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Comment by chiffre01

5 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?

31 comments

chiffre01

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amatron48  4 hours ago

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.

  • ampdepolymerase  3 hours ago

    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.

bsimpson  4 hours ago

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.

  • A_D_E_P_T  4 hours ago

    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".

    • HillRat  3 hours ago

      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.")

      6 replies →

    • thesz  1 hour ago

      Endorphins make you happy as you are. Endorphins have sedative effect. Morphine is a similar substance and it is a sedative, all opioids are.

      What makes one socialize is dopamine [1]: "Hypomania, manifesting with feelings of euphoria, omnipotence, or grandiosity are prone to appear in those moments when medication (dopaminergic medication - thesz) effects are at their maximum."

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine_dysregulation_syndrom...

      This dopamine dysregulation occurs naturally in people with toxoplasmosis.

      This kind of mistake - mistaking dopamine and endorphine, - strongly suggests a fake. I know of one such fake from the former employee of my friend, you can read his account here [2]. My friend was a lead of the "secret" laboratory (next to Kitay Gorod metro station in the center of Moscow, in an institute that needed no documents to enter) that researched how "psychics" and "healers" achieve their results.

      [2] https://lit.lib.ru/t/torin_a/text_0100.shtml (it is in Russian, but language is not a barrier at all nowadays)

      The laboratory researched what these "extrasensing people" do and found nothing - given very little training an ordinary men can do the same and even better. At the end of USSR, there was a string of visitors from USA there in the lab, and one of those visitors successfully persuaded US government to open similar research program, according to [2].

      The fearmongering of "endorphin-producing bugs that make one socialize and spread" looks like, well, fearmongering to obtain funds for Big Pharma's government contracts, etc. It messes up two very different neurotransmitters, a mistake that real scientist would not make.

  • penskymaterial  4 hours ago

    [flagged]

    • jibalt  4 hours ago

      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.

      3 replies →

DennisP  5 hours ago

Yep. And this is a lab that was reportedly doing gain-of-function research.

  • Chance-Device  4 hours ago

    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.

    • pigpop  2 hours ago

      Making it antibiotic resistant is not difficult and they already did that back when they were the USSR. Not only did they develop it, they produced large quantities of it to stockpile for a rainy day.

  • dualvariable  4 hours ago

    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  3 hours ago

      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.