Husband, Father. Working on #bioeconomy & #biosecurity policy.
Joined April 2011
- Tweets34.5K
- Following3.1K
- Followers3K
- Likes58.6K
Matt Watson retweeted
We are partnering with @FireworksAI_HQ to add BioBench, our suite of evaluations on benchmarks.bio, to Fireworks’ Specialized Intelligence Index (SII).
BioBench is the largest benchmark for agentic capability and safeguards in biology, consisting of 1,337 tasks covering domains that span many facets of life science. Tasks mimic complex workflows, taking 50+ turns and running for up to 10 hours
Includes coverage of:
- Omics (including single-cell and spatial transcriptomics, epigenetics, genetic variant analysis, metagenomics, and biosafety surveillance)
- Therapeutics (testing preclinical pharmacology and discovery of ASOs, siRNAs, and antibodies)
- Applications (assessing clinically relevant application tasks based on private experimental data, patient cohorts, or individual patient cases, focusing primarily on oncology-based tasks)
- Refusal (grades the model’s/safeguard’s ability to refuse disguised biology red-team tasks while complying with routine research tasks that have dual-use characteristics)
Focused treatment of molecular assays is very important in biology. We include several of the most widely used kits, instruments, and providers. Some of these technologies include, but are not limited to:
- scRNA-seq: 10x Chromium Single Cell, Parse Evercode WT, Mission Bio Tapestri
- Spatial: AtlasXomics DBiT-seq, 10x Visium and Xenium In Situ, Vizgen MERSCOPE, Curio Seeker
- WGS: Illumina TruSeq, PacBio SMRTbell, Oxford Nanopore Sequencing
Stoked to partner with Fireworks. High quality evaluation is one of the core components of the new intelligence ecosystem.
fireworks.ai/specialized-int…
Matt Watson retweeted
I am hiring a Student Researcher at the SynthID team at @GoogleDeepMind in London. We work on provenance across all modalities: text, images, audio, video and bio sequences, deploy on every single GenAI surface at Google and with partners like OpenAI, Apple and NVIDIA.
Matt Watson retweeted
In #UNGA81 #FirstCommittee, #bioweapons took centre stage last wk. States pressed for progress on strengthening #1972BWC but divisions persist over verification & compliance. Our latest briefing examines what’s at stake ahead of December’s negotiations. tinyurl.com/yhfts4et
Matt Watson retweeted
New @FDA guidance on how a BLA can incorporate personal gene editors. This is a major step towards making editing-on-demand appealing to the for-profit sector. The academic/nonprofit sector will still have to do all the initial work ofc. And we are doing it. Right now.
Matt Watson retweeted
Bavarian Nordic will donate vaccines for a global mpox emergency stockpile to strengthen preparedness against the viral disease, the Danish vaccine maker said in a statement on Tuesday. reut.rs/4ikbNpV
Matt Watson retweeted
.@NSF is hiring the inaugural Head of its Office of Metascience to apply the scientific method to how we fund, organize, and evaluate research. Continuous improvement will accelerate discovery.
If you care about the science of science, apply:
nsf.gov/careers/openings/od/…
Matt Watson retweeted
Japan plans to introduce rules for DNA synthesis companies to prevent AI-assisted creation of dangerous viruses and bacteria. The government aims to develop safety guidelines by January 2027, balancing biotechnology innovation with biosecurity.
mainichi.jp/english/articles…
Matt Watson retweeted
I’m building a team in DC. Everyone in Washington has a stake in ensuring that reliable info about alignment and RSI reaches the public.
We need trustworthy communicators who can explain METR's loss-of-control risk assessments and goals to policymakers.
Matt Watson retweeted
Bad day for securing Bio AI with managed access or pretraining data filters. @AISecurityInst found:
1. Agents can reproduce bio-AI tools on 1 GPU for <$20 with just abstracts and public data
2. Fine-tuning can restore full capability to ESM-2 trained w/o viral proteins for <$80
Matt Watson retweeted
But this method wasn't durable: fine-tuning on publicly available viral data fully restored the capability with under ~$80 of compute, even for the largest model.
