Chapter 12.

Biological weapons

The most immediate global catastrophic risk facing humanity, especially in the prior
to 2030 time frame, plausibly appears to be the threat of genetically engineered viruses
causing a global pandemic. In 1918, the Spanish flu killed 50 million people, a number
greater than the casualties from World War I which occurred immediately prior. After
biology researchers publicly released the full genome for the virus, tech thinkers Ray
Kurzweil and Bill Joy published an op-ed article in The New York Times in 2005
castigating them1, saying, “This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design
of a weapon of mass destruction.”
The greatest risk comes into play when we consider the possibility of either creating
dangerous pathogens, like the Spanish flu, from scratch, or modifying the genomes of existing
pathogens, like bird flu, to make it transmissible between humans2. Once the new virus exists, the
risk is that it either is used in warfare, or spread around airports in a terrorist act.

Biological weapons are forbidden by the Biological Weapons Convention, which entered
into force in 1975 under the auspices of the United Nations3. The treaty has been signed or ratified
by 154 UN member states, signed but not ratified by 10 UN member states, and not signed or
ratified by an additional 16 UN member states. There are three non-UN member states, which
have not participated in the treaty: Kosovo, Taiwan, and Vatican City. A summary of the
convention is in Article 1 of its text:

Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never in any circumstances to

develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain:

(1) Microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method
of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic,
protective or other peaceful purposes;
(2) Weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or
toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict.
 The two largest historical stockpiles, those of the United States and Russia, have allegedly
been destroyed, though Russian destruction of Soviet biological weapons facilities is mostly
undocumented. In 1992, Ken Alibek, a former Soviet biological warfare expert who was the First
Deputy Director of the Biopreparat (Soviet biological weapons facilities) defected to the United
States. Over the subsequent decade, he wrote various op-eds and a book on how massive the
Soviet biological weapons program was and lamented the lack of international oversight of
Russia's biological weapons program, pointing out that inspectors are still denied access to many
crucial facilities4.

Both the United States and Russia still maintain facilities that study biological weapons for
“defensive purposes,” and these facilities are known to contain samples of dangerous viruses,
such as smallpox. Two medical journal papers claim that as recently as the late 80s, the United
States military was currently developing vaccines for “tularemia, Q fever, Rift Valley fever,
Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Eastern and Western equine encephalitis, chikungunya fever,
Argentine hemorrhagic fever, the botulinum toxicoses, and anthrax”5,6. The biological weapons
convention is mostly a “gentleman's agreement,” is not backed by monitoring or inspections, and
offers wide latitude for the development of offensive biological weaponry. The James Martin
Center for Nonproliferation maintains a detailed list of “known,” “probable,” and “possible”
biological and chemical agents possessed by various countries, a list on which many dangerous
pathogens appear7. Furthermore, the Federation of American scientists has questioned whether
the current US interpretation of the Biological Weapons Convention is in line with its original
interpretation8:

Recently, the US interpretation of the Biological Weapons Convention has come to reflect
the point of view that Article I, which forbids the development or production of biological
agents except under certain circumstances, does not apply to non-lethal biological
weapons. This position is at odds with original US interpretation of the Convention. From
the perspective of this original interpretation, current non-lethal weapons research clearly
exceeds the limits of acceptability defined by Article I.

There is also the “dual-use problem,” meaning that pathogens grown for testing and
defensive uses can quickly be re-purposed for offensive use. The United States had an extensive
biological weapons program from 1943—1969, weaponizing anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, Q-
fever, VEE, botulism, and staph B. The procedures and methods needed to grow and weaponize
these pathogens are known to the US military, and industrial production could begin at any time.
The US developed munitions such as the E120 biological bomblet, a specialized bomblet
designed to hold 0.1 kg of biological agent, to rotate rapidly and shatter on impact, spraying
tularemia bacteria across as wide an area as possible. Despite the international agreement, all
the tools for biological warfare could readily be built.

What is tularemia? It is a highly infectious bacteria which is found in various lagomorphs

(hares, rabbits, pikas) in North America. Humans can become infected by as few as 10-50
bacteria. From the point of view of biological weaponry, tularemia is attractive because it is easy
to aerosolize, easy to clean up (unlike anthrax), and is incapacitating to the victim. Within a few
days of contact, tularemia causes pus-filled lesions to form, followed by fever, lethargy, anorexia,
symptoms of blood poisoning, and possibly death. Tularemia causes the nymph nodes to swell
and fill with pus, similar to bubonic plague. The death rate with treatment is about 1%, without
treatment it is 7%. The low death rate is actually somewhat helpful from the perspective of warfare,
as sick or injured soldiers and civilians must be taken care of by others, creating a burden that
hampers fighting capability.

Even worse than tularemia is weaponized anthrax, because anthrax spores are persistent
and very difficult to clean up. To clean them up requires sterilizing an entire area with diluted
formaldehyde. Anthrax spores are not fungal spores—the scientific term is “endospores,” which
are just a dormant and more resilient form of the original bacteria. “Spores” is for short. Anthrax
spores stay in a dehydrated form and are reactivated when a host inhales or ingests them, or they
come into contact with a skin lesion. At that point, they come to life quickly and can cause fatal
disease. We'll spare you a detailed description of the disease, but the death rate for ingestion of
anthrax spores is 25-60%, depending upon promptness of treatment9.

After anthrax-contaminated letters containing just a few teaspoons worth of spores were
sent by terrorists to congressional officials in 2002, it cost over $100 million to clean up the anthrax
trail safely, which included spores at the Brentwood mail sorting facility in northeast Washington
and the State Department mail sorting facility in Sterling, Virginia10. Dorothy A. Canter, chief
scientist for bioterrorism issues at the Environmental Protection Agency, who tracked the
decontamination work, said, “It's in the hundreds of millions of dollars for the cleanup alone.”

If it cost over $100 million to clean up just two mailing facilities, imagine what it would cost
to clean up a whole city. It would be close to impossible. Anthrax spores are very long-lasting—
there have been cases where anthrax-infected animal corpses have caused disease 70 years
after they were dug up. So, it is reasonable to assume that a site thoroughly contaminated with
anthrax would remain uninhabitable for 70 years or longer11. It would be cheaper and easier to
just rebuild a city in a different place than clean one up. The total real estate value of Manhattan
was $802.4 billion in 2006, consider if that entire area were contaminated with anthrax. It would
knock more than $800 billion off the US economy all at once, and far more due to second-order
economic disruption.

The case of Gruinard Island, an island in Scotland contaminated with anthrax due to
biological weapons testing, illustrates what is required to remove anthrax12. The island is just soil
and dirt (no trees), and is under a square mile in size. To decontaminate the island required
diluting 280 tonnes of formaldehyde in seawater and spreading it over the entire surface of the
island, with complete removal of the worst-contaminated topsoil. After the decontamination, code-
named Dark Harvest, was completed, a flock of sheep was introduced to the island and they
thrived without incident.

These descriptions of biological weapons are included to give the reader more clarity into
what we are referring to when the phrase is used.

Consider a total nuclear war between the United States and Russia, fought over Crimea
or some other border area. After each side unloaded on one another, many major cities and
military bases would be destroyed, but each side would still have ample military resources to
continue fighting. As the conflict dragged on, there would be an increasing desperation to turn to
exotic weapons with a better cost-benefit profile than conventional arms. Biological weapons fall
into this category. Anthrax could quickly be produced in huge quantities (if there aren't already
secret stockpiles we don't know about), loaded up into bomblets, and delivered to the enemy.
Recall that few people even remember the exact reason behind why World War I was fought, yet
it still lasted for four years and led to the death of more than 9 million combatants. Such a total
war is certainly plausible, even if it would be fought for reasons that don't seem to make much
sense to us today.

