Russia’s Plague Mystery and the Coming Age of Bioweapons

Today, a Russian plague mystery and the future of bio-weapons.

In January 2023, a sheesh-jaw a scientist who served as Joe Biden's COVID-sar was approached

after a meeting in the White House situation room.

The situation, officials told him, was grave.

Some intelligence officials were seeing bio-weapons research explode around the world,

especially among our geopolitical adversaries, including Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea.

If these states successfully built a weapon, the Biden officials asked, what could we do

to protect ourselves?

And what should we do now to get ahead of that risk?

Now three years later, there are at least two reasons why this conversation seems unusually

inefficient.

The first reason is that AI may pose an extreme bioresque, as expertise in manipulating

viruses and bacteria becomes the sort of thing an average person can look up on open-weight

models as easily as asking Kimmy or Claude to summarize a paper.

The second is that recent news out of Russia finds that a mysterious death occurred at a

Russian or Siberian biolab, an international incident that triggered fears of a new pandemic.

During the JHA, it's not surprising that we're in a moment of elevated fear about the risk

of states or non-state actors vibe-coding or whipping up bio-weapons.

Think about the history of modern science in the last 100 years.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, chemistry took great leaps forward, including the

extraordinary achievement of fixing nitrogen from the air to make fertilizer.

But soon after, in the 1910s, the same scientist Fritz Haber, who fixed nitrogen, also turned

his science into a weapon, as Germany deployed fatal chemical weapons on its adversaries

in World War I.

Then in the 1920s and 1930s, the hotspot of scientific achievement shifted from chemistry

to physics, where scientists cracked open the secrets of the quantum world.

One decade later, they used that science to build another weapon, the atomic bomb, in

yet another world war.

And now, in the 21st century, it's not chemistry or physics, but rather biology that is in

the spotlight.

From CRISPR to mRNA drugs to cancer therapies and GLP ones, we are clearly and blessedly

in an age of wonder in biology and the life sciences.

But the modern history of science teaches us that horrors often follow wonders.

Seeing in this framework, if the biological breakthroughs of the last few decades become

agents of war in the next few decades, that would not be an abnormal break from history.

It would be the continuation of history.

And of course, that is the scariest part.

Today's guest is Ashish Jha.

We talk about the Russian plague, the state of bio-eapons research around the world, how

and why AI makes this work more dangerous by making the science of manipulating biology

more democratic, the optimistic argument that bio-eapons might not be as dangerous as

many people think, and what we should do now.

Not only at the level of states and societies, but the level of families.

I'm Derek Thompson.

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Ashishcha, welcome to the show.

Derek Thompson, thanks for having me here.

Let's begin in Russia, a 28 year old woman working at a laboratory in Siberia died last

week of mysterious disease.

What do we know about what happened to her?

Yeah, Derek.

Unfortunately, we know very little.

What the Russian authorities have told us is now they're saying they don't think it was

plague, even though there were reports that she had died of plague.

They say they don't actually know why she died.

And a 28 year old woman, who's otherwise healthy, dying of pneumonia is pretty unusual.

The fact that she worked in a lab that had a long history of biological agent manipulation,

you can call it biological weapons, is concerning.

So I would say we know very little about exactly what happened to her and what the Russian

authorities have told us is not super reassuring to.

You use the word plague and sometimes that word is used generically to mean a disease

that kills lots of people.

But in this case, it's used specifically to refer to a very particular disease.

Can you just tell me a little bit about what that disease is and why people even thought

that this was the cause of death?

Yeah, so the plague is actually a specific disease.

It's caused by a bacterium called the irsenia pestis.

It is being a cause of human pandemics throughout human history, right?

And the black death and in the middle ages, it was pretty devastating.

It would kill a third half of the population.

The good news is we have antibiotics against it.

And so that's why it is no longer quite a scary even the word, of course, has taken on

a much broader meaning.

This specific lab was part of a network of labs in Russia called the anti-plague network

because plague occurs naturally in Siberia as it does, by the way, in parts of the US

Southwest and other places.

And the story, at least in the first couple of days after she died, was that she was exposed

to the plague bacteria and die from that.

I think one thing that confused me and confused other people is that on the one hand, Russia

is saying, oh, we've got this covered.

This wasn't a death from plague, nothing to see here.

But at the same time, there's reports that there was a quarantine of roughly 200 people.

There were security officials that were sent to this biolab.

Why such an extraordinary response?

If at the same time the government is saying this is essentially a nothing burger.

Yeah.

Well, that's the disc, right?

So if you just think of it as, okay, a 28-year-old woman dies of pneumonia, that's tragic,

but again, very unusual for a 28-year-old to die of pneumonia.

But then you don't generally put hundreds of people into quarantine.

You don't put several hospitals into lockdown and you don't send security officials to that

city to manage it.

None of that is consistent with either a simple lab accident or just a healthy young woman

dying of pneumonia.

All of that, of course, in the context of a lab that has a rich history of working on biological

weapons.

You put all that together and you understand why both US government officials have been

very concerned, why I have been very concerned, that there is something else that we are not

being told.

Yeah.

In the process of my reporting for this episode, I spoke to the MIT biologist, Kevin Ezvelt,

who estimated that, according to his analysis of historical mortality rates, a lab infection

here is something like 30 to 300 times more likely than an unrelated fatal pneumonia case

in a young woman like this, just as you're saying.

You know, death from plague in a healthy 28 year old woman is basically unheard of, especially

if she's in a lab, which theoretically has a little bit of antibiotics in the backroom.

Why does it matter in this case that it was a lab infection?

Why is that a particularly frightening or important possibility?

Yeah.

So it's not just a lab that, quote unquote, works on plague.

I think you have to ask, like, what exactly does it do?

If we go back 20, 30 years to the fall of the Soviet Union and some of the lab workers

and lab directors who defected around that time, they made it very clear.

