandemic
potential.
One way in which this definition has been criticized (quoting the recent NSABB report on updating the US biosecurity oversight framework) is that "research involving the enhancement of pathogens that do not meet the PPP definition (e.g., those with low or moderate virulence) but is anticipated to result in the creation of a pathogen with the characteristics described by the PPP definition could be overlooked."
GOF (Gain-of-Function)
GOF is not a term that I know to have a clear definition. In the linked Virology under the microscope paper, examples range from making Arabidopsis (a small flowering model plant) more drought-resistant to making H5N1 (avian influenza) transmissible between mammals. I suggest avoiding this term if you can. (The paper acknowledges the term is fuzzily defined, citing The shifting sands of ‘gain-of-function’ research.)
Biosafety, biosecurity, biorisk
The definitions you gave in the footnote seem solid, and similar to the ones I'd offer, though one runs into competing definitions (e.g. the definition provided for biosafety doesn't mention unintentional exposure). I will note that EA tends to treat "biosecurity" as an umbrella term for "reducing biological risk" in a way that doesn't reflect its usage in the biosecurity or public health communities. Also, as far as I can tell, Australia means a completely different thing by "biosecurity" than the rest of the English-speaking world, which will sometimes lead to confusing Google results.
Just echoing the experience of "it's been a pretty humbling experience to read more of the literature"; biosecurity policy has a long history of good ideas and nuanced discussions. On US gain-of-function policy in particular, I found myself particularly humbled by the 2015 article Gain-of-function experiments: time for a real debate, an adversarial collaboration between researchers involved in controversial viral gain-of-function work and biosecurity professionals who had argued such work should face more scrutiny. It's interesting to see where the contours of the debate have changed and how much they haven't changed in the past 7+ years.
Happy to pitch in with a few stories of rejection!
These were all pretty painful for me at the time... and I'm realizing I've since come up with stories where the rejections were okay, or part of a fine trajectory. I guess one message here is "just because you were rejected once doesn't mean you will be if you apply again"?
I just wanted to highlight this in particular; I have heard people at Open Phil say things along the lines of "... but we could be completely wrong about this!" about large strategic questions. A few examples related to my work:
These are big questions, and I have spent dozens (though not hundreds) of hours thinking about them... which has led to me feeling like I have "working hypotheses" in response to each. A working hypothesis is not a robust, confident answer based on well-worked-out assumptions. I could be wrong, but I suspect this is also true in many other areas of community building and cause prioritisation, even "all the way up".
I recall meeting Karolina M. Sulich, the VP of Osmocosm, at EAGxBerlin last year, and thought some of her machine olfaction x biosecurity ideas were really cool! I'd be stoked for more people to look into this.
A few more you might share:
This is great! I think that project-based learning is simply a way more effective way to learn about a cause area than going through a reading list (I know you've written about this before). Cold Takes has quite a lot of writing about how just reading stuff is probably not the best way to form a view and robustly retain things.
It's also super generous of you to offer to review people's fit-test projects :)
Another poem about loss that moves me, this one specifically about grieving a dear friend:
It's what others do, not us, die, even the closest
on a vainglorious, glorious morning, as the song goes,
the yellow or golden palms glorious and all the rest
a sparkling splendour, die. They're practising calypsos,
they're putting up and pulling down tents, vendors are slicing
the heads of coconuts around the Savannah, men
are leaning on, then leaping into pirogues, a moon will be rising
tonight in the same place over Morne Coco, then
the full grief will hit me and my heart will toss
like a horse's head or a threshing bamboo grove
that even you could be part of the increasing loss
that is the daily dial of the revolving shade. Love
lies underneath it all though, the more surprising
the death, the deeper the love, the tougher the life.
The pain is over, feathers close your eyelids, Oliver.
What a happy friend and what a fine wife!
Your death is like our friendship beginning over.
― for Oliver Jackman, Derek Walcott
My favourite cookbook right now is The Korean Vegan. Magical, delicious flavour combinations. The bulgogi blew my mind. The cookbook also sets you up to have a fridge full of sauces and banchan to dress up any weekday rice + protein combination into a delicious meal.
This West-African-inspired peanut soup from Cookie and Kate is what I pull out whenever I want to make something impressively delicious, but also fast and low-effort.
I found I Can Cook Vegan by Isa Chanda Moskovitz to be somewhat hit and miss, but the hits (buffalo cauliflower salad, sloppy shiitakes, chickpea tuna melt, maple-mustard brussel sprouts) were really solid. I recommend this over her earlier cookbooks; she has really reined in her desire to have 30-ingredient recipes that take over an hour to prepare.
The Moosewood Cookbook is a classic for a reason, but you gotta get a version released either before or after the 1990s low-fat fad. We like oil and salt! We like calories! Put the fat in!!
This was a beautiful remembering, thank you for sharing it. Often how I want to grieve people is just to remember them in detail, saying: they were here, not like anyone else, but specifically this is the way they were; I remember, and I wish they were still in the world. This post felt like that sort of grief.
This is my favourite poem about grief, which I often return to when grieving the people I've lost (most especially my partner Zach):
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
― Dirge Without Music , Edna St. Vincent Millay
Thanks for this post! I agree with your point about being careful on terms, and thought it might be useful to collect a few definitions together in a comment.
DURC (Dual-Use Research of Concern)
DURC is defined differently by different organizations. The WHO defines it as:
while the definition given in the 2012 US government DURC policy is:
ePPP (enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogen)
ePPP is a term (in my experience) mostly relevant to the US regulatory context, and was set out in the 2017 HHS P3CO Framework as follows:
One way in which this definition has been criticized (quoting the recent NSABB report on updating the US biosecurity oversight framework) is that "research involving the enhancement of pathogens that do not meet the PPP definition (e.g., those with low or moderate virulence) but is anticipated to result in the creation of a pathogen with the characteristics described by the PPP definition could be overlooked."
GOF (Gain-of-Function)
GOF is not a term that I know to have a clear definition. In the linked Virology under the microscope paper, examples range from making Arabidopsis (a small flowering model plant) more drought-resistant to making H5N1 (avian influenza) transmissible between mammals. I suggest avoiding this term if you can. (The paper acknowledges the term is fuzzily defined, citing The shifting sands of ‘gain-of-function’ research.)
Biosafety, biosecurity, biorisk
The definitions you gave in the footnote seem solid, and similar to the ones I'd offer, though one runs into competing definitions (e.g. the definition provided for biosafety doesn't mention unintentional exposure). I will note that EA tends to treat "biosecurity" as an umbrella term for "reducing biological risk" in a way that doesn't reflect its usage in the biosecurity or public health communities. Also, as far as I can tell, Australia means a completely different thing by "biosecurity" than the rest of the English-speaking world, which will sometimes lead to confusing Google results.
Just echoing the experience of "it's been a pretty humbling experience to read more of the literature"; biosecurity policy has a long history of good ideas and nuanced discussions. On US gain-of-function policy in particular, I found myself particularly humbled by the 2015 article Gain-of-function experiments: time for a real debate, an adversarial collaboration between researchers involved in controversial viral gain-of-function work and biosecurity professionals who had argued such work should face more scrutiny. It's interesting to see where the contours of the debate have changed and how much they haven't changed in the past 7+ years.