Alongside anthrax, other dangerous pathogens, such as tularemia might be used, creating
an artificial epidemic. Refugees pouring out from the cities into the countryside would carry the
pathogens along with them, spreading them among friends, family, and whoever else they came
across. The war might be accompanied by the high-altitude detonation of hydrogen bombs,
causing a continent-wide EMP that fries all unprotected electronics and makes industrial
agriculture impossible13. All sophisticated farm machinery is dependent on electronic circuits and
cannot function without them. They would be fried in an EMP attack. The refugee situation would
make a lack of hygiene rampant, as refugee camps would lack proper sanitation and would likely
be contaminated with human waste. Combinations of factors such as these—nuclear war,
biological war, pandemic, breakdown of infrastructure—all could combine to deal an extremely
hard hit to large countries such as Russia and the United States, causing them to lose more than
nine-tenths of their population. Frank Gaffney, head of the Center for Security Policy, has said of
an EMP attack, “Within a year of that attack, nine out of 10 Americans would be dead, because
we can’t support a population of the present size in urban centers and the like without electricity.”14

Without some external force to reestablish order in a situation such as that described here,
countries like the United States and Russia could even decline into feudal societies. Further war
and conflict based on grudges from the original conflict could continue whittling down the human
species, until crop failures from nuclear winter finally kill us off. Modern agriculture is based on
artificial fertilizer, and if infrastructure is down and the security situation is poor, artificial fertilizer
cannot be produced. Based on subsistence agriculture alone, the carrying capacity of the Earth
would be significantly lower than it is now. Our modern population depends on industrial
agriculture and artificial fertilizer to sustain this many people. Without these tools, billions would
perish.

We've briefly reviewed one possible disaster scenario, which would not be fatal to
humanity all at once, but could be the trigger for a long-term decline that eventually culminates in
extinction. We will return to such scenarios later in the chapter, but for now we will review the tools
which could be used to cause trouble.

The key danger area is synthetic biology, a broad term defined as follows15:

A) the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and
B) the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes.

The term “synthetic biology” somewhat replaces the older term “genetic engineering,”
since synthetic biology has a more inclusive definition which captures much more of the work
happening today. In synthetic biology, genes are not merely modified, but completely new genes
may be synthesized and inserted, or even viruses constructed from entirely synthetic genomes,
as was achieved by Craig Venter in 201016. Venter had previously chemically synthesized the
genome of the bacteriophage virus phi X 174 in 2003, but it was not until 2010 that an artificial
bacterial genome was created. The genome was synthesized and injected into a bacteria, the
nucleolus of which had been previously hollowed out, and it “booted up” the organism and it came
to life, Frankenstein-style, and demonstrated itself capable of self-replication. The bacteria was
named Mycoplasma laboratorium, after the Mycoplasma genitalium bacterium which inspired its
creation, the simplest bacteria known at the time. Venter's Institute for Biological Alternatives
called the original 2003 viral synthesis, “an important advance toward the goal of a completely
synthetic genome that could aid in carbon sequestration and energy production.”17

In 2002, the polio virus was synthesized from an artificial genome18, an advance that Craig
Venter called “irresponsible” and “inflammatory without scientific justification.” These synthetic
virus particles are absolutely indistinguishable from natural particles on all parameters—from size
to behavior and contagiousness. Though Venter was working on developing a synthetic artificial
viral genome at the time, the objectionable nature of the experiment was that polio is a virus
infectious to humans. The project was financed by the US Department of Defense as part of a
biowarfare response program. We see “biowarfare response” also encompasses creating
dangerous pathogens, not just “responding” to them. That is the fundamental nature of dual use.
Commenting on the advance, researcher Eckard Wimmer said, “The reason we did it was to prove
that it can be done and it is now a reality”.19

The synthetic biology path pursued by Craig Venter's J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI)
focuses on stripping down the simplest known bacterium, Mycoplasma genitalium, which consists
of 525 genes making up 582,970 base pairs. The idea, called the “Minimal Genome Project” is to
simplify the genome of the bacterium to make a free-living cell with the simplest possible genome
for survival, which can then serve as a base template for engineering new organisms with
functions like producing renewable fuels from biological feedstock. The overview of the “Synthetic
Biology and Bioenergy” group of JVCI says, “Since 1995, Dr. Venter and his teams have been
trying to develop a minimal cell both to understand the fundamentals of biology and to begin the
process of building a new cell and organism with optimized functions.”

The activity of the Minimal Genome Project project picked up in 2006, with participation
from Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith and microbiologist Clyde A. Hutchison III. The project is still
ongoing, and has reached important milestones. From the 525 genes of M. genitalium, JCVI plans
to scale down to just 382 genes, synthesizing them and transplanting them into a M. genitalium
whose nucleolus has been hollowed out for this purpose. This has not yet been achieved as of
this writing (January 2015). In 2010, the group successfully synthesized the 1,078,809 base pair
genome of Mycoplasma mycoides and transplanted it into a Mycoplasma capricolum cell, which
was shown to be viable, i.e., it self-replicated billions of times. Craig Venter said the new organism,
called Synthia, was “the first species... to have its parents be a computer”.20

Today, synthesizing genomes the length of a bacterium, i.e., half a million base pairs, is
extremely expensive and complicated. The 1,078,809 base pair genome of Mycoplasma
laboratorium cost $40 million to make and required a decade of work from 20 people. That works
out to almost $40 per base pair. For more routine gene synthesis of segments about 2,000-3,000
base pairs long, the more typical cost is 28 cents per base pair, or $560 for a 2,000 base pair
segment. Synthesizing a viral genome like phi X 174, 5,375 base pairs in length, currently costs
about $1,500. So, the barrier to creating new doomsday viruses is not cost so much as it is
knowledge about what kind of genome to synthesize.

Basic tools for garage lab bioengineering and synthetic biology have been developed. One
of the most prominent international groups is the International Genetically Engineered Machines
(iGEM) competition, which was initially oriented towards undergraduate students, but has since
expanded to include High School students and entrepreneurs. The MIT group led by Tom Knight
which created iGEM also created a standardized set of DNA sequences for genetic engineering,
called BioBricks, and The Registry of Standard Biological Parts, used by iGEM. The way iGEM
works is that students are assigned a kit of biological parts from the Registry of Standard Biological
Parts, and are given the summer to engineer these parts into working biological systems operating
within cells. As an example, the winners in 2007 were a team from Peking University, who
submitted “Towards a Self-Differentiated Bacterial Assembly Line”. Other winners have
“developed a new, more efficient approach to bio production (Slovenia 2010), improved the design
and construction of biosensors (Cambridge 2009), created a prototype designer vaccine (Slovenia
2008),and re-engineered human cells to combat sepsis (Slovenia 2006)”21.

There is a Biobrick Public Agreement, which is “a free-to-use legal tool that allows
individuals, companies, and institutions to make their standardized biological parts free for others
to use.” This makes what is essentially a “DNA dev kit” available for all to use. The Standard
Biological Parts Registry currently contains over 8,000 standard biological parts, which can be
used to create a wide variety of biological systems within cells. Most of the parts within the registry
are designed to operate within the E. coli bacterium, which lives in the intestine and is the most
widely studied prokaryotic organism.
 The basic technological trend is towards biotech lab equipment becoming cheaper and the
knowledge of how to use it becoming more diffuse. The constant reduction in price and
improvements in the simplicity of DNA sequencers and synthesizers make “biohackers” possible.
However, it is important to point out that falling costs in the field of gene synthesis are absolutely
not exponential, and there is no predictable “Moore's law” type effect happening (besides, Moore's
law itself is leveling off). Still, we are entering an era where it will be possible for nearly anyone to
synthesize custom viruses, and eventually bacteria.

