Those who want to manufacture biological weapons have it easy.
The number of different natural organisms that can be used for both biological warfare and bioterrorist attacks is enormous.
GIDEON (Global Infectious Diseases and Epidemiology Network) is an organization dedicated to studying all outbreaks of infectious diseases that occur in the world.
And in their studies they found that between 1980 and 2010 there were a total of 12,000 different epidemic outbreaks caused by viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites.
Viruses as terrible as Ebola or Marburg, with lethality rates of up to 90%, or viruses such as Congo hemorrhagic fever or Nipah, with lethality rates of 50%, give an idea of the potential danger posed by these organisms.
Natural buds keep rising
Things are rapidly getting worse with global man-made change.
For example, between 2010 and 2020 the number of epidemic outbreaks in the world increased by 42% to 17,000.
That means that in the last 10 years there have been 5,000 more outbreaks than in the previous 30 years.
And what’s worse: GIDEON data estimates that, if we don’t remedy it, epidemic outbreaks could quadruple in the next decade.
The main reason is that more than 65% of these epidemic outbreaks are zoonoses, which by now almost all of us know are diseases that pass from animals to man.
Many of our infectious diseases jumped from mammals or birds, and even reptiles, to humans.
The danger of the Sixth Great Extinction
We are currently witnessing a massive catastrophic loss of biodiversity (known as the Sixth Great Extinction). For example, 26% of all mammal species are under threat of extinction.
And things get worse in our closest relatives, the primates, where the endangered species already reaches 29%.
The seriousness of the situation is easy to understand:
Each animal species has a great diversity of viruses that specifically infect them. They are the result of hundreds of thousands of years of co-evolution.
- But if the total population of a certain animal species declines to near extinction, its viruses will only survive if they manage to make the jump to other animal species.
- And if they manage to jump to a species with a high population, they will do “a good deal.”
Thus, SARS-CoV-2 “won the lottery & rdquor; when it managed to go from pangolins, with a population of a few thousand and in danger of extinction, to the prosperous population of 7,750 million human beings.
Of course viruses do not do this intelligently. But mutation and natural selection are responsible for favoring this type of jump between species evolutionarily.
Are there 2 billion different biological weapons?
In this context, in 2019 the “Global Virome Project” began. An international collaborative scientific initiative to discover existing zoonotic viral threats and try to stop future pandemics.
And in just over 2 years of work, the results are devastating.
- It is estimated that there are at least 827,000 virus species capable of making the jump from animals to humans. But the real figure could be much higher.
- The total number of different viruses that could be used as biological warfare agents against our livestock or crops could reach 2 billion.
It may seem like an exaggerated estimate, but keep in mind that on Earth there are a total of about 1030 virus (that’s a 1 followed by 30 zeros).
Certainly extremely harmful biological warfare agents are out there.
Is there a real risk of reliving the first of the plagues of Egypt?
In addition to these infectious agents, there are many other non-infectious microorganisms that are capable of producing extremely potent biotoxins.
As Exodus describes, in the first biblical plague that struck the Egyptians “the waters that are in the Nile were turned into blood. And the fish that were in the Nile died. The water was corrupted and those who drank from the river died.”
And it perfectly describes an ideal organism as a biological warfare weapon: the dinoflagellates. A group of microorganisms that proliferate in such quantity in the water that they give it an intense reddish coloration.
They are called Red Tides. Like the one described in the Bible.
And several of the dinoflagellate species produce potent toxins. Some are amnesic neurotoxins, others cause diarrhea…
But the worst are a group of them that act by blocking sodium channels and “become” one of the most powerful non-protein poisons known.
And with lethal doses for humans so small that a single gram of this toxin could kill about 1,200 people.
Biotoxins and the danger of water
Unfortunately, there are many other microorganisms that produce potent biotoxins.
Among them, the cyanobacteria stand out, which are especially dangerous due to their ease in proliferating in the supply reservoirs.
When Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca arrived in the area of North America that corresponds to present-day Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, he was impressed by the calendar followed by the natives of the place.
They counted the years based on a periodic event: the water in the lagoons turned green and many fish died.
They were outbreaks of cyanobacteria.
