logoalt Hacker News

chiffre01 • yesterday at 6:00 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

You should read up on the long history of Russian Biological War programs. Fascinating stuff. They came up with some insane versions of plague.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_biological_weapons_prog...

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/rr/rr7003a1.htm?


Replies

amatron48 • yesterday at 6:49 PM

In a similar vein, I highly recommend Annie Jacobsen's recent book, Biological War: A scenario. It dives into the Soviet/Russian biological weapons programs and discusses facilities such as the Vector Institute (State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology) located in Koltsovo, Siberia. Interestingly enough, the scenario follows a lab leak of weaponized plague at this research facility... having read the book it was rather shocking to see this headline.

➕ show 2 replies
bsimpson • yesterday at 6:21 PM

I saw a post about this on Reddit this morning. Haven't looked into it further, but people were claiming that there are versions of this plague that have been modified to release other toxins. It's effectively a bioweapon: they cure you for the plague, which kills you with the poison it contained.

➕ show 3 replies
DennisP • yesterday at 6:10 PM

Yep. And this is a lab that was reportedly doing gain-of-function research.

➕ show 2 replies