Even simple genetic engineering, making a few modifications to an existing genome, can
be extremely dangerous. In 2014, controversial Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier and his team

at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands studied the H5N1 avian flu virus and
determined that only five mutations were needed to make this bird flu transmissible between
humans22. This was confirmed by making the new strain and spreading it between ferrets, which
serve as a reliable human model for contagiousness. In 2011, Fouchier and his group had
published details on how to make bird flu contagious among humans, which was met by
widespread condemnation by critics23. Microbiologist David Relman of Stanford

University told NPR, “I still don't understand why such a risky approach must be
taken […] I'm discouraged.”24 D.A Henderson at the University of Pittsburgh, a
pioneer in the eradication of smallpox said of this “ominous news” that “the benefits
of this work do not outweigh the risks.”25 The World Health Organization conveyed
“deep concern” about “possible risks and misuses associated with this research” and “the
potential negative consequences.”26 In December 2011, the National Science Advisory Board for
Biosecurity (NSABB) ruled that Fouchier's work be censored, but after much debate, the ruling
was reversed and all the specific mutation data was openly published27. Around that same time,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said there is “evidence in Afghanistan that…al Qaeda…made a
call to arms for—and I quote—'brothers with degrees in microbiology or chemistry to develop a
weapon of mass destruction.’”28 Fouchier told New Scientist that his human transmissible bird flu
variant “is transmitted as efficiently as seasonal flu” and that it has a 60 percent mortality rate29.

Biological risk
 The basic one-factorial scenario of biological catastrophe is global pandemic caused by one
type of virus or bacteria. The spread of this pathogen could occur via two means—as an epidemic
transferred from human to human, or in the form of contamination of the environment (air, water,
food, soil). The Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 spread over the entire world except several remote
islands, as an example. Would-be man-killing epidemics face two problems. The first is if carriers
of the pathogen die too quickly it can't spread. The second is that no matter how lethal the
epidemic, some people usually have congenital immunity to it. For example, about one in every
three hundred people has an innate immunity to AIDS, meaning they can contract HIV and it never
progresses to AIDS. Even if innate immunity is rare or non-existent, as is apparently the case with
anthrax (the authors were not able to find any medical research papers citing cases of innate
immunity to anthrax), vaccines are usually available.

A second variant of a global biological catastrophe would be the appearance of an

omnivorous agent which destroys the entire biosphere, devouring all live cells, or a more limited
version that takes out a large chunk of the biosphere. This is a more fantastic scenario, less likely
in the near term, but of uncertain likelihood in the long term. It seems fanciful that natural evolution
could produce such an agent, but perhaps through deliberate biological engineering it could be
possible. A bacterium immune to bacteriophages due to fundamental genetic differences from the
rest of all living bacteria would be a possible candidate for such a pathogen. Harvard geneticist
George Church is working towards such a bacterium for research purposes30.

In 2009, Chris Phoenix of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology wrote31:

I learned about research that is nearing completion to develop a strain of E. coli which
cannot be infected by bacteriophages. Phages are a major mechanism—likely *the* major
mechanism—that keeps bacteria from growing out of control. A phage-proof bacterium
might behave very similarly to "red tide" algae blooms, which apparently happen when an
algae strain is transported away from its specialized parasites. But E. coli is capable of
living in a wide range of environments, including soil, fresh water, and anaerobic
conditions. A virus-proof version, with perhaps 50% lower mortality, and (over time) less
metabolic load from shedding virus defenses that are no longer needed, might thrive in
many conditions where it currently only survives. The researchers doing this acknowledge
the theoretical risk that some bacteria might become invasive, but they don't seem to be
taking anywhere near the appropriate level of precaution. They are one gene deletion
away from creating the strain.
 The work Phoenix is referring to is work undertaken by the famous geneticist George
Church, who describes his work in a Seed magazine article32:

Given this knowledge, the modern tools of biotechnology allow us to do something

amazing: We can alter the translational code within an organism by modifying the DNA
bases of its genome, making the organism effectively immune to viral infection. My
colleagues and I are exploring this within E. coli, the microbial powerhouse of the biotech
world. By simply changing a certain 314 of the 5 million bases in the E. coli genome, we
can change one of its 64 codons. In 2009 this massive (albeit nanoscale) construction
project is nearing completion via breakthroughs in our ability to “write” genomes. This
process is increasingly automated and inexpensive — soon it will be relatively easy to
change multiple codons. Viral genomes range from 5,000 to a million bases in length, and
each of the 64 codons is present, on average, 20 times. This means that to survive the
change of a single codon in its host, a virus would require 20 simultaneous, specific,
spontaneous changes to its genome. Even in viruses with very high mutation rates, for
example HIV, the chance of getting a mutant virus with the correct 20 changes and zero
lethal mutations is infinitesimally small.

As of January 2015, this E. coli has not yet been created, though intermediate variants that
display increased virus resistance have been. The basic idea is scary, though—how much more
effective would E. coli be if it were immune to bacteriophages? What would the large-scale
consequences be? Are we going to be up to necks in self-replicating, virus-immune E. coli? The
specific safety issues and the worst-case scenarios in this vein have been studied poorly, if at all.
Articles on the topic are often filled with reassurances by scientists that nothing will go wrong,
while other scientists issue ominous warnings. George Church recommends the following
countermeasures33:

If we engineer organisms to be resistant to all viruses, we must anticipate that without

viruses to hold them in check, these GEOs could take over ecosystems. This might be
handled by making engineered cells dependent on nutritional components absent from
natural environments. For example, we can delete the genes required to make
 diaminopimelate, an organic compound that is essential for bacterial cell walls (and hence
bacterial survival) yet very rare in humans and our environment.

Notice that it requires special effort to come up with an idea to make these organisms less
harmful. They would take over planetary ecosystems by default if released. That is a scary
thought. Church refers to the possibility of “molecular kudzu” taking over the biosphere. The risk
seems so clear that engineering such organisms is arguably a risk we should not be willing to
take. Where are the international treaties forbidding the creation of such organisms? With one of
the world's most prominent geneticists, George Church, pioneering their creation, it seems
extremely unlikely that the United States government will do anything to restrict this research.
We're just going to have to wait until these organisms are created and see what happens.

The third variant of globe-threatening biological disaster is a binary bacteriological

weapon. For example, the tuberculosis and AIDS are chronic illnesses, but even more deadly in
combination. A similar concept would be a two-level biological weapon. The first stage would
make a certain bacterium, the toxin of which imperceptibly spreads worldwide. The second stage
would be a bacterium that makes an additional toxin which is lethal in combination with the first.
This opens up a larger space of possibilities than a uni-factorial biological attack. Such an attack
could be possible, for instance, if a ubiquitous bacterium such as E. coli is used as the template
for a bioweapon. The selective nature of a two-staged attack would be more amenable to the
biological attack being targeted towards a certain nation or ethnic group.

The fourth variant of a biological global catastrophic risk is the dispersion in the air of a
considerable quantity of anthrax spores (or a similar agent). This variant does not demand a self-
replicating pathogenic agent—it may be inert but lethal. As previously mentioned, anthrax
contamination lasts a very long time, more than 50 years. Contamination does not require a very
large quantity of the pathogen. One gram of anthrax, properly dispersed, can infect a whole
building. To contaminate a substantial portion of the planet would require thousands of tonnes of
anthrax, and very effective delivery methods (drones), but it can be done in theory. This amount
of anthrax required is not unattainable—the USSR had stockpiled 100 to 200 tons of anthrax at
Kantubek on Vozrozhdeniya Island until it was destroyed in 199234. If this amount of anthrax had
been released from its drums as a powder and stirred up by a large storm, it could have
contaminated an area hundreds of miles across for more than 50 years. At its height, the
Soviet biological weapons program employed over 50,000 people and produced 100 tons of
weaponized smallpox a year35. The huge fermenting towers at Stepnogorsk in modern-day
Kazakhstan could produce more than two tons a day, enough to wipe out an entire city36. More
advanced basic technology and manufacturing could improve this throughput by an order of
magnitude or more, and it could all be done in secret. Many in the US intelligence community are
skeptical that Russia has even shut down its biological weapons program completely. When Ken
Alibek defected from Russia in 1992, he said the biological weapons program was still ongoing,
despite the country being a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention forbidding the use or
production of biological weapons.

