| ▲ | chiffre01 2 hours ago |
| 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? |
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| ▲ | amatron48 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | cwisecarver an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | She was interviewed on Breaking Points today https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvVRnh3JVGQ&list=PLdOud06Yw7... | | |
| ▲ | subpixel 8 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The algorithm giveth, and the algorithm keepeth away. Before I clicked that link I had never heard of Breaking Points, a political series with over 2MM subscribers. I'm a YT premium subscriber and watch a ton of political stuff, much of it damn similar to what that channel produces. |
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| ▲ | ampdepolymerase 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | bsimpson 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | A_D_E_P_T 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There are some that had been modified to release endorphins! >"When we first heard Soviet scientists were inserting the endorphin gene [for euphoria] into plague," says Dr. Henry Heine, a former U.S. Army bacteriologist, "we were appalled. That they would purposefully engineer the Y. pestis bacteria to behave this way... to make you want to go out and socialize... this was some horrifying stuff." > . . . > Former assistant secretary of defense Andy Weber agrees. "I grew up thinking Reagan’s phrase ‘Evil Empire’ was an exaggeration," he tells us. "Then I learned what the Russians were doing [with biological warfare]." He pauses for effect. "It was evil." The accounts are from Annie Jacobsen's notes in "Biological War". | | |
| ▲ | pavel_lishin 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Reminds me of a David Brin short story. | |
| ▲ | HillRat 30 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Jacobsen is also the author who claimed that the Roswell event was a Soviet plot to sow panic with an actual Nazi flying saucer piloted by genetically-engineered midgets, so I'd like to see a reputable source. (Having said that, bacteria upregulate selected interleukins to reduce inflammation, so maybe this is a game of telephone based on some actual Soviet effort to increase virulence, just not "euphoria.") | | |
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| ▲ | cobbzilla 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [flagged] | |
| ▲ | penskymaterial 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Reddit and Wikipedia are the universe's two most unreliable sources of information, behind somebody's Aunt Linda after a couple glasses of box wine. | | |
| ▲ | darkwi11ow 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Better than rt though | |
| ▲ | jibalt 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Those two things are not alike, and the claim about Wikipedia is a blatant lie ... certainly it is vastly more reliable than you are. Other comments from you: > there is a gatekeeping cretin in his basement hitting refresh to make sure he controls the world's definition for egg salad. > Wikipedia is filled with ministers of truth. Permanently muted and dismissed. | | |
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| ▲ | DennisP 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yep. And this is a lab that was reportedly doing gain-of-function research. |
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| ▲ | Chance-Device 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Indeed. I wonder how much work it would be to make this antibiotic resistant. Then the Russians develop some bacteriophage that infects and kills the bacteria as their own cure. | |
| ▲ | dualvariable an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The phrase "gain-of-function research" has acquired almost magical properties on the Internet. You can do literally anything you want to a pathogen with it. | | |
| ▲ | chaostheory an hour ago | parent [-] | | Purposely giving a pathogen increased infection abilities and more lethality, and expecting to be able to contain it in a lab has proven to be wishful thinking time and again. |
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| ▲ | drysine an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_biological_weapo... |