Our intelligence community also assesses that these labs are working on manipulating or

modifying the plague, sorry, bacteria, your senior, to be either antibiotic resistant or

to be more deadly.

We don't know if that's what was happening here.

But again, if you think about a 28 year old woman, she was almost surely vaccinated against

the plague.

There is a vaccine against the plague that Russia uses.

I am confident they had tons and tons of antibiotics.

If she actually was a lab worker there and got exposed, she would have started antibiotics

immediately.

And the chances that she would have died of this is extraordinarily low.

So it raises the question of, was this a modified bug?

Was it something completely unrelated that we don't know what exactly is going on here?

I think that's the thing that really heightens concern.

Just to be clear about this lab before we broaden the story and talk about this dawn

of a new age of bio-weapons research, you're saying there's a possibility that this Russian

lab was engaged in both legitimate research on the plague and some kind of work on tweaking

plague in order to make it more transmissible and more mortal.

I mean, are we essentially just guessing here because at the end of the day, it's Russia,

it's a big black box, and this is Siberia, which is a part of the world that is sometimes

synonymous with the middle of nowhere.

Or do we have a sense of what this lab is actually up to?

Yeah.

So I would say obviously we don't know for sure, but it is not just a random guess.

So let me lay out the case for why this specific lab raises concerns among people who have

been paying attention.

First and foremost, I'll make sort of three or four points on this.

One is Russia has a long history or the Soviets had a long history of bio-weapons development

and this lab was part of the network of labs that were involved in bio-weapons development.

So there is that history here.

The second piece of information is that in the last few years, our national threat assessment,

our national intelligence agencies, have publicly stated in reports.

And there's lots of other evidence that Russia has been substantially expanding its bio-weapons

programs.

Now, I don't want to connect it to because I don't know, and what we don't know is, is

that substantial expansion include this lab?

We don't know.

But given the history of this lab, given the substantial expansion by Russia and bio-weapons,

one has to be concerned that this lab is part of that expansion.

And I think that is why this lab particularly has raised concerns and why Russia particularly

has raised concerns because basically we think there are four countries in the world that

have been actively working on biological agents, tool use programs, whatever term you want

to use.

And Russia is clearly one of them and maybe the most prominent of them all.

What does Zoom out now and consider the broader state of bio-weapons in the 21st century?

You've told me a remarkable story about leaving the White House situation room in January

2023 and hearing something quite alarming from administration officials.

Tell me what happened.

Yeah.

So if you go back to January 2023, that was during COVID and it was during the big outbreak

in China when China had let go of its hero COVID policy.

And I was walking out of a secure briefing.

And the president's Homeland Security Advisor.

So the national security team at the White House reports up to two people.

The national security advisor who was Jake Sullivan and the Homeland Security Advisor who

was a Lissur would Randall.

Liz's job was to think about security for the homeland, for the U.S.

And I had become very close colleagues friends and she basically put her hand on my arm and

said, hey, can I get your help on something that's been keeping a lot of us awake at night?

She has a lot of things that might keep her awake at night and so that's not the beginning

of a great conversation.

Of course, I said, yeah, her next question was remind me of your security clearance.

So I reminded her of my security clearance.

And that began a deep dive into learning about what at that time of course was a confirmation,

confidential information, secure information.

Now a lot of this has gotten much more public about what we were learning about a whole new

generation of biological threats that were being developed by bad actors.

So I should say state actors who we worried about.

And our intelligence agencies were particularly concerned about Russia, China, Iran and North

Korea.

All of this is detailed in various national threat assessments that are public.

And what we were seeing were things that were really unusual, very different than the kinds

of biological weapons developments that we had seen.

The one thing I will say about this area, because if you think back to that time January

of 2023, this is not AI fuel, right?

Like I think chat GPT had been out for like a couple of months.

So this was not being driven by AI.

This was really much broader than that.

And the question that I was asked to be to sort of help answer was that if these things

sort of be used against us, what would our capabilities be around detection?

And I worked on that.

But the big picture point here is that that really shifted my thinking about the global

risk landscape that we had around biological threats.

You told me a really interesting story about the history of modern science that connected

developments in 19th century chemistry, to developments in 20th century physics, to developments

in 21st century biology, and put these all on a string that were the, where the connective

string in fact was weapons.

Can you give me this sort of brief theory of history because I found it both incredibly

memorable and also quite scary?

Yeah.

So if you think back to the three basic sciences that we all learned in high school, chemistry,

physics, biology, obviously humans have been studying all three of those for millennia.

But around the turn of the 20th century, late 1800s into early 1900s, we saw real breakthroughs

in chemical engineering, the ability to manipulate chemistry, not just study it, but to actually

manipulate it.

Actually, there was a German scientist who won the Nobel Prize for its haver who really

did some of that fundamental work.

Ten years later, after his fundamental work, we saw the Germans use chemical weapons

in World War I.

So chemical engineering comes around the turn of the century and 10 to 15 years later,

we see the use of chemical weapons.

Fast forward 1920s into 1930s, fundamental work in engineering of physics, right, you

know, by Niels Bohr and Max Blank and all these amazing scientists.

And we learned how to manipulate physics.

And about 10 to 15 years later, we saw the use of nuclear weapons in World War II.

Okay, fast forward now to the third of those three natural sciences biology.

I would say it was about 10 or so years ago, maybe 15, depending on when you want to,

when people like Jennifer Doudna, who invented CRISPR and and Caitlin Caraco, who also

won the Nobel Prize, who did the mRNA work.

And these people, what these brilliant scientists did was essentially taught us how to engineer

biology.

But for centuries, we had learned how to study and read biology.

But only in the last 10, 15 years have we actually been able to learn how to engineer

biology.

