James Phillips

In the summer of 2020, while the country was between ‘waves’ of Covid, Dominic Cummings convened a meeting at my urging in Downing Street on pandemic biosecurity. Around the table sat the types of people you would want: scientists, key national security figures and officials. They explained that the thing Cummings was worried about, namely an engineered pathogen, obtained or built cheaply by a small group or even one person, was essentially science fiction. ‘You can’t beat Darwin,’ we were told. At the end, Cummings turned to me and asked what I thought. I said that much of what had just been declared impossible I had personally seen done in a laboratory five years earlier. Such work was, and is, openly published.