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.
Funnily enough the reason why virology therapy (something the Soviets did a lot of research in cuz they didn't have good antibiotics and biotech/pharma) hasn't seen much success at scale is precisely because the body's immune system adapts too quickly. Maybe we will see more success now with AI but it will be a cold day in hell before the powers that be let any garage biohacker have access to LLMs trained on this sort of information.
She was interviewed on Breaking Points today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvVRnh3JVGQ&list=PLdOud06Yw7...