It would be a historical anomaly if we did not see the use of bio weapons in the upcoming

years, not decades, but years.

That is what history has taught us that engineering of natural sciences inevitably leads to the

use of weapons.

I would hope that we can break that string, but that's a, that's, you know, in my mind

that we would have to be lucky in order to break that string.

Maybe one more point on that, Derek, sorry, just biological engineering also arrives at

a time when something else has arrived, which is artificial intelligence.

And I actually think that accelerates the risk not diminishes it.

The scientists that you talked about, who came up with these chemistry breakthroughs in

the early 20th century, they were also military inventors, right?

Fritz Haber came up with the fixing of nitrogen, but also, I believe, built chemical weapons

for the Germans in World War I, Leo Salard and Oppenheimer were quantum physicists who

also contributed to the creation of the atomic bomb.

And is not the case as far as I'm aware, the Jennifer Daugner and Caitlin Carrico are

busy building biological weapons on purpose.

Someone can steal their work and manipulate it in a way that creates a biological weapon,

but it is certainly not clear that they are engaged in that activity right now.

Is that the same?

Is that equally true for these other countries that you named, Russia, Iran, North Korea,

China?

Do we have an inkling, a fear that the Jennifer Daugner's of those respective states are

also working closely with the state to translate new science into new weapons?

Yeah, so this is a great point, by the way.

And of course, and again, I've been mentioned from the specb of her Jennifer Daugner.

No one is cascading a specific Jennifer Daugner on this show.

Right, right.

And so the issue and the difference may be here that you actually needed that deep level

of scientific expertise that only the breakthrough scientists, the people who had actually done

that breakthrough work, could have brought to bear both for in the world of chemistry and

physics.

There are reasons to believe that you don't have to have a Jennifer Daugner level expert,

not that places like China don't, China has amazing people, I don't know quite the same

level.

My point is that with the proliferation of knowledge in a way that didn't exist 100

years ago or 60 years ago, the ability to copy the learnings of Jennifer Daugner, or

Caitlin Kerrick, or all of these great scientists is very different today.

And there is plenty of data to suggest that great scientists in countries are indeed working

with the military in those countries in these programs.

What do we know about what's motivating Russia, China, North Korea, Iran to build biological

weapons?

And what's the most frightening thing that they could be capable of because of those motivations?

Yeah.

So, and I'm going to actually split those four countries into two buckets.

What the threat assessment says is that Russia and North Korea clearly buy weapons, like

undoubtedly.

The threat assessment puts China and Iran in slightly different category, which says

they have a lot of dual use programs that we know less about in terms of whether they're

true biological weapons programs or not.

To me, that's what the threat assessment says.

I'm just going to be very honest to me, that's a distinction without a difference.

Like the truth here is that almost all of biology is dual use.

And when you have people working on manipulating biology in a way that could very quickly be

turned into biological weapons, essentially, you're there.

You don't have to have the industrial scale of production that you did with a nuclear bomb

or chemical weapons because you can build biological weapons in a lab and biology itself

replicating.

So you don't need massive amounts of material if you can infect a small number of people,

it can spread very rapidly.

Okay.

So now, coming to your question on motivation.

I don't think we have, or at least I don't have a deep understanding of exactly what is

motivating each of these places for Russia.

I think there has been a view that they might use these biological agents in as a part

of a war in Eastern Europe, if there is an attempt to kind of get back some of the former

Soviet countries into their, into their fold that they wouldn't be opposed to and they

would not, it would not be something that would not be willing, it would not be a red line

that he wouldn't cross.

So I think that's the concern.

I mean, I talk to friends and security people in Eastern Europe like Poland and Estonia,

that's their concern around Russian by-weapons.

North Korea, the concern there has been that you can literally put biological weapons on

balloons and fly them over the border and release them.

And obviously, the South Koreans have been very concerned about this for a long time and

have been paying very close attention to that issue.

Iran is interesting to me because obviously Iran has been in the news.

They have had a long interest in weapons of mass destruction.

They've been obviously trying to build a nuclear weapon.

I see biological weapons almost sort of as a cheap person's nuclear weapon in the sense

that you don't need the infrastructure, you don't need the set of resources.

We know that Iran has had a specific lab that was working on quote unquote tool use programs.

That lab run by the IRGC was bombed during our bombing back in the spring.

I don't know, and I don't know if our intelligence officials know, I don't know what has happened

to that lab.

But that concerns me the fact that we may not know.

And China is to me the most interesting country because obviously, and I have said this many

times to public, I do not think that some morning Xi Jinping is going to wake up and decide

to use a bioweapon.

I just think that's extraordinarily unlikely.

I'm not a China expert.

And so what motivates their building of this program is unclear to me outside of it could

be a part of a multi-modal attack maybe around Taiwan or something else.

But I have to say that my understanding of their motivations is more limited.

Two follow-ups to that last comment.

The first question is, does the US have what a Chinese national security adviser or the

Chinese equivalent of a Xi's jaw would call a dual use program?

So the official, and I will tell you what I know about this, the official stance of the

US government is we don't have an offensive biological program.

I don't believe we have a dual use program in any substantive way.

We have lots of defensive biological programs that one could misuse for offensive purposes.

But the stance of the US has been that we don't need one.

And that's because we have so many other military capabilities that if somebody were to attack

us, there is very little for us to be gained by using a biological weapon.

We could strike back using lots and lots of other capabilities.

I'm not a biologist.

I certainly don't work in an advanced biolab, but I can imagine an American national security

person saying we needed to see COVID to build the COVID vaccine.

We need to understand super COVID in order to build the super COVID vaccine.

We need to understand super plague, some bio-enhanced plague in order to build the vaccine against

that.

And there's something interesting, which is that we don't have an offensive program.