Read the blog: aisi.gov.uk/blog/pretraining…
Matt Watson retweeted
followup from my post from yesterday, Martha Nelson's lab has done an analysis of the mink H5N1 virus sequences. The closest sequences appear to be from Texas dairy cows from early in 2026 but how those viruses got to Utah mink farms is a mystery: virological.org/t/preliminar…
Matt Watson retweeted
Applications are open for the @gatesfoundation's next Director, Integrated Development (IDev), a senior leadership role that guides global health product development from late discovery through registration.
To learn more and apply: gatesfoundation.wd1.myworkda…
Matt Watson retweeted
“In a better-prepared world, vaccines against known threats would be developed in advance and held ready for outbreaks, he said. ‘We’re not there yet.’”
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Matt Watson retweeted
1586. England is a rogue state, ruled by an illegitimate religious dissident who has imprisoned the rightful Catholic queen, from the perspective of Catholic Europe. These powerful forces seek regime change---both by force, and through covert action.
A battle of spies plays out in the shadows. Double agents and code breakers abound.
It's easy to think, now, that Elizabeth's long reign was a foregone conclusion. But in fact, England was on a razor's edge for decades, with the protestant elite rightly terrified that she could be removed at any moment and replaced by a hostile Catholic monarch who would hunt them down and destroy them.
This desperate fear animated everything, including their vigorous counter-espionage efforts. Was there really a plot to kill Elizabeth and replace her? Or, in their paranoia, did Elizabeth's forces entrap her Catholic antagonists, exaggerating their efforts in the same way that counter-terrorism efforts sometimes go awry?
This is the brilliant account that comes from Stephen Alford's THE WATCHERS, one of the best pieces of non-fiction I've read this year. It pairs extremely nicely with @TheRestHistory 's recent series on this topic (which is where I got the book recc).
Can't recommend it strongly enough!
Matt Watson retweeted
The United States has halted funding for finding and destroying chemical weapons. @gregkoblentz explains what’s at risk if the OPCW can’t do their work. lawfaremedia.org/article/che…
Matt Watson retweeted
People who lived 5500 years ago on the shores of Siberia’s Lake Baikal survived by hunting deer and game and catching fish. At times, marmots were on the menu, too—a decision with deadly consequences.
Learn more: scim.ag/4sdUV9f
ALT The earliest plague epidemics may have been caused by marmots
Matt Watson retweeted
1/ Congratulations to @inrb_kinshasa @PlacideMbala @NeuroLuebbert on their phylodynamic analysis of the Bundibugyo outbreak in DRC, run with @claudeai
Science & Delphy, our fast Bayesian phylogenetics tool developed by @sabeti_lab @fathominfo and our Sentinel team. African scientists leading important analyses in near-real time is the future. 💙🇨🇩
Matt Watson retweeted
Everyone is talking about AI bio threats in humans. What they should ALSO be talking about is biothreats in crops and livestock.
In a new letter in @ScienceMagazine, @JonxFeldman, @PardisSabeti, and I argue that agriculture deserves a large place in biosecurity conversations.
Why agriculture? Well, our screening mechanisms don't focus on these pathogens. They are also easier to experiment with, since many don't pose risks to the humans handling them. And there's lots of data about them and host defenses.
As Congress weighs the Biosecurity Modernization and Innovation Act, we're calling for:
- DNA synthesis screening that covers agricultural pathogens
- AI evaluations that explicitly test for agricultural misuse
- Early-warning disease monitoring for agriculture, not just for people
Read it here science.org/eprint/6ARDVAUJY…
Matt Watson retweeted
The UK announced $134 million for a AI Biosecurity Lab to be supported by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, part of a raft of measures designed to improve the government’s ability to understand and tackle risks posed by the technology bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
