Name: Biological War
Author: Annie Jacobsen

Introduction

What’s in it for me? An unvarnished look at the dangers of biological weapons in the age of genetic engineering .

If you thought nuclear war was the worst threat facing the modern world, think again. The next war may be fought with weapons no one can see: tiny fragments of DNA or single-celled organisms, bioengineered to spread faster, strike harder, and resist all known cures. Bombs and bullets, at least, kill quickly. Bioweapons show far less mercy.

This is the dark side of the incredible medical advances made through genetic engineering and gene editing technologies – scientists in high-level laboratories around the globe who put genetic engineering to work as weapons, not medicine.

This Blink traces the troubling history of biological warfare before presenting a fantasy scenario of a future unplanned bioweapons release. By understanding what’s possible and where we stand today, we can work to ensure that scenario never comes to pass.

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A brief history of germ warfare

For much of the last century, the idea of a global pandemic seemed like ancient history. The last one to make the headlines was the Influenza pandemic of 1918, when modern medical science was far less advanced. The development of penicillin for the war effort in the 1940s kicked off decades of antibiotic and antiviral drug developments – a simple infection would no longer kill you. Meanwhile, advances in vaccine technology were getting close to eradicating some of the world’s worst killers, from smallpox and polio to measles and meningitis.

But early into 2020, as quarantines, travel bans, mask mandates, and social distancing rolled out across the globe, ancient history came roaring back. Even worse, the virus causing COVID-19 seemed particularly virulent and deadly. The outbreak was quickly blamed on a wet market in Wuhan, China, where live animals were slaughtered onsite. Coronaviruses have natural reservoirs in the wild, like bat populations, and it was reported that consuming bats from this market caused the initial outbreak.

However, Wuhan is also home to several high-level biosafety laboratories, including BSL-3 and BSL-4. The highest possible risk is Biosafety Level 4, and it indicates they work with the most deadly and contagious organisms known to history, like rabies and plague.

It wasn’t long before people around the world were questioning whether COVID-19 was an emergent natural disease, or a bioweapon that had unwittingly escaped from a lab. The resulting erosion of trust in both government and science is still reverberating today, and driving an increasingly polarized political landscape. Vaccine exemptions are on the rise, with outbreaks of once-rare diseases like measles and even rabies now common in headlines.

This isn’t the first time a plague has eroded entire civilizations in its wake – or even the first time an outbreak may have happened on purpose.

To understand the history of biological warfare, we have to go back to the Middle Ages. In the middle of the fourteenth century, a plague known as the Black Death first broke out across Europe. Modern estimates put the death toll of this plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, at between one-third and one-half of the total population. For centuries scholars were puzzled about the cause of the widespread outbreak; Yersinia pestis is a bacterium commonly found in rat and mice populations, so this widespread death toll seemed to come out of nowhere.

One historic eyewitness account may hold the key: an Italian notary who lived through the plague, Gabriele de’Mussi, traced the outbreak to a single, historical event. In 1346 the Mongols were besieging a Genoa-held fortress in Caffa, in what is now modern Ukraine. As they became frustrated by the lengthy standoff, the Mongols catapulted plague-ridden bodies over the fortress walls, and waited for the disease to take hold. If de’Mussi’s account is true, the Black Death that ravaged for centuries across Europe – and caused millions of deaths – was the result of an early experiment in biological warfare.

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Harnessing healing to engineer death

The long-term impact of the Black Death can’t be overstated: governmental and religious systems collapsed, whole families were wiped out, towns and cities were abandoned, and individuals retreated into isolation as civil society collapsed. For centuries the only medical advice was this: when the plague comes, leave immediately – and don’t hurry back.

The same applied to other virulent diseases, like small pox, cholera, and yellow fever. When the plague came to town, no matter the form, the only way to survive was to not get it in the first place.

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Countdown to day one

Our fantasy scenario also begins in Russia. It’s getting dark in Koltsovo, a quiet town in Siberia, on a January evening in the near future. To civilians, the laboratory on its edge is a vaccine research facility. In reality, it houses some of the most dangerous pathogens known to humankind, and a secret bioweapons program.

Leonid Brezhnev had launched the program, Biopreparat, back in 1973. Since then, this BSL-4 lab has been using recombinant DNA technology to build chimera weapons, combining the destructive power of more than one disease in a single agent.

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Day one

After leaving his confession with the priest, Aleksandr feels unusually clear-headed and positive about his decision to commit suicide as a final act of penance. He feels euphoric as he walks through town, past local residents doing their morning shopping, and out into the woods where he intends to end his life.

But within just a few hours walking, he suddenly feels terrible. His fever is spiking, his lungs filling with fluid. He collapses onto the snow coughing up a foamy pink mucus that stains the snow around him. Now aware he’s infected with his own bioweapon, his last thought is that at least he will die out here in the woods without infecting anyone else. He doesn’t know that this will be his final thought.

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Days two and three

US intelligence is watching Koltsovo. Satellite imagery shows military units moving toward the ruined laboratory, and the site now dominates the President’s briefings. Analysts know the town hosts a Russian BSL-4 facility, so they watch Russian media too. A day after the explosion, all it has produced is a few small items about a fire in remote Siberia. But on the ground, events are heating up.

First, our rogue scientist, Aleksandr, has died in the local clinic. The doctors and nurses who tried to save him couldn’t identify what killed him, so they sent samples to a medical laboratory and went home to their families. Some stopped at the gym, a sports game, the grocery store.

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It’s here

Four days after the explosion in Siberia, events in Los Angeles are taking a sharp turn. An unhoused man walks into a free clinic near Skid Row and tells the nurses he’s dying. He has a high fever, he can’t breathe, and he’s coughing up a pink foam that he spits on the floor.

One nurse looks closer. Most would read the pink froth as bleeding from the gut, common in end-stage alcoholism. She suspects something else. She takes a sample for the lab and sends him to the local hospital, where he’s admitted and dies within hours.

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The end of American Democracy

Media outlets in Los Angeles begin reporting outbreaks of violence downtown near Skid Row, and blame reported deaths on a mass overdose. But in the age of social media, no story stays offline. An influencer hears about the chaos, takes an e-scooter past the blockades, and livestreams the skirmishes from a nearby rooftop. His feed draws other content creators, and several are filming when the police start to fall. One officer in full riot gear coughs up pink foam as he goes down. Another leans against his squad car, blue-faced and sweating, fighting to stay conscious. Firefighters and medics who had been holding the perimeter move in to drag them out.

LA hospitals are slow to link any of it to the Dallas passenger or the Caribbean. By the time the outbreak is recognized as infectious, thousands are sick, and the virus has reached San Diego and San Francisco.

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What’s worth fighting for

In our fantasy scenario, things are getting bleaker and more hopeless. Just like the Black Death six hundred years ago, society is forever transformed. Only those who isolate early and care for no one but themselves survive – in other words, sociopaths. The compassionate go the quickest, and take much of our collective humanity with them. What it means to be human in the decades that follow looks very, very different.

But here’s where the fantasy ends and we return to the real world, and to the lessons the scenario is offering.

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Biological War summary