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Automatically translated version. May contain inaccuracies compared to the original.
🧬 About the book by Annie Jacobsen “Biological War: A Scenario.” It is an imagined but very disturbing scenario of a genetically modified plague leaking from a laboratory in Siberia.
In the book the bacterium was modified so that it first caused euphoria and drove a person to seek social contact, i.e., to spread the disease. Then fever begins, blood in the cough, sepsis, and antibiotics activate additional viral genes that attack the nervous system.
The most important modern hook is AI. In Jacobsen’s scenario the pathogen is still Soviet-era, but The Economist reminds us: models trained on virology and bacteriology can lower the barrier to entry for biological weapons. In the U.S., thousands of high-level biosafety laboratories have weak federal oversight, and budget requests for biosecurity in 2025 were cut by almost half.