But I can imagine a world in which a defensive program designed exclusively with the intent

to build bio-weapons, keep them in the lab, and then build vaccines that can protect people

from those bio-weapons, would nonetheless be what an outsider would define as a dual

use program.

Does the US have that?

Well, look, we have the SL3 and the SL4 labs.

These are the highest security labs.

They work with dangerous pathogens.

What are they doing with dangerous pathogens?

Exactly what you describe, which is they are working with dangerous pathogens to build

medical countermeasures.

I think of it as a little differently than when I think about the dual use program in Iran,

for instance, where, again, what our intelligence agencies have said publicly, they were

doing the kind of research that would lead very easily to an offensive program.

I would say that is not the kind of research we are doing in these labs.

We really are working with dangerous pathogens.

And, again, under these very tight security controls to understand them better and to build

medical countermeasures better.

So you mentioned BSL4.

And BSL4 is biosecurity level 4, which is the security level necessary to work with the

most dangerous pathogens for the purpose, ideally, of developing, as you call them, medical

countermeasures.

So either medicine or vaccines.

Have there been efforts to ban this kind of work internationally, similar to, let's

say, nuclear arms measures between the US and Soviet Union, or something like the Montreal

Protocol, which bans dangerous chemicals, creating holes in the ozone layer at an international

level based on a collective understanding of the science.

And do we trust our counterparties enough to sign a treaty that bans this kind of work,

even if we can't perfectly verify that they're not working on their own equivalent of BSL4

labs, too?

Yeah.

Great question.

So I'm going to answer that question in two ways.

First, there's something called the BioWeapons Convention, Biological Weapons Convention,

BWC.

That's been around for 70 or 80 years.

And basically, all these countries have signed on saying we're not going to build biological

weapons.

There's no verification mechanism.

And my view is it's great to have a convention that for which there's no verification mechanism

and basically you really can't rely on it at all.

I don't think that it's useful.

I also don't think there's an easy way to do verification for it.

But that has existed.

And obviously, people believe in that convention.

But I don't think we believe the US government has set on multiplication that we believe

countries have violated that.

But there are no consequences.

So having just a convention, in my view, without verification, without any teeth, without

the ability to send inspectors in just doesn't do much good.

US have outlaps.

So let's actually talk about those labs.

No one keeps track of BSL3 and BSL4 labs.

These are the two most, right?

BSL3 and level four.

The most two most interest.

Nobody keeps track of them.

My best assessment tracking this over the last few years is that the number of BSL3 and

BSL4 labs in the world have doubled in the last five, seven years.

There's just a lot more of them.

And they're not all in the US or even in China, they are all over the world.

And no one tracks them.

They're supposed to be, they're these published safety protocols that you're supposed to

have.

No one verifies whether people are using those safety protocols or adhering to them.

And one of the things that I have actually called for, and I said this when I was in

the Biden administration, and I've been much more focal in the last couple of years,

is a great place for us to work with China.

We did this with the Soviets, right, where we worked with them on nuclear safety.

And I actually think we should put together a team.

We should come up with some rules and basically we should create a global mechanism for inspection

that actually goes into these labs and looks for safety protocols and looks at safety is

actually being adhered to.

This would be a fantastic way for us to work with China, maybe even Russia, but we need

that and we don't have that.

Most of these labs are doing more or less whatever they think without any oversight.

One thing I don't understand and I'm happy to not understand it is how in a world with

more and more DSL for labs in various countries that are not exactly known for their operational

intelligence or their operational excellence.

Like I don't know a whole lot about Russia.

I'm just guessing that they don't have the same operational excellence at their BSL

for labs as the US has.

It's a poorer country.

It's a tyranny.

It's just a very different place.

Sorry, it's all the Russian listeners here.

It's kind of amazing to me that there hasn't been more catastrophic accidents.

I mean, if you were talking about a fundamental unit of danger that is not like enriched uranium,

it seems very difficult to enrich uranium to the scale necessary to build an atomic bomb.

It doesn't seem that difficult to have a quantity of plague and then have someone say I want

to start another lab to study plague and develop offensive and defensive measures around

this plague and then to just distribute some of that plague to the other lab in a vial.

Are you sometimes happily surprised by how few accidents there have been so far?

As I'm knocking on wood, not jinx us, given that we've seen an acceleration of these

kind of labs throughout countries that we, I would just think would make more mistakes

than like the most conscientious group of scientists.

Yes.

So here's, first of all, I have been pleasantly surprised and here's my explanation for why.

First of all, I suspect there have been a lot more accidents than we're aware of these

places don't report the accidents.

And maybe a few people die, maybe a bunch of people get sick and as what just happened

in Siberia, but maybe it's in a place where they're able to kind of clamp down on it a

lot more.

Nothing has gotten out.

Obviously, there are lots of people who think there was an exception to that from the

one institute of virology back in 2019.

So and again, and I think, I believe, and I have said this now publicly to a lot of people

getting very mad at me that I think more likely than I did was a lab leak out of Wuhan.

But look, the truth is that these things happen with some frequency and we have been very,

very lucky.

And I think there have been two things that have kind of driven that and I think they're

both changing.

I mean, one is engineering pathogens in ways that make them more transmissible is very

hard, that make them more deadly is not quite as hard, but still pretty difficult.

And the level of expertise one needed to have was quite substantial.

You needed large teams of PhDs with great resources doing it.

And that was not widely available.

So yes, you had BSL for a lot.

I bet there have been accidents.

I bet blood workers have died.

I bet you and I just don't know about it.

As I said in that last phrase, I alluded to the idea that I think that is now changing

because of artificial intelligence.

And so I think the idea that what we haven't seen in the last five, seven years, you

know, sort of the past performance doesn't predict future performance.

I think that is never been more true than in this issue.

Right.

What I hear you saying is that expertise has been the bottleneck to stop a disaster from

happening.