A fifth variant of a world-threatening bioweapon is an infectious agent changing human

behavior, such as by causing heightened aggression leading to war. A virus that causes
aggression or the loss of the feeling of fear (toxoplasma) can induce infected animals to behavior
which promotes the contamination of other animals. It is theoretically possible to imagine an agent
which would trigger a person to spread it to others, and for this to continue until everyone is
infected. This may actually be more intimidating than all the previous scenarios, because a
pathogen spread by aggressive carriers could be spread much more totally and effectively than a
typical pandemic, and spread to remote settlements.

Toxoplasma gondii is the world's best known behavior-changing pathogen, a parasitic

protozoan estimated to infect up to a third of the world's population. One study of its prevalence
in the United States found the protozoan in 11 percent of women of child-bearing age37 (15 to 44
years), while another study put the overall US prevalence rate at 22.5 percent38. The same study
found a prevalence rate of 75% in El Salvador. Research has linked toxoplasmosis with ADD39,
OCD40, and schizophrenia41, and numerous studies have found a positive correlation between
latent toxoplasmosis and suicidal behavior42,43,44. T. gondii has the capability to infect nearly all
warm-blooded animals, though pigs, sheep, and goats have the highest infection rates. The
prevalence of T. gondii among domestic cats is 30-40 percent45. Czech parasitologist Jaroslav
Flegr found that men with toxoplasmosis are likely to act more suspicious relative to controls,
while infected women show more warmth46. In addition, infected men show higher testosterone in
the blood than uninfected men, while infected women have lower levels of testosterone relative
to their counterparts.

Another obvious example of a behavior-changing pathogen is rabies. Pathogens like rabies

take one to three months to show symptoms, which would be enough time to spread around much
of the world. As an example, the Spanish flu spread extremely quickly, with populations going
from near-zero flu-related deaths to 25 deaths per thousand people per week in just under a
month.47

It is not just unusual pathogens like T. gondii and rabies that studies have proved modify
human behavior. One team of epidemiologists found that even the common flu vaccine modifies
human behavior. Their abstract48:

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that exposure to a directly
transmitted human pathogen-flu virus-increases human social behavior
presymptomatically. This hypothesis is grounded in empirical evidence that animals
infected with pathogens rarely behave like uninfected animals, and in evolutionary theory
as applied to infectious disease. Such behavioral changes have the potential to increase
parasite transmission and/or host solicitation of care.

Methods: We carried out a prospective, longitudinal study that followed participants

across a known point-source exposure to a form of influenza virus (immunizations), and
compared social behavior before and after exposure using each participant as his/her own
control.

Results: Human social behavior does, indeed, change with exposure. Compared to the
48 hours pre-exposure, participants interacted with significantly more people, and in
significantly larger groups, during the 48 hours immediately post-exposure.

Conclusions: These results show that there is an immediate active behavioral response to
infection before the expected onset of symptoms or sickness behavior. Although the
adaptive significance of this finding awaits further investigation, we anticipate it will
advance ecological and evolutionary understanding of human-pathogen interactions, and
will have implications for infectious disease epidemiology and prevention.

This study shows that we are only beginning to uncover the complex nature of human-
pathogen interactions, and common diseases may have a more substantial behavioral
modification component than is commonly thought. That behavioral modification component is
likely to be adaptive from the perspective of the pathogen; that is, the pathogen forces people to
transmit it to others more effectively. With the right genetic tweaks, could this property be
magnified to an intense level? Only future genetic engineering and experimentation will be able
to determine that. It is definitely a global risk worth considering, and is almost never discussed.

A sixth variant of the biological threat is an auto-catalytic molecule capable of spreading

beyond natural boundaries. One example would be prions, protein fragments which cause mad
cow disease and in some cases infect and kill humans. Prions only spread through meat,
however. Prions are unique among pathogens in that they completely lack nucleic acids. What is
even more scary is that prion diseases affect the brain or neural tissue, are untreatable, and
universally fatal. They consist of a misfolded protein which enters the brain and causes healthy
proteins to change to the misfolded state, leading to destruction of the healthy brain and death.
The prion particles are extremely stable, meaning they are difficult to destroy through conventional
chemical and physical denaturation methods, complicating containment and disposal. Fungi also
harbor prion-like molecules, though they do not damage their hosts. Outbreaks of prion diseases
among cattle, called mad cow disease because of its unusual behavioral effects, can occur when
cows are given feed that includes ground-up cow brains.

Is there some kind of prion or other subviral protein particle which can spread quickly
between people through mucous membranes or lesions, which antibiotics and antiviral drugs
cannot fight? We may observe that the fact this has not happened in the course of recorded history
is evidence against its possibility, but synthetic biology will open up vast new spaces of molecular
engineering, and we will be able to create and experiment with molecules inaccessible to natural
evolutionary processes. Among these possibilities may be a dangerous new prion or some other
kind of auto-catalytic molecule that bypasses our immune systems completely.

A seventh variant of biological disaster is the distribution throughout the biosphere of some
species of yeast or mold which is genetically engineered to release a deadly toxin such as dioxin
or botulinum. Since yeast and mold are ubiquitous, they would distribute the toxin everywhere. It
would probably be much easier to carry out this kind of bio-attack than manufacturing dioxin in
bulk and distributing it around the globe. Botulinum bacteria are capable of producing eight types
of toxins, of which there are antidotes for only seven. In 2013, scientists discovered a new type of
botulism toxin and the gene that allows the cell to produce it, and in a highly unusual move,
withheld its genetic details from publication until an antitoxin could be developed.49

One last biological danger is the creation of so-called “artificial life,” that is living organisms
constructed with use of DNA or another set of amino acids but with deep biochemical differences
from other life forms. Such organisms might appear invincible to the immune systems of modern
organisms and threaten the integrity of the biosphere, as in the E. coli example discussed earlier.
The virus-immune bacteria described above would just be the first step into a world of organisms
that have a different number or different types of fundamental codons than the rest of life. In this
way, we will eventually create organisms which can rightly be said to be “outside the Tree of Life”.

A possible countermeasure to all these threats would be to create a “world immune

system”—that is, the worldwide dispersion of sets of genetically modified bacteria which are
capable of neutralizing dangerous pathogens. However, such a strategy would have to be
extremely complex, and may introduce other problems, such as “autoimmune reactions” or other
forms of loss of control. A worldwide immune system based on reprogrammable nanotechnology
would be likely to be more effective in the long-term, but it would be even more difficult to build
than a biological global immune system. Alternatively, nanobots could be developed which can
be injected into the bloodstream of any human and can eliminate any pathogen whatsoever50.

Ubiquitous Polyomaviruses: SV40, BKV, JKV

There is another case which may help to better illustrate biological risk, the case of the
asymptomatic simian virus 40, which was inadvertently spread to hundreds of millions of people
in the United States and the former Soviet Union through polio vaccines 51. The case of SV40 is
extremely controversial, and talking about it bothers some biologists deeply, who call it a “zombie
scare” and attack any discussion about it as scaremongering. Regardless of these attacks, it is
an objective fact that over a hundred million people were infected with this virus in the 1950s and
1960s, when polio vaccine stocks were contaminated with it. One study found that 4 percent of
healthy American subjects have it52. The virus was present in humans even before the poliovirus
vaccine was invented53, and appears to be endemic in the human population, though the primary
reservoir is unknown.

