Nightmare Scenario
The rising bioterror threat
By Peter Katona and Seth Freeman
If you had lived in 1347 in the Black Sea port city of Caffa (part of Ukraine today) when it was besieged by the Mongols, you might have looked up at the sky and seen human bodies catapulted over the city walls – bodies infected with plague. Trading ships from Caffa likely carried the plague to Italy, from where the Black Death rolled through Europe, killing some 25 million people. Bioweaponry had become a reality.
Jump forward to today when, in just the last few years, the pace of genetic research and the development of Artificial Intelligence have accelerated. Recombinant DNA technology, CRISPR, and other genetic modifications, along with the giant leaps in Artificial Intelligence technology, can now facilitate the creation of increasingly potent bio superweapons, unleashing scary, new pathogens not previously known in nature. With today’s supercomputers, quantum computers, advances in genetic sequencing, and, most importantly, the power (and low cost) of AI, newly developed pathogens can be artificially rendered more virulent, antibiotic or anti-viral resistant, more transmissible, and cunningly able to evade the immune system, enabling fringe bad actors as well as advanced nations to fairly easily and inexpensively create narrowly targeted agents of infection, as Jason Matheny, president of the RAND think tank, recently told the Aspen Strategy Group and as a trio of AI experts testified in July at a senate subcommittee.
Earlier, in 2011, well before the current pandemic, two separate research teams in the Netherlands and the U.S. conducted studies in which the H5N1 Avian flu virus – now spreading in the U.S. – was made airborne and transmissible between ferrets, which provided a good model for human respiratory virus infection. The studies found that just a few mutations could make H5N1 transmissible through respiratory droplets, heightening the risk if such mutations occurred in nature or, more troublingly, if they were created intentionally. This “gain-of-function” enhancement was suggested by some, without proof, to have been added to SARS Cov-2 in a Chinese lab, presumably making the epidemic all the more widespread and lethal. There is no hard evidence that this really happened, but the important point is that it is theoretically possible.
Suddenly, we live in a world where a lone wolf or aberrant cult could launch a bioterror attack as sophisticated and lethal as any advanced nation.
Since the beginning of human history, mankind has struggled with infectious diseases like plague, smallpox, and many others. Yet even as humans worked to prevent and cure these diseases, they also found creative ways to use them as weapons. In the First World War the German army developed a program to infect Allied livestock with glanders, a bacterial disease primarily of horses. The Japanese tested bioweapons in China during the Second World War, and during the Cold War, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union nurtured active bioweapons development efforts. In 1972, an international treaty banned the development, production, and stockpiling of bioweapons. Nevertheless, several countries clandestinely continued offensive bioweapons research.
Bioterrorism, as distinct from biowarfare used by one country against another, began with the clumsy efforts of rather unsophisticated propagators. In 1984, in a coordinated attack by the Rajneeshee cult, Salmonella was surreptitiously placed in local salad bars in The Dalles, Oregon, infecting 751 people. A decade later, the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan executed deadly attacks in Tokyo and Matsumoto subways using the chemical nerve agent sarin. They also tried, unsuccessfully, to assassinate a judge using anthrax. These incidents represented relatively crude and indiscriminate terrorist strikes. The anthrax-laden letters, which showed up in U.S. Government and news media offices following the September 11, 2001 attacks, killed five people in a more targeted campaign.
Advances in modern technology, if we use them wisely, can be leveraged to mitigate both natural epidemic and human-caused bioterror threats. With its speed enhanced by quantum computing, AI can analyze vast datasets – social media searches and conversations, health records, veterinary data, and environmental sensors – to identify new pathogens and weapons in development as well as to detect outbreaks sooner. Using all these technologies, we need to be more aggressive in standing up a robust early warning system against all forms of infectious disease, those which evolve in nature along with those created in a lab. AI could also help identify a microbe’s genetic code and develop, quickly and powerfully, the right vaccines and other countermeasures in the event that the warning system sounds an alarm.
Technology, however, is not the most important part of a solution. To control the threat of nuclear weapons, President Ronald Reagan realized in the nineteen eighties mankind needs to employ diplomacy, legal accountability, and the highest level of cooperation and communication that human beings can muster. We need negotiated international agreements to limit the development of bioweapons, agreements that are up-to-date on the latest technology, verifiable and enforceable. We also need vigorous policing of independent, nongovernmental bad actors planning to perpetrate bioterror crimes. As a start, in October of last year, President Biden issued an Executive Order on Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, including the goal to “Protect against the risks of using AI to engineer dangerous biological materials…”.
We live in a world where we constantly click “I am not a robot,” to prove that we are not a robot – to a robot. How, when we are handing over so much of our autonomy to machines, can we prevent a technologically developed worldwide bioweapons holocaust?
The only sure way to a safer future is through upholding high ethical standards in the use of modern technology. The new tools, which humans have created, are enabling the biggest threat the species has ever faced, but at the end of the day it will be the humanity which no machine or computer program can ever experience that can and must save us.
Peter Katona, MD, has been clinical professor of medicine at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine in Infectious Diseases, and adjunct professor of Public Health at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health in Epidemiology. He helped design UCLA’s campus covid policy.
Seth Freeman, MPH, is an Emmy-winning writer/producer for television, a playwright and a journalist, who writes about technology, education, policy and public health.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.