And therefore, it would be quite dangerous if that bottleneck was cleared by say some

technology that democratized extraordinary expertise in the realm of biology dot, dot,

dot.

AI in 30 seconds.

That's right.

At the risk of derailing this conversation, which I do not want to do, let's just limit

this answer to two minutes.

Why do you think COVID was more likely a lab leak than a wet market event?

Yeah.

Look, I've debated this now with like Andy Rasmussen and others.

My view on this is I actually initially did think it was much more likely to have been

a natural spillover because most outbreaks in the history have been natural spillovers.

I think there's a bunch of information that points to the lab.

The fact that first of all, this lab was working on very, very similar viruses.

The fact that a lot of the information about exactly what experiments were being done,

what labs, what viruses were there, all of that was taken down in late 2019.

The fact that every attempt that WHO and others made to try to get into the lab to speak

to workers were largely blocked or obfuscated in ways that made it very difficult for anybody

to assess.

Then there's just a lot of intelligence out there about the outbreak that for me doesn't

mean I am sure it was a lab leak.

One of the things I say is that anybody who tells you they're sure is selling you something.

But I went from 80-20, it was likely a natural to 80-20, it was likely a lab leak.

I don't know for sure, but I have just seen so much evidence that points in that direction

that that is where I have landed.

But I could easily still be proven wrong if we get more definitive information.

I just worry that I'm not sure we will.

The last point I'll make on this is this has also gotten so incredibly insanely partisanized

that it's just very hard to have a conversation about this without everybody suggesting that

you have a partisan motivation for saying you're on one side or the other.

I think I basically agree with you.

I think the balance of circumstantial evidence in my mind points to a lab leak and if presented

with some slam dunk evidence that it was a wet market spillover, I would say, oh,

okay, I was wrong.

Yeah, I think this might be one of those events that we never truly get to the bottom of,

which is itself, I think quite unfortunate, quite scary because COVID was an unbelievably

significant event, I think, in the history of the 2020s.

I mean, not just in terms of the millions that it killed, but I think if you look at inflation

level of social, levels of socialization and self-isolation changes to the economy,

we are still living in many ways in a COVID age.

It's quite remarkable to me that the big bang moment is very much like the OG big bang

moment.

We know that it happened, but we actually, we still don't know why it happened or what

caused it.

And that's a, as an explainer journalist, that's certainly a matter of deep frustration.

Turning the page or at least driving the car back onto the main highway here, I want

to talk about how AI changes the picture of what you're describing.

You argue or I hear you arguing that AI is destroying the barriers or a critical barrier

that has made biological weapons so difficult to tweak in a way that makes them more transmissible

or more deadly.

As specifically as you can be here, what exactly does AI give someone trying to manipulate

a virus or bacteria that wasn't possible five years ago?

Yeah.

Good question.

So I see this in several ways.

Several types of knowledge that AI is now able to give you.

So like people still ask a question, like, can a kid in a, you know, in a basement build

a bioweapon?

Like, no, like I think that's just, I don't think so.

I think it's very, very hard.

But the level of expertise one needed to essentially work with and manipulate viruses was very,

very substantial.

Like you didn't just need a PhD.

I mean, you had to be a very well trained virologist.

Now I don't think you need quite that depth of expertise.

If you understand a good amount about biology, let's give a master's, maybe you have a PhD,

AI will give you a lot of the capabilities and give you a lot of the information you

need to close that knowledge gap.

There's a second part that is also important, which is you need a team of people because

to build biological weapons, it's not like you need one kind of expert.

You need multiple types of experts.

And it was hard to pull all those different types of experts together.

Again, I think what AI is allowing is allowing people who are pretty smart, who are well trained

in biology to learn about a whole bunch of things that are adjacent to their feet.

This is something that I think often, and this came up a lot in COVID, right?

Like, everybody was a COVID expert.

Actually, there was almost no one who was a COVID expert.

There were virologists who really understood the virus, or immunologists who really understood.

And so the deeper you go in expert into expertise, you start realizing that you actually need

to understand things at a much deeper level.

Like one of the things I try to do because I was not a virologist or an immunologist, is

I try to talk to the best in the country and synthesize that information.

And that was what I was trying to bring to the table.

That is what AI, I think, increasingly allows people to do is synthesize expertise, fill

in gaps in expertise.

You don't need the same number of people.

You don't need the person leading it to be an op-in-himer with deep, deep, deep physics

knowledge or deep biological knowledge.

And here's the other part.

Because it has democratized this.

And the other part that has happened is the ability to manipulate biology, biological

engineering, has just become really ubiquitous.

If you remember, the story I started with in the White House was in 2023 before AI,

engineering, biological engineering tools are becoming pretty commonplace.

We have autonomous labs that can, you just upload instructions on experiments and it'll

run them.

And all of that means lots more people are trying.

Like I don't think lots of people are trying to build atomic bombs.

Like I don't know, I'm not an expert on that, but I suspect it's not a lot of people.

Because it's really hard.

People perceive, and I think to some extent rightly, that AI has made biological weapons

much easier.

The problem with that is now lots and lots of people, state and non-state actors are trying.

And I think it's still difficult for any one person.

But when I speak to people who are like, think about this all the time as scientists.

And when I ask them, what are the chances that no one will be successful in the next six,

12, 18 months?

Pretty much everyone agrees.

The chances that no one will be successful is close to zero.

There are lots of similarities between this conversation that we're having about bio-risk

and the conversation that I had with Alex Stamos about cyber-risk.

Because one of the points that he emphasized over and over again is that one way that

open-weight models in particular could be particularly dangerous for cyber hacking is

that cyber hacking used to require enormous teams of software developers.

And some people in those teams just, they were criminals.

They just weren't very scrupulous.

They weren't very conscientious.

Maybe they would just like talk to some CIA informant because they didn't know how to

shut their mouth.