The controversy over SV40 primary revolves around whether it causes cancer in humans.
We find the studies that argue there is no link between SV40 and cancer in humans to be
convincing54. For us, a far more interesting topic is recognizing that there are asymptomatic
viruses which are prevalent in the population. Studies have found that SV40 antigen prevalence
(a key indicator of the presence of the virus) in England is a few percent55. There are other viruses
which are far more common; BK virus, from the same family of polyomaviruses, has a prevalence
between 65 percent and 90 percent in England, depending on age56. Prevalence is highest for
those under age 40 and declines somewhat during seniority. Another virus, JCV, starts off at just
a 10 percent prevalence among English infants, jumping to 20 percent prevalence in teenagers
and escalating to 50 percent prevalence among seniors. Studies have confirmed that BKV and
JCV are both horizontally and vertically transmissible in humans57,58. Despite their ubiquity,
practically nothing is known about the method of transmission.

BKV, JCV, and SV40 are all similar viruses, and cause tumors in monkeys and rodents. The
notion that there are ubiquitous viruses which cause cancer in animals and about which close to
nothing is known of the method of transmission is rather important, and scary. It raises the
possibility of a similar virus being genetically engineered in the future, one that actually does
cause cancer in humans (like SV40 has been incorrectly claimed to), possibly at a high incidence.
If the virus does not respond to antiviral drugs (many viruses don't), it might be able to spread in
an (unknown) fashion similar to the BK virus, achieving 80 percent incidence in the population
and causing a high incidence of fatal cancer. It would be difficult for the human species to “shake
loose” from the virus, since it would be passed from mothers to children. The only way of
perpetuating the human species in circumstance would be for only women and men known to be
uninfected to produce offspring. Meanwhile, normal horizontal infection would keep occurring.
Keeping civilization going in such a circumstance, especially as infrastructure collapsed due to a
lack of population, could be very difficult.

Plural biological strike

Though it may be possible to stop the spread of one pandemic through the effective use of
vaccination and antibiotics, an epidemic caused by several dozen species of diverse viruses and
bacteria, released simultaneously in many different parts of the globe, would produce a much
greater challenge. It would be difficult to assemble all the appropriate antibiotics and vaccines and
administer them all in time. If the virus with 50 percent lethality would be simply be a huge
catastrophe, 30 diverse viruses and bacteria with 50 percent lethality would mean the guaranteed
destruction of all who had not hidden in bunkers. Alternatively, about 100 different organisms with
10 percent lethality could have a similar outcome.

Plural strike could be the most powerful means of conducting biological war, or setting up a
Doomsday weapon. But a plural strike could also occur inadvertently through the release of
pathogenic agents by different terrorists or competition among biohackers in a wartime scenario.
Even nonlethal agents, in conjunction, could weaken the immune system of a human so greatly
that his further survival becomes improbable.
 The possibility of plural application of biological weapons is one of the most considerable
factors of global risk.

Biological delivery systems

To cause mass mayhem and damage, a biological weapon should not only be deadly, but
also infectious and rapidly spreading. Genetic engineering and synthetic biology offer possibilities
not only for the creation of a lethal weapon, but also new methods of delivery. One does not need
to possess a great imagination to imagine a genetically modified malarial mosquito which can live
in any environment and spread with great speed around the planet, infecting everyone with a
certain bio-agent. Fleas, rats, cats, and dogs are all nearly global animals which would be
excellent vectors or reservoirs with which to infect the human population.

Probability of application of biological weapons and its distribution in time

Taking everything into account, we estimate there is a probability of 10% that
biotechnologies will lead to human extinction during the 21st century. This estimate is based on
the assumption there that will inevitably be a wide circulation of cheap tabletop devices allowing
the simple creation of various biological agents. The assumption is that gene synthesizer and
bioprinting machines will be circulated on a scale comparable to computers today.

The properties a dangerous bioprinter (cheap mini-laboratory) would have are:

1) inevitability of appearance,
2) low cost,
3) wide prevalence,
4) uncontrollable by the authorities,
5) ability to create essentially new bio-agents,
6) simplicity of application,
7) a variety of created objects and organisms,
8) appeal as a device for bioweapon manufacture and drugs.

A device meeting these requirements could consist of a typical laptop, a software-piracy

distributed program with a library of initial elements, and a reliable gene synthesis or simple
genetic engineering device, like CRISPR. These components already exist today, they just need
to be refined, improved, and made cheaper. Such a set might be called a “bioprinter”. Drug-
manufacturing communities could be the distribution channel for the complete set. As soon as
these critical components come together, the demand rises, and the system shows itself to have
many practical uses (biofuels, pharmaceuticals, psychedelics, novelties like glowing plants), it will
quickly become difficult to control. The future of biopiracy could become similar to the present of
software piracy—ubiquitous and rampant.

A mature bioprinter would allow the user to synthesize self-replicating cells with nearly
arbitrary properties. Anyone could synthesize cells that pumped out psilocybin (magic
mushrooms), THC (marijuana), cocaine precursors, spider silk, mother of pearl, or botulism toxin.
You could print out cells that produce life-saving medicines, produce glowing moss, or print your
own foods. Eventually, a very wide range of biomaterials and biological structures could be
created using this system, including some very deadly and self-replicating ones.

The probability of global biological catastrophe given widely available bioprinters will
increase very quickly as such devices are perfected and distributed. We can describe a probability
curve which now has a small but non-zero size, and after a while escalates to a large size. What
is interesting is not the exact form of the curve, but the time when it starts to grow sharply.

The authors estimate that this major upswing will take place sometime between 2020 and
2030. (Martin Rees estimates that a major terrorist bio attack with more than a million casualties
will occur by 2020, and he has put a wager of $1,000 behind this prediction59.) The cost of gene
sequencers and synthesizers continues to fall, and will eventually make a bioprinter accessible.
The genomes of many organisms are sequenced newly every year, and there is an explosion in
knowledge about the operative principles of organisms at the genetic and biochemical level. A
much cheaper method of gene synthesis is also needed; current methods involve expensive
reagents.

Soon there will be software programs that can quickly model the consequences of a wide
variety of possible genetic interventions to common lab organisms. This software, along with
improved hardware, will allow the creation of the bioprinter described above. That growth of
probability density around 2020-2030 does not mean that there aren't already terrorists who could
develop dangerous viruses in a laboratory today.

As stated previously, based on what we currently know, the misuse of biotechnologies

appears to be number one on the current list of plausible global catastrophes (especially if
concurrent with a nuclear war), at least for the next 20-30 years. This risk would be substantially
lowered in the following scenarios:
 1) Biological attack could be survived in underground shelters. The United States and other
countries could substantially upgrade their shelter infrastructure to preserve a major percentage
of the affected population after biological warfare or terrorism. There are bunkers for the entire
population of Switzerland, for instance, though they are not adequately stocked.

2) The first serious catastrophe connected with a leak of dangerous pathogens results in
draconian control measures, enough to prevent the creation or distribution of dangerous
bioprinters. This would require a government substantially more authoritarian than what we have
now.

3) AI and molecular manufacturing are developed first, and serve as a shield against
bioweapons before they are developed. (Highly unlikely as these technologies seem much more
difficult than bioprinters.)

4) Nuclear war or other disaster interrupts the development of biotechnologies. Obviously,

depending on a disaster to mitigate another disaster is not the best strategy.

5) It is possible that biotechnologies will allow us to create something like a universal vaccine
or artificial immune system before biological minilaboratories become a serious problem.

