Dr. Bryce Nickels is a professor of genetics at Rutgers University and the co-founder of Biosafety Now, an organization that aims to reduce the public threat of lab-generated pandemics.

In this episode, we discuss the Risky Research Review Act—legislation that, if passed, would establish an independent review board to assess whether the benefits of gain-of-function research outweigh the risks and determine whether that research should be done in the first place.

Nickels says: “What's astonishing is that the pandemic broke out four and a half years ago, and there's been no nothing, literally no change in the regulatory landscape for this type of extremely high risk research, and so that's just negligent. So finally, this bill is a is a massive step forward, because it will do something that's never been done before, which should be supported by everybody, simply just to say, if I'm doing something that could cause massive harm, maybe that should be looked at by somebody other than me to make the decision about whether I should proceed.”