And then suddenly boom, the cyber hacking network has been infiltrated and shut down.

He said, with these new tools though, it's creating more one-man bands or one-woman bands

where it previously required the team of 20, but now someone can do it on their own or

with a much smaller team which reduces the risk that law enforcement stops them.

Turning this back to you though, if expertise is becoming cheap and democratized, what's

still genuinely difficult in the construction of a bio-weapon?

I don't want to turn this into how to make a bio-weapon 101 here, but I presume that's

not how this conversation is going to be going to go or how it's going to be used.

But I still want to understand for the purpose of blocking efforts, what is genuinely hard

to attain, to come into ownership of if you are the sort of madman trying to build a dangerous

bio-weapon?

Yeah, that's a great question.

Obviously, by the way, I'm not a scientist, a biological scientist who kind of works at

this at the frontier.

The conversations I have, and if this is a place where scientists really disagree and

I actually worry that there is a lack of imaginative thinking on this.

A lot of virologists are like, oh, this is too hard, and it is very hard.

Like manipulating viruses in a way that, and I go back to a line that a friend of mine,

Tony Fauci, often said to me when we would talk about these topics, he'd say, nature is

the greatest bio-terrorist.

Nature is constantly running experiments, and the idea that humans can outdo nature on

this seems extremely unlikely.

I think Tony was very skeptical of the ability of people to build bio-weapons, and Tony

said very smart guys, so I take that with some seriousness.

What is really difficult about this are several things.

One is you are kind of in some ways out-compete nature.

You're trying to manipulate, that's why I said earlier, it's very, very hard to build

biological agents that are more transmissible, because essentially evolution selects for

transmissibility.

It is easier to select for things or build things that are more deadly.

You have to have a pretty deep understanding of how to do that and how to make sure that

those things still continue to replicate.

You can build a super deadly virus that kills one person, but so quickly that person doesn't

spread it, you've killed one person, you don't have a bio-weapon.

There are still these technical issues that are there to going back to your cyber experience

or analogy.

Because you needed large numbers of people working on this, it allowed our intelligence agencies

to know who they were, to track them, to understand what was happening.

The teams have gotten much smaller.

I think from the conversations I've been having with people who work on the biological frontier

of this, they feel like the barriers are falling.

To pick up on the Tony Fauci theory here, knowing nothing about the history of bio-weapons,

but are the cases in the last, I'm guessing not more than 100 years, when something that

could plausibly be called a bio-weapon, a human-manipulated virus, bacteria, pathogen, was used

to kill not one person, but many, many people.

But are the canonical cases of bio-weapons being successfully grown and deployed to kill

at mass-scale?

Yeah, that's a very good question.

There have been, obviously, most of this stuff has been, it's been hard to nail down,

which ones exactly were.

I mean, actually, I think, for instance, in Russia, there was, from a lab in 1979, a release

of anthrax that at least many people at that time thought was manipulated, that killed 60,

70 people, the Russian government, of course, soviet government denied it until the Soviet

Union fell.

That comes to mind, there have been experiments inside the United States that have remained

classified where there were, there were work happening on agents, again, not bio-weapons,

that where there were lab accidents and people died.

There aren't very many throughout history of large-scale, thousands and thousands of people

dying from bio-weapons, but I think there are enough in history that people look at those

instances and situations and worry that the barriers that have kept them small and kept

the outbreak small are dissolving.

Yeah, just in a quick search, it seems like, for example, around World War II, Japan targeted

Chinese cities by dropping ceramic bombs that were filled with plague-infected fleas,

and that these, this might have been one of the cases where biology was used in order

to kill the most people.

But that clearly isn't manipulated biology.

You're putting fleas already infected with a natural, naturally existing plague inside

of a bomb and then dropping it on people.

Horendis, but not a manipulated bio-weapon.

How many biologists that you've spoken to agree with take seriously the Fauci thesis

here, which is that, yes, of course, we should worry about bio-weapons, we should worry

about people trying to kill people.

That's a good thing to worry about.

But bio-weapons, manipulated biology, is so much harder than most people think that the

idea that it's a top-order risk to the world can be overrated because it's just so hard

evolutionarily to produce a virus that is, as you said, both highly transmissible and

highly fatal so that you are killing people, but after a lag so that they infect many

people before they pass away.

What is the possibility that Fauci's right, that bio-weapons really are actually successful

bio-weapons are much, much harder to build and deploy than many people think?

Yeah.

If you go back and whether you use the Japanese example more or two, there's like, you

know, there have been a lot of cults, Om Shorikyo used, I think it was an attenuated anthrax,

obviously the anthrax of Tassin United States.

None of them were really manipulated in a way because it was very hard to manipulate things,

right?

That's the biological engineering has become a reality only in the last 10 years.

So what I say to Tony is you're absolutely right that throughout history that has been

extraordinarily hard, but two things have changed.

It's sort of like, you know, again, that just because it hasn't been true in the past

doesn't mean it will not be in the future.

So again, I think if you ask Tony Fauci, he will, I suspect, continue to say it's extremely

hard.

I'm not saying it's easy, by the way, and I'll come back to that in a second.

Again, there are, I think, kind of traditional virologists who look at this and say, boy, this

would be very, very difficult to do.

The two counterpoints I would make are one, this issue that biological engineering is getting

easier and easier.

10 years ago, if you had said to me, we're going to take cancer cells out of somebody's

tumor and we're going to build an mRNA vaccine specifically to that cancer.

It sounds a little science fiction either, Derek.

We can now, right?

Not perfectly, not every time, but we can.

I believe you're referring to the Balachandron lab.

We've had them on the show.

Yeah, it's really amazing.

These are secondary vaccines using mRNA to prevent the recurrence of pancreatic cancer or

other cancers.

Exactly.