Unfortunately, there is the following unpleasant chain of a feedback connected with

protection against a biological weapon. For the best protection we should prepare vaccines and
countermeasures against as many viruses and bacteria as possible, but the more experts working
on that task, the greater the potential that one of them goes rogue and becomes a terrorist or
troublemaker. Another risk besides targeted, weaponized pathogens is the probability of creating
biological “green goo”, that is, a universally omnivorous microorganism capable of quickly
digesting a wide variety of organic matter in the biosphere in general. For this purpose, it would
be necessary create one microorganism with properties which are available separately in different
microorganisms—to photosynthesize, dissolve and acquire nutrients, to breed with the speed of
E. coli, and so on.

Usually, such a scenario is not considered because it is assumed that such organisms would
have already evolved, but the design space accessible through deliberate biodesign is much,
much larger than through evolution and natural selection alone. Such an organism that ends up
as a bioweapon might even be designed for some other purpose, such as cleaning up an oil spill.
There is also a view that enhancement of crops for farming could eventually lead to the creation
of a “superweed” that outcompetes a majority of natural plants in their biological niches.

In conclusion for this section, there are many imaginable ways of applying biotechnology to
the detriment of mankind, and we've only scratched the surface here. The space of unknown risks
is much larger than has been explicitly enumerated. Though it is possible to limit the damage of
each separate application of biotechnology, low cost, inherent privacy, and prevalence of these
technologies makes their ill-intentioned application practically inevitable. In addition, many
biological risks are not obvious and will emerge over time as biotechnology develops.

Already, biological weapons are the cheapest way of causing mass death: it takes a fraction
of a cent of botulism toxin to kill someone. Manufacturing modern bioweapons like anthrax for
military purposes necessitates large protected laboratories and skilled personnel, but it is only a
matter of time until this changes. It can be even cheaper to kill if we consider the ability of a
pathogenic agent to self replicate.

It is often said that biological weapons are not effective in military applications. However,
it may have a non-conventional use--as a weapon for a stealth-strike targeting the back of an
enemy or as a last-ditch defense weapon to infect invading armies.

Plausible Motives for Use of Biological Weapons

The issue of motive with regard to unleashing extremely destructive and potentially
uncontrollable agents will be addressed in further detail in section two of this book, but it's worth
addressing here specifically with regard to biological weapons.

There are two likely scenarios in which biological weapons might be used; warfare and
terrorism. As mentioned above, biological weapons could be used non-conventionally in warfare,
either as a stealth-strike in a time of great military need, a last-ditch weapon to wipe out invaders,
or as a scorched earth tactic.

There are two prominent historical examples where either a stealth strike or aggressive
scorched earth tactics were considered. The first is Hitler's so-called Nero Decree, named after
the Roman emperor Nero who allegedly engineered the Great Fire of Rome in 64 AD. Hitler
ordered that “anything […] of value be destroyed” in German territory, to prevent its use by the
encroaching Allies60. The relevant section of the decree is as follows:
 It is a mistake to think that transport and communication facilities, industrial
establishments and supply depots, which have not been destroyed, or have only
been temporarily put out of action, can be used again for our own ends when the
lost territory has been recovered. The enemy will leave us nothing but scorched
earth when he withdraws, without paying the slightest regard to the population. I
therefore order:
1) All military transport and communication facilities, industrial establishments
and supply depots, as well as anything else of value within Reich territory, which
could in any way be used by the enemy immediately or within the foreseeable
future for the prosecution of the war, will be destroyed.

The Nazi Minister of Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer, who had been
assigned responsibility for carrying out the decree, secretly ignored it, and Hitler
committed suicide 41 days later, making it impossible to ensure his orders were carried
out. A summons of Nazi party leaders in Dusseldorf in the closing weeks of the war, to be
posted throughout the city, called for the evacuation of all inhabitants and said, “Let the
enemy march into a burned out, deserted city!”61 Around the same time, many sixteen-
year-olds and old men were also recruited in a “great levy” as a last-ditch effort to fight
the Allies. Back to the so-called Nero Decree, the orders for destruction were wide in
extent. The details are recalled in Speer's memoirs62:

As if to dramatize what lay in store for Germany after Hitler's command,

immediately after this discussion a teletype message came from the Chief of
Transportation. Dated March 29, 1945, it read: “Aim is creation of a transportation
wasteland in abandoned territory... Shortage of explosives demands resourceful
utilization of all possibilities for producing lasting destruction.” Included in the list
of facilities slated for destruction were, once again, all types of bridges, tracks,
roundhouses, all technical installations in the freight depots, workshop
equipment, and sluices and locks in our canals. Along with this, simultaneously
all locomotives, passenger cars, freight cars, cargo vessels, and barges were to
be completely destroyed and the canals and rivers blocked by sinking ships in
 them. Every type of ammunition was to be employed for this task. If such
explosives were not available, fires were to be set and important parts smashed.
Only the technician can grasp the extent of the calamity that execution of this
order would have brought upon Germany. The instructions were also prime
evidence of how a general order of Hitler's was translated into terrifying thorough
terms.

Speer called the order for the destruction of “all resources within the Reich” as a
“death sentence for the German people”:

The consequences would have been inconceivable: For an indefinite period there
would have been no electricity, no gas, no pure water, no coal, no transportation.
All railroad facilities, canals, locks, docks, ships, and locomotives destroyed.
Even where industry had not been demolished, it could not have produced
anything for lack of electricity, gas, and water. No storage facilities, no telephone
communications—in short, a country thrown back into the Middle Ages.

This shows the degree to which an authoritarian leader may choose to ruin his own
country to deny its resources to a victorious enemy, even at great detriment to the future
of the homeland. If these orders were carried out, it would have caused many millions of
unnecessary deaths. To put it bluntly, Hitler was willing to sacrifice millions of German
lives to express his contempt for the enemy.
Now, imagine Hitler had access to a Doomsday virus which could kill off millions
of the invading Allied soldiers but only at the cost of millions of native German lives. Would
he have used it? Giving the reluctance of his subordinates to carry out the scorched earth
policy, it might not have worked, but what if he were a dictator in the future, around the
year 2040, and had access to an army of drones which could disperse the pathogen with
a single push of a button, no cooperation from subordinates required? In that case, we
can imagine that it is well within possibility. Perhaps Hitler would have rather seen the
destruction of Europe than to suffer the failure of his plan to dominate it. Are there not
dictators in the world today who might not do the same thing? Will not there also be in the
future? It certainly seems there will be. With an arsenal of biological weapons and
dispersal drones at their disposal, combined with a fevered and angry state of mind, such
an outcome is certainly imaginable. From the initial hot zone, the disease could spread
worldwide.
The second example of the potential use of non-conventional weapons in warfare
on a mass scale was the case of Churchill wanting to use poison gas on German cities in
1944 to counter the continuous rocket attacks hitting British cities. He issued a
memorandum telling his military chiefs to “think very seriously over this question of using
poison gas”, that “"it is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it
in the last war without a word of complaint”, and that63:

I should be prepared to do anything [Churchill's emphasis] that would hit the

enemy in a murderous place. I may certainly have to ask you to support me in
using poison gas. We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in
Germany... We could stop all work at the flying bombs starting points.... and if we
do it, let us do it one hundred per cent.

—Winston Churchill, 'Most Secret' Prime Minister's Personal Minute to the Chiefs
of Staff, 6 July 1944

There have also been claims that Churchill advocated the use of anthrax, but these
have since been shown to be false. The key point is that Churchill was willing to anything
to damage the enemy, meaning that if he did have sufficient anthrax, it seems likely he
would have advocated its use. Such a mass distribution of anthrax would have
contaminated wide areas of Germany for decades to come, as cleanup would have a
prohibitive cost unless used only in very limited areas. If anthrax had been used, many
cities would have had to have been completely abandoned and fenced off for generations.
Anthrax has the advantage that it is not contagious in the way that flu is; you can only
catch it by directly inhaling spores from cadavers. Therefore, a long-distance bombing
would minimize the risk of collateral damage, and increase the incentive for its use.

