The primary bottleneck preventing Far-UVC deployment is public awareness, not regulatory barriers, cost, or missing research—the technology is commercially available now but almost nobody has heard of 222nm UVC.
Both speakers emphasize that the main barrier to deployment is awareness rather than technology, regulation, or cost. Most people have never heard of UV disinfection, and among those who have, 222nm Far-UVC is virtually unknown. The technology is commercially available and ready for mass deployment. ✦ AI generated
Misha Gervich · The Cognitive Revolution · 2026-08-16 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 44:05
“if there were hypothetically a well-resourced capitalist listening to this and thinking, okay, but where do I spend the first million dollars”
there's not any insurmountable technical difficulties. There's not any insurmountable logistical difficulties to deploying it... This is something that's like pretty much ready to be deployed... I think information is the main bottleneck... There's just so little knowledge about this as a technology. Most people you meet to begin with, most people have never even heard of UV for disinfection. But like even among people who have heard of UV for disinfection, almost no one has heard of 222. This is just such a— the pitch is really easy. It's a cool science fiction technology where you're using special wavelengths to decrease the risk of getting sick. Everyone is eager once they know about it, but almost nobody knows about it.
verbatim transcript · starts at 44:05
44:05curve. I think worldwide maybe a couple thousand of these lamps are are sold uh every No, I don't think it's even that high. It might be as low as just a couple of hundred a year worldwide. And um I I I don't even have a great sense for whether this is going up, but I think essentially it's a matter of like does this idea go viral har you know if this if it takes off if
44:36it kind of becomes like a hey this is a thing you can and should do and then I think you know we can maybe look at the speed of deployment of LED lighting as a case. I mean, we're still looking at at least a decade like after it really takes off to get to get truly wide deployment, but you know, and like I said, that 10 year renovation cycle for commercial
45:02buildings is going to play a role here. So, so it's really just a matter of like when do we get to that tipping point and how do we get there? And this is something that really keeps me up at night because you know, you know, I talk to people and they and people think that like, oh, there must be some good reason that like this isn't getting going.
45:21There must be a regulatory barrier. There must be a cost barrier. Um, or there's there's a critical piece of like safety research missing. And like I said, not that there isn't lots of safety research and other kinds of research still to do, but there's nothing, you know, super critical where it's like, ah, we just need to know this and then we can get going. And there's not really any regulatory barrier
45:48either. It's, you know, it's maybe just like a social diffusion question. It's um like do we need just like a global awareness campaign? you know, how do we get this out there? And you know, I have been in research for my entire career, so I am not an expert in how to run a global awareness campaign or how to make one actually effective, you know, and I started really wish I
46:15was. Calling back to something that you said earlier, uh we're all somewhat traumatized by the pandemic, but implicitly we are erasing uh the next pandemic and uh hopefully we have it uh you know up and running in as many spaces as possible prior to the somewhat inevitable crash efforts to uh again uh improve our uh physical spaces and other resilience uh that would be sort of activated uh in the ordinary course
46:40during pandemic times. ordinary course to the extent that anything is ordinary during pandemic times. Uh but uh it is combination of frustrating and uh intellectually interesting that there is no barrier at the moment. Uh it is a product that is commercially available. I guess we'll say a few words on the scaling. So this is uh presumptively again uh you know manufactured in without loss of generality China. And uh