It's unbelievable.

That kind of technology, or if you think about, look at all the biotech companies that are

working on cancer therapies, so much of it is like, can we target the cancer cell but

leave the healthy cell alone?

That set of capabilities just did not exist.

And so it was true that in that world, it was always going to be Mother Nature that was

going to win.

In this world, where tools have become ubiquitous, the ability to synthesize DNA has become ubiquitous.

The thing that was really missing in my mind was know how.

You now have tools, you now have materials, synthetic biology.

And now, finally, with AI, you have the third missing piece, which is know how.

You put those together.

Might it be that we will not see the deployment and use of biological agents against a human

population in the next five years?

Yeah.

That could happen.

Boy, that would be very lucky.

Two more points to make about AI before we get to the question of what do we do about

this.

I think it's important to say here that the US frontier labs, open AI and Anthropic,

often have very strict limits to what kind of prompts you can successfully give them

to get back any information about biology.

Dario Amade and Anthropic has said in many occasions, I would much rather deny a science

student the ability to learn something about the pancreas than accidentally be the cause

of someone learning how to create some pancreatic infection at scale as a bio weapon.

So they are, according to some people, over cautious in shutting down certain prompts

of biology.

But that's not true for all of the open weight models.

And I believe you mentioned to me in a pre-interview that, you know, Kimi, which comes from the AI

company moonshot, is significantly less restrictive.

You can ask the questions, you can change the weights and it can give you answers that

are in some cases right at the level of the sophistication of the up to date, Claude

and Chatchee team models.

But in addition to that, in an essay that you wrote in stat, you cited a study where researchers

found that they could successfully order the raw material in order to create some kind

of bio weapon.

And this I think is particularly important that we're combining what's frightening here

is we're combining open weight expertise and in some cases, not in the frustrations

around the ability to order the raw materials of viruses and bacteria.

Tell me a little bit about that study that you wrote about in stat and why it's so important.

Yeah.

And by the way, that was done by Kevin S. Velt who you mentioned earlier from MIT.

So what Kevin did, and by the way, what he did, he actually informed the FBI, the Boston

Office of the FBI.

Professor at MIT that he was going to do this just because he did not want to do anything

illegal or at least wanted that.

And then he ordered snippets of the 1918 influenza virus.

This is what's called a select agent, meaning you can't build it.

It's illegal to build it if we see a version of it.

It's all, you know, it brings law enforcement in.

And essentially he took the virus split into 38 pieces and ordered it up from companies

around the world.

He actually went one step further.

He ordered it to post office boxes.

He ordered it with fake names, things that you would think would trigger a concern.

It's one thing if it's Professor Kevin S. Velt at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And 36 of the 38 orders were filled.

And he wrote about it.

Obviously, he didn't do anything dangerous with it.

And that was like three years ago.

Those, okay.

And so now there's a whole push to like we need more restrictions on the law.

And I think that's fine.

But this stuff has gotten global.

Like you can order stuff from India.

You can order stuff from China.

Are we going to restrict and really tightly monitor what?

And by the way, those are American scientists.

Like what about scientists working in other countries?

How do we restrict their ability to get access to this?

I just think my view is people are still talking about restrictions screening.

I'm fine with that.

To me, the cat is mostly out of the bag here.

We're not going to be able to keep this under control.

Right.

The fear essentially, just to recapitulate here, the fear is not just that someone at MIT

does this.

It's that someone in Kazakhstan could do this.

It's that someone in, let's say, the state of Georgia in order to create a bio weapon,

to hurt the Russians that they're in some kind of interstate conflict with, unleash something

that then becomes a global pandemic.

You could have interstate relations that have nothing to do with the US that nonetheless

pose a threat to American families because of the nature of transmissibility and the nature

of viruses and these kind of bacteria.

I think that leads us to the final category here, which is not just how scared should we

be, but what should we do?

Let's say you're back in the White House, 2029.

President gives you 10 to 20 billion dollars to protect America against this new age of

AI-enabled biological weapons.

What are the first three things you do?

Well, actually, I will say when I was in the White House, we started worrying about this

and I talked to President Biden about protecting America.

Now again, my level of concern was lower than, because now we're talking about 2023 into

24, where the AI risks were not quite as substantial as they are today.

And basically, we laid out a three-part plan.

One was we needed to have coordination on this topic from the White House.

We just needed serious senior people sitting in the White House working on this, because

agencies are great, but I think they're not going to be enough to really make this a high

enough priority.

So that's actually part of the whole creation of the pandemic office.

It was called the pandemic office, but it was working on biosecurity every bit as much

as natural outbreaks.

Second is we built out a plan of what national biotextion needs to look like.

Listen, there are versions of these biological agents that we were are designed to bypass

all of our surveillance capabilities and could spread for weeks or months, could be devastating

to the population.

And we would not know it until things got very bad.

And I can share some of the stuff that we declassified that's actually available in reports.

But so we said we would miss those things.

We need a national biotextion strategy.

And so we built a plan for that.

And then we said we need huge investments in platforms around medical countermeasures,

therapies, vaccines.

We don't know what's coming.

So let's make investments in things that we think are kind of likely like a platform for

respiratory viruses and how we prevent them from becoming, you know, prevent them from

not only causing serious illness, but how we prevent them from spreading to other people.

So what's a platform?

Yeah.

Oh, I'm sorry.

So platforms like vaccine platforms are the idea that there's a set of capabilities that

you need to develop against for a vaccine that are not very specific to that, to that virus

itself.

Like how do you actually deliver the vaccine effectively?

So for instance, we thought a lot about how do you build up mucosal immunity, immunity

in your nose and throat because that's actually going to prevent people from spreading the

virus.

Remember one of the problems with COVID is you, it might prevent you from getting serious

illness, COVID vaccines, but it doesn't really slow down transmission.

