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"Next Year's News This Week" Brave new world: Synthetic dna, AI Tools, and the New Era of Biowarfare By Evan Anderson _________ Why Read: The use of new technologies to develop biological weapons has been a threat for centuries. Now, that threat is at a moment of convergence. The advent of the age of affordable approaches in synthetic bio is meeting the acceleration from LLM-based gene coding head on, in the midst of the pandemocene. Read on for more about the rapidly rising threat level in biology, where it might take us, and what can be done to allay the greatest biowarfare challenge to national security ever seen. _________ A study of Disease - of Pestilences methodically prepared and deliberately launched upon man and beast - is certainly being pursued in the laboratories of more than one great country. Blight to destroy crops, Anthrax to slay horses and cattle, Plague to poison not armies but whole districts - such are the lines along which military science is remorselessly advancing. - Winston Churchill, "Shall We All Commit Suicide?" (1925) In the field of biological weapons, there is almost no prospect of detecting a pathogen until it has been used in an attack. - Barton Gellman Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. - Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), Jurassic Park
Throughout human history, countless human wars have taken countless human lives. At no point, however, has kinetic conflict ever neared the level of destruction that can be wreaked by pathogens. While chronic illness is now responsible globally for most annual deaths, it is infectious disease that historically has been the single greatest killer of humankind. Even today, one-third of annual human deaths is attributable to the pathogens that circulate in our world. In the past, pandemics were common, long-lived, and horrifically deadly. In the mid-1300s, the Black Death's decimation of more than one-half the population of Europe and one-third that of the Middle East exemplifies what a plague can do. But plague is hardly alone. Tuberculosis has effectively been an ongoing pandemic for 4,000 years. It is estimated that since 1882, over 1 billion people have died from tuberculosis infection, and 2 billion are latently infected today. That is quite the butcher's bill for mycobacterium tuberculosis. (Another mycobacterium, leprae, causes leprosy.) Given the level of danger posed to human health, one would rightfully expect that pathogens would be treated by humans with the utmost, diligent care and respect. They are not. |
