From The Economist, July 30:
The terrifying threat of a genetically engineered plague
Annie Jacobsen imagines the repercussions of a leak from a Russian laboratory
Biological War: A Scenario. By Annie Jacobsen. Dutton; 432 pages; $33. Torva; £22
YOU HAVE been infected with a “demon germ”, but you do not feel monstrously bad just yet. In fact, you feel euphoric. The bacterium multiplying inside your lungs has been modified with an endorphin gene to trigger a neurochemical high—which encourages you to socialise, and thereby spread the pathogen about.
Soon the ecstasy gives way to a fever and splitting headache. You start coughing up bloody sputum: evidence of rotting lungs and the onset of sepsis. Antibiotics help at first, but then activate virus genes engineered into the bacterium. That virus attacks your nervous system. You suffer tremors and seizures and soon you die.
In “Biological War: A Scenario” Annie Jacobsen, a journalist and the author of several books on war and military affairs, lays out what would happen if a genetically modified bioweapon were unleashed. She reprises the format of her previous book, which offered a minute-by-minute account of a hypothetical nuclear attack on America. The result is a tale just as energetic, detailed and disturbing.
In this imagined scenario, there is an explosion at an infectious-disease research facility in Siberia, where scientists genetically alter bacteria and viruses in ways that can make them more virulent, transmissible and resistant to antibiotics. In the blast, a scientist is infected with a modified pneumonic plague. Within minutes, American analysts are poring over intelligence indicating a potential lab leak. The American president is briefed but has few options. “By the time a pathogen escapes from a lab and gets seeded in the population”, Ms Jacobsen writes, “it is almost certainly already too late.”
Russian officials obfuscate and blame contaminated marmot meat from a wet market for an outbreak of “atypical pneumonia-like illness” (one of many passages that will remind readers of covid-19). As the disease spreads, the faults in America’s biodefences are exposed. Detection technologies fail. Just 100 isolation beds exist in a country of more than 340m people.
Crucial data are not shared across agencies. An outbreak of plague among California’s homeless population, for instance, is incorrectly treated as an overdose event, and not reported to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. The effects of the plague on its victims are described in stomach-churning detail.
Soon emergency services are overrun. Social media stoke panic; the internet is shut off. Martial law is imposed. There is violent unrest. Cabinet officials are taken to remote locations to ensure continuity of government—or what is left of it. “What makes biological warfare so sinister isn’t just its ability to deliver mass casualties and deaths,” Ms Jacobsen writes, “but its capacity to create unbridled chaos.”
It is an engrossing, plausible book—though it is surprising, given the subject’s timeliness, that ai barely features in it. The pathogen in Ms Jacobsen’s scenario is a cold-war relic built by Soviet scientists. But AI models, trained on virological and bacteriological information, can turn novices into bioweapons manufacturers. Frontier labs have admitted that AI tools are getting better and better at designing pathogens. Instances of rogue states and terrorist groups using bioweapons are mercifully rare. But with barriers to development falling, new and troubling scenarios are certain to emerge....
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