Can we block transmission with a whole new way of doing vaccines?

So a platform would be, how do you deliver that kind of vaccine effectively, safely in a

large number of people?

How do you test it?

So there's a whole bunch of scientific work that needs to go in.

So we actually made a bunch of investments in that.

We made a bunch of investments in the mRNA platform because we thought that was going to be

really critical.

Unfortunately, three things have happened.

The pandemic office is it's empty.

All those investments were pulled back by Secretary Kennedy who did not believe that we should

be investing in those things.

And the National Bio Surveillance System that we think is actually the linchpin here because

without it, you're just not going to have any idea what happened for weeks, months until

things get very bad has not gotten built at all.

And one last thing is in 2025 after President Trump came in, I spent a year working with people

inside the Trump administration, Trump White House, DOD trying to get them energized on

this.

Actually, it wasn't that hard to get them energized.

I think very much understand the problem, very much understand what the solutions are.

Their ability to affect way change has been very limited.

They have not been able to move the ball.

So our country sits pretty vulnerable to this set of risks.

Despite the fact that we actually know what to do at this moment.

Finally, talk to me as a dad.

How much should I worry about bio weapons the next decades of mine, my family's life,

and what should a family like mine do to prepare?

Yeah.

Well, I am a dad and I decided a year ago that the chances that a bio weapon is going to

end up being used against human population as I said in the next five years is very, very

high.

And if it ever ends up affecting my family, I need to be able to look at my kids in the

eye and say, look, I knew about this and I did everything I could to try to prevent

this.

So there's a little bit of like an obligation that all of us have to say, if we believe

this threat is real as I am claiming it is, then all of us have an obligation.

And I understand this is not quite the question you're asking, but I'll say it, like as

citizens to like really push our policymakers to look for solutions, it doesn't have to

only come from the public sector or their private sector solutions.

There are lots of ways of driving this chip forward and we have got to all push on that.

From a personal point of view, you know, people ask, are you stocking up on PPEs?

I am not.

We have some mass at home.

I think that's a good idea, but I don't know that there's a ton I can do on a personal

level because I don't really have enough insight.

Like we're not building a bunker.

We're not.

We don't have UV, far UV in our home.

But there are these things that people talk about as like family protection.

And the reason I haven't gone down that road is not because I don't love my family.

But my view is, you know, I have two kids in college.

They're going to be out and about doing stuff.

The chances that everybody's going to be at home, hunker down seems very unlikely to me.

And so this is, it's a pretty substantial threat from the outside.

We really need a functioning government and we really need a very effective private sector,

working him in hand to try to solve this problem.

I don't think there's a ton I can do person.

I'm not stockpiling on antibiotics.

I'm not like there's just none of that stuff because I don't think I am smart enough to

predict exactly what I need to stockpile in order to keep our families safe.

I just want just one last follow here.

Like what's the case against the heavy duty masks?

The UV thing and stockpiling antibiotics.

Like why why not?

Why not?

Yeah.

Now that you say it, Derek, I probably should stockpile some mass.

I haven't.

There's no case against it.

We probably, that probably would be a good thing.

I'm thinking of the mask that looked like something that someone was wearing in World

War One, except updated for like a century later.

Not the thin little mask that someone can wear to buy pairs at the farmers market.

Yeah, yeah.

No, and look, Kevin S. Felt we've talked about has actually been working on trying to

build the next generation of masks and get its stockpile by private individuals because

again, they don't think that the government is doing enough on this.

So there are these kinds of strategies.

Those masks really don't, there aren't very many of them.

In my view is we probably should have some more N95s at home in the pretty sleigh available.

So maybe we will do that.

There's really no good case against it.

I have just thought it's a pretty, I'm not convinced it's going to really bail us out

if we don't fix the big problems.

When I think about like the latent virus that we know people have been trying to work

on, which is basically a mild cold virus, but it's designed to knock out your P53 gene

and essentially cause like cancer, widespread cancer in a population, you know, there's

going to be a cold that will go around.

We will never see it.

We will not be, I will not be using a mask because we won't know that it's even spreading.

Like there are all of these scenarios that I look at and I think, sure, like on the margins

we should probably have some masks at home.

But it really feels like marginal compared to the real solutions that we've got implemented.

Well, that's terrifying.

Sorry.

And I hate, I really don't like ending on a note of common cold engineered to cause mask

cancer.

Is there some other note that we could end on?

Yes, yes, yes.

Let me actually pick up that.

I'd better know because as you might imagine, I'm a blast at dinner parties.

Like people don't even ask me like what I think about these.

I could guess.

Yeah.

But here's the best part of all this.

All of this is like all of this is stuff we can solve.

We know how to detect that terrible engineered cold virus.

We have that capability today.

We know how to build countermeasures against it.

The one thing I will tell people that they should be hopeful is there's a lot of activity

happening by companies, by nonprofits in this space.

My saying the federal government has largely been absent is not to say no one's doing it.

There are other countries that are very involved in this.

There are countries that are building kind of bad detection capabilities.

We have been in close contact with a lot of friends in the UK and you, there's some

really good work happening there.

I actually think we can solve this.

It's just going to take all of us.

The critical error we could make is to say the government has to solve it.

The government can't or isn't going to or they're incompetent or they're not focused

enough.

We're all screwed.

That is not true.

There are lots of good solutions here.

This is what I spent all of my time thinking about and trying to build for America and the

world.

I would argue that all of us could be more engaged in being part of the solution.

Look throughout history, we've had governments that have not functioned as effectively as we

wish.

There are other institutions that can step up, step in and do really great work.

It's easy, that was.

And with optimism and with agency.

This is what you need to say at least during the dessert course at the dinner parties.

You don't need people with the bad taste in them out.

Are she just going to fight me back?

Thank you very much.

That's so much Derek.