Cyanobacteria also produce an enormous variety of toxins. Some act in a similar way to organophosphates like Sarin.
But perhaps the worst of these are microcystins, toxins that destroy the liver.
And the diversity of biotoxin-producing organisms is enormous.
The “laboratory weapons”
So far we have only reviewed biological warfare agents found in nature. But genetically modified organisms can be obtained in the laboratory to make them much more harmful.
At the moment we all know countless organisms genetically modified by man, from bacteria to plants. But almost all, if not all, are organisms modified to be beneficial.
- For example, the human insulin gene has been inserted into bacteria. And thanks to this, these bacteria produce the insulin that diabetics need.
- Also, many crop plants have been genetically modified to make them resistant, for example, to frost.
- Or to pathogens so that they do not need insecticides, or have lower fertilizer requirements.
- Even to make them more nutritious.
Today, the advancement of new molecular genetic techniques (with technologies such as CRISPR) make it possible to directly modify the genome in an efficient, precise, simple and economical way.
To avoid going into technical details, we could say that molecular genetics is at the same stage as the automobile industry when Ford began to manufacture the Model T, the first car model of which more than 15 million were manufactured.
Better not go into too precise details?
Technology like CRISPR has enormous potential in medicine and agriculture.
But it is terrifying what could be done by these modern molecular genetic techniques (and those that are to come) if they were used to increase the contagiousness and lethality of some microorganisms.
Maybe it’s better not to talk about it.
Going into details would cause unnecessary alarm and fear at this time.
In any case, we can say that there are points of unanimity among scientists.
- The West undoubtedly had the nuclear lead by manufacturing the first atomic and thermonuclear bombs. But it was largely self-limiting in its research on biological warfare weapons.
- So the USSR made a considerable effort to develop this type of weaponry.
- And he should have gotten a considerable head start on us.
That is why when many of its scientists emigrated to the West after the fall of the USSR, curiosity reigned: how far had the Russians advanced in this field?
Two Russian scientists in our laboratory
Two of these émigré scientists had a good relationship with our laboratory.
One of them was a particularly intelligent, studious and hard-working man.
Although he far surpassed us in conventional knowledge of microorganisms, we were surprised by his lack of training in modern molecular genetics.
He attributed it to the peculiar history of the USSR that we will try to summarize in a few data:
- In December 1929, Joseph Stalin delivered a speech decreeing that Marxist dialectical materialism was a far superior tool to the experimental scientific method for gaining knowledge.
- And he put Trofim Lysenko, an obscure agronomist who, among other things, denied the existence of genes and the laws of inheritance, which he considered an “invention” at the head of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. bourgeois & rdquor ;.
- Nor did he believe that viruses, bacteria, and fungi were the disease-causing agents in crops.
Lysenko began a major purge of geneticists, many of whom starved to death in a Gulag.
At that time the Soviet Union had top-level geneticists like Sergei Vavilov (who starved to death in prison), Sergei Chetverikov, Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky Nikolai Dubinin, who suffered from the Stalinist purges.
One of them, Nikolai Koltsov, pioneered the discovery of the cytoskeleton, anticipating Watson and Crick in proposing that a chromosome was a giant double-stranded molecule.
But Koltsov fell from grace and was killed, apparently with a biotoxin.
Genetics stopped being taught in the Soviet Union
After Stalin’s death, Trofim Lysenko continued to be supported by Nikita Khrushchev.
But in 1964, after the fall of Khrushchev, the father of the Soviet thermonuclear bomb, Andrei Sakharov, began a campaign against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences.
In Sakharov’s words “(Lysenko) He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and genetics. In particular for the spread of pseudoscientific views of him, for the degradation of learning and for the defamation, dismissal, arrest and even death of many genuine scientists & rdquor ;.
And so a campaign for the restoration of scientific methods in all fields of biology began in the country. And Lysenko was removed from his post as director of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences.
But despite the fall of Lysenko, the USSR was unable to recover from its backwardness in genetics. And it seems that the Russian Federation has not known how to do it either
It may be that thanks to Trofim Lysenko, the Russian Federation has failed to develop biological warfare weapons as formidable as it might otherwise have been.