Many view WWII as the most intense war in history, which it certainly was, but they
also give it an aura of mystery and unrepeatability as if it were a unique event. That is not
necessarily the case. We are still at risk of a World War today. The Mutually Assured
Destruction (MAD) doctrine is false—it certainly would be possible to disable a great many
nuclear silos with submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and thereby greatly ameliorate
the damage of a counterstrike. Leaning on MAD as a guardian angel to protect from the
threat of another World War is not very prudent. In a total war, it is plausible that all ethics
would fly out the window, as it very nearly did in World War II. When the big guns come
out, they could very well include next-generation, genetically engineered biological
weapons alongside nuclear missiles and conventional arms. The military scenarios
outlined above make that imaginable.

The third major category of plausible usage of a Doomsday virus is, of course,
through a terrorist incident. The key threat is fundamentalist Islam, and Hillary Clinton was
previously cited in this chapter as noting that Al Qaeda was specifically looking for
specialists in the area. Fundamentalists Muslims might be quite happy with wiping out
billions of people in North America, South America, and Eurasia as long as, in their eyes,
it gave Islam a better foothold in the world. In the not-too-distant future, it may be possible
to design viruses that selectively target specific races, which would help enable this.

Ethnic bioweapons are a well-established and well-recognized area of risk64. In

ancient times, the rulers of Nepal maintained the malaria-infected Terai forest as a natural
defense against invaders from the Ganges south, as the natives of the forest had innate
resistance against malaria while the invaders did not. Certain populations living around
specific microbes for a long period of time evolve defenses against them which other
groups lack. Microbes originating in the crowded cities of Europe killed millions of natives
in the Americas when the European explorers first arrived, far more than could be killed
with guns or swords alone. The native population simply lacked immune defenses against
these germs.

In 1997, US Secretary of Defense William Cohen referred to the concept of

ethnic-specific bioweapons, saying65, “Alvin Toffler has written about this in terms of some
scientists in their laboratories trying to devise certain types of pathogens that would be
ethnic specific so that they could just eliminate certain ethnic groups and races”. An 1998
interview with a UK defense intelligence official, Dr. Christopher Davis, refers to ethnic
bioweapons66. Davis said, “...we also have the possibility of targeting specific ethnic
groups of specific genetic subtypes, if you like, of the population, that you can
indiscriminately, in a way, spray something, but it only kills the certain people that this
material is designed to find and attack.” In 2005, an official announcement of the
International Committee of the Red Cross said67, “The potential to target a particular
ethnic group with a biological agent is probably not far off. These scenarios are not the
product of the ICRC's imagination but have either occurred or been identified by countless
independent and governmental experts.”

Even more highly specific bioweapons than ethnic bioweapons may be

possible. In 2012, an article in The Atlantic covered various advances in synthetic biology
and concluded that a weapon that, for instance, only caused a mild flu for the general
population but was fatal to the President of the United States could be possible in the
future (timeframe unspecified)68. None of the authors of the article were biologists, so the
article should be taken with a grain of salt, but there are enough references to the
possibility of gene-specific bioweapons from more solid sources, such as by the Red
Cross and British Medical Association, that the prospect is worth taking seriously. In our
literature search, we could not find an in-depth description of the precise possible
mechanisms or a biochemical analysis of such a hypothetical pathogen. Microbes that
affect one group more than others are common in nature, but a pathogen that exclusively
infects one group and infects close to zero of another group is very rare, mostly because
worldwide travel has spread pathogens universally and produced immune resistance in
many to all of them.

Consider if there were a massive global war and various ethnicities

unleashed bioweapons which were all targeted to kill one another, ultimately resulting in
omnicide. Or, perhaps a virus designed to attack one ethnicity might be designed in such
a way that it were possible for it to mutate to effect other ethnicities, perhaps even infecting
the ethnic group of the creators of the bioweapon. If biological minilaboratories with cheap
gene synthesis capability become universal and lack sufficient safeguards or are
hackable, this is a real possibility. Such an attack backfiring should be taken into account.
 Aside from interethnic or international warfare and religious terrorism, there is
also the possibility of even more abstract and sinister ideological threats, such as
Doomsday cults who desire the destruction of the entire population. Heaven Gate, the
suicide cult that committed mass suicide in California in 1997, anticipated the “cleansing
of the Earth” by aliens who had ascended to “a level higher than human. Perhaps if they
could have deliberately carried out such a cleansing themselves, though would have
done it. There are many examples of such cultists who get themselves into a state of
mind where the body is just a “vessel,” so engaging in mass killing would not be
construed as actually doing wrong, but rather freeing their fellow man from their “vessel”
and allowing them to “ascend to the higher level” in a “cosmic body”. People who are
not cultists (most of us, presumably) flinch away from considering such worldviews, but
they do exist among many people, and do threaten us whether we acknowledge their
existence or not.

This chapter has been a lengthy one, and we've covered many of the basic
threats from biological weapons, and the motivations which might give rise to their use.
Overall, this analysis just scratches the surface, and a more detailed, up-to-date book
length analysis is required. A very in-depth analysis will be needed to inform scientists
and policymakers of the true extent of the dangers and allow them to chart a course that
minimizes aggregate risk.

The map of biorisks

The map of global catastrophic risks connected with biological weapons and
genetic engineering
TL;DR: Biorisks could result in extinction because of multipandemic in near future and their risks is the same order
magnitude as risks of UFAI. A lot of biorisks exist, they are cheap and could happen soon.

It may be surprising that number of published research about risks of biological global
catastrophe is much less than number of papers about risks of self-improving AI. (One of
exception here is "Strategic terrorism” research parer by former chief technology officer
of Microsoft.)
It can’t be explain by the fact that biorisks have smaller probability (it will not be known
until Bostrom will write the book “Supervirus”). I mean we don’t know it until a lot of
research will be done.

Also biorisks are closer in time than AI risks and because of it they shadow AI risks,
lowering the probability that extinction will happen by means of UFAI, because it could
happen before it by means of bioweapons (e.g. if UFAI risk is 0.9, but chances that we
will die before its creation from bioweapons is 0.8, than actual AI risk is 0.18). So studying
biorisks may be more urgent than AI risks.

There is no technical problem to create new flu virus that could kill large part of human
population. And the idea of multi pandemic - that it the possibility to release 100 different
agents simultaneously - tells us that biorisk could have arbitrary high global lethality. Most
of bad things from this map may be created in next 5-10 years, and no improbable insights
are needed. Biorisks are also very cheap in production and small civic or personal biolab
could be used to create them.

May be research in estimation probability of human extinction by biorisks had been done
secretly? I am sure that a lot of analysis of biorisks exist in secret. But this means that
they do not exist in public and scientists from other domains of knowledge can’t
independently verify them and incorporate into broader picture of risks. The secrecy here
may be useful if it concerns concrete facts about how to crete a dangerous virus. (I was
surprised by effectiveness with which Ebola epidemic was stopped after the decision to
do so was made, so maybe I should not underestimate government knowledge on the
topic).

I had concerns if I should publish this map. I am not a biologist and chances that I will find
really dangerous information are small. But what if I inspire bioterrorists to create
bioweapons? Anyway we have a lot of movies with such inspiration.

So I self-censored one idea that may be too dangerous to publish and put black box
instead. I also have a section of prevention methods in the lower part of the map. All ideas
in the map may be found in wikipedia or other open sources.

