Russia’s Plague Mystery and the Coming Age of Bioweapons

Derek Thompson (0:05)

Today, a Russian plague mystery and the future of bioweapons.

In January 2023, Ashish Jha, a scientist who served as Joe Biden's COVID czar, was approached after a meeting in the White House Situation Room. The situation, officials told him, was grave. American intelligence officials were seeing bioweapons 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 Jha, 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 prescient. The first reason is that AI may pose an extreme bio risk, 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 Kimi 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. According to 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 bioweapons. 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-1s, 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. Seen 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 bioweapons 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 bioweapons 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. This is Plain English.

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Ashish Jha (5:03)

Derek Thompson, thanks for having me here.

Derek Thompson (5:05)

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?

Ashish Jha (5:16)

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.