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amatron48 • yesterday at 6:49 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

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.


Replies

cwisecarver • yesterday at 7:37 PM

She was interviewed on Breaking Points today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvVRnh3JVGQ&list=PLdOud06Yw7...

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ampdepolymerase • yesterday at 7:42 PM

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.