The goal of this map is to show importance of risks connected with new kinds of biological
weapons which could be created if all recent advances in bioscience will be used for bad.
The map shows what we should be afraid off and try to control. So it is map of possible
future development of the field of biorisks.

Not any biocatastrophe will result in extinction, it is in the fat tail of the distribution. But
smaller catastrophes may delay other good things and wider our window of vulnerability.
If protecting measures will be developed on the same speed as possible risks we are
mostly safe. If total morality of bioscientists is high we are most likely safe too - no one
will make dangerous experiments.
Timeline: Biorisks are growing at least exponentially with the speed of Moore law in
biology. After AI will be created and used to for global government and control, biorisks
will probably ended. This means that last years before AI creation will be most dangerous
from the point of biorisks.

The first part of the map presents biological organisms that could be genetically edited for
global lethality and each box presents one scenario of a global catastrophe. While many
boxes are similar to existing bioweapons, they are not the same as not much known
bioweapons could result in large scale pandemic (except smallpox and flu). Most probable
biorisks are outlined in red in the map. And the real one will be probably not from the map
as the world bio is very large and I can’t cover it all.

The map is provided with links which are clickable in the pdf, which is
here: http://immortality-roadmap.com/biorisk.pdf

References

1. Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy. “Recipe for Destruction”. The New York Times, October 17,
2005.
2. Linster M, van Boheemen S, de Graaf M, et al. “Identification, Characterization and Natural
Selection of Mutations Driving Airborne Transmission of H5N1 Virus”. Cell. 2014.
3. Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of
Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction. Signed at
London, Moscow and Washington on 10 April 1972. Entered into force on 26 March 1975.
4. Alibek, K. and S. Handelman. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert
Biological Weapons Program in the World - Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran it. 1999.
5. Huxsoll DL, Parrott CD, Patrick WC III. "Medicine in defense against biological warfare".
JAMA. 1989;265:677–679.
6. Takafuji ET, Russell PK. "Military immunizations: Past, present and future prospects".
Infect Dis Clin North Am. 1990;4:143–157.
7. “Chemical and Biological Weapons: Possession and Programs Past and Present”, James
Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Middlebury College, April 9, 2002.
8. “Introduction to Biological Weapons”, Federation of American Scientists, official site.
9. “Anthrax Q&A: Signs and Symptoms”. Emergency Preparedness and Response. Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention. 2003.
10. Scott Shane. “Cleanup of anthrax will cost hundreds of millions of dollars”. December 18,
2012. Baltimore Sun.
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California Press.
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Atlantic, 2012.

Biopreparat
Biopreparat (Russian: Биопрепарат, "Biological substance preparation") was the Soviet
Union's major biological warfare agency from the 1970s on. It was a vast, ostensibly civilian,
network of secret laboratories, each of which focused on a different deadly bioagent. Its 30,000
employees researched and produced pathogenic weapons for use in a major war.
History
Establishment

Biopreparat was established in 1973 as a "civilian" continuation of earlier Soviet bio-warfare

programs (see Soviet biological weapons program). The project was reportedly initiated by
academician Yuri Ovchinnikov who convinced General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev that
development of biological weapons was necessary.[1] The research at Biopreparat constituted a
blatant violation by the Soviet Union of the terms of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972
which outlawed biological weapons. Its existence was steadfastly denied by Soviet officials for
decades.

Exposure of Biopreparat in the West

In April 1979, a major outbreak of pulmonary anthrax in the city of Sverdlovsk (now
Yekaterinburg) caused the deaths of 105 or more Soviet citizens. Sverdlovsk contained a
Biopreparat facility. The Soviet Union attempted to cover up reports of the incident, but details
leaked out to the West in 1980 when the German newspaper Bild Zeitung carried a story about
the incident. Moscow described allegations that the epidemic was an accident at a biological
warfare facility as "slanderous propaganda" and insisted the anthrax outbreak had been caused by
tainted meat.

The first senior Soviet biological weapons engineer to defect to the West was Vladimir
Pasechnik (1937–2001) who alerted Western intelligence in 1989 to the vast scope of Moscow's
clandestine program. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President George H. W.
Bush put pressure on Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to open up Russia's germ warfare
facilities to a team of outside inspectors. When the inspectors toured four of the sites in 1991,
they were met with denials and evasions. Production tanks, the purpose of which seemed to be to
manufacture large quantities of hazardous materials, were clean and sterile when presented to
inspectors. Laboratories had been stripped of equipment before being presented to inspectors.

Pasechnik's revelations that the program was much greater in scope than previously suspected
were confirmed in 1992 with the defection to the United States of Colonel Kanatjan Alibekov (b.
1950), the First Deputy Director of Biopreparat. Alibekov (now known as Ken Alibek) held his
role in Biopreparat from 1988 to 1992. He claimed that development of new strains of
genetically engineered weapons was still continuing.

Alibekov later wrote the book Biohazard (1999) detailing publicly his extensive inside
knowledge of the structure, goals, operations and achievements of Biopreparat. He was also
featured in the October 13, 1998 episode of Frontline (PBS TV series).

Operations
Biopreparat was a system of 18, nominally civilian, research laboratories and centers scattered
chiefly around European Russia, in which a small army of scientists and technicians developed
biological weapons such as anthrax, Ebola, Marburg virus, plague, Q fever, Junin virus, glanders,
and smallpox. It was the largest producer of weaponized anthrax in the Soviet Union and was a
leader in the development of new bioweapons technologies.

The Soviet Biological Weapons Program - A History (2012)

https://books.google.lt/books?isbn=0674065263 -

Milton Leitenberg, Raymond A Zilinskas, Jens H Kuhn - 2012 - History

Biopreparat and All-Union Research Institute of Applied Enzymology in

Vilnius Lithuanian SSR1
Tough all Biopreparat institutes where “real” work was performed were closed, a few related
specialized research institutions were not. One open Biopreparat- related institute had a particularly
vital role.
In the late 1970s, the supply of restriction enzymes, which are vital for ge ne tic engineering
work, was severely limited in the Soviet Union. Out of desperation, research-ers collected
bacteria that produced these enzymes and developed protocols for recovering and purifying
them. Institutions would exchange lists of sci-entists and the types of restriction enzymes they
were able to supply. This informal barter system enabled molecular biologists to trade with one
an-other for some of the restriction enzymes they needed.
To meet demand, Biopreparat established an enzyme development and production facility in
Vilnius, Lithuanian SSR, called All- Union Research Institute of Applied Enzymology.

Under the leadership of Arvydas Janulaitis, the institute supplied restriction enzymes and other
enzymes of importance to research laboratories and industries throughout the Soviet Union.
Biopre-parat appointed Lyudmila I. Petrova as the institute’s “curator.”
At that time, a curator supervised the institution but was not technically responsible for its work.
Petrova, a minor Biopreparat functionary, was married to the exceedingly influential A. A.
Vorobyov. As an open institute, none of its employees, besides Petrova, knew the “real” business
of its main customer. (After Lithuania regained its in de pen dence, All- Union Research
Institute of Applied Enzymology was renamed Institute of Biotechnology).

After the Soviet Union’s dissolution, Biopreparat’s primary concern was obliterating all traces of
the Soviet offensive BW program at its institutes and facilities. Vaults holding classified
documents were emptied, and the docu-ments were transported to Biopreparat headquarters or
the RF- MOD for storage, or were destroyed. Overt signs of offensive work, such as the chambers in which
scientists tested dispersion by explosion, were either disassembled or cleaned for future civilian or defensive
applications.

1
The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: a history
https://books.google.lt/books?isbn=0674065263 - Išversti šį puslapį

Milton Leitenberg, Raymond A Zilinskas, Jens H Kuhn - 2012 - History