Finished reading this last week, and as a read in of itself, I enjoyed it. Only the first half of the book is an actual book though, the remaining 200 something pages are all just source citations, which is cool but can be misleading if looking at page count. If you want to read it, you can find it on OceanofPDF.Tldr of the book>Russian biolab working on giga bioweapon (airborne pneumonic plague mixed with Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus), scientist has crisis of conscience and tries to destroy it, ends up releasing it on accident and getting infected>Infection causes 24 hours of engineered endorphin fueled euphoria to spread the disease as much as possible, then pneumonic plague but even more deadly and infectious kills you within a day or so>If you take antibiotics to ward off plague symptoms, you succumb to symptoms of VEEV in which your brain swells up and you get paralyzed then die>Oh fuck oh shit ensues>Literally within 6 days, the US and most of the world is in lockdown under martial law, POTUS spirited away to some secret hide out and military steps in domestically >Fast forward indeterminate amount of years>Only people who survive are people who perpetually keep their CBRN masks on (i.e, military) and survivors are disproportionately male>Russians rolled out experimental vaccine to defend themselves from their own bioweapon, side effect is terrible deformities in all children birthed by women who took the vaccine, Russian population growth absolutely halts and cannot continue >Europe barely holding on, most of the world in similar straits>Planets population lowered considerably to say the least I read Biohazard by Ken Alibek recently as well and that's a good read. But is there any actual truth to these "chimera bioweapons" where traits of two diseases are rolled into one package? Info is sparse online.Also bio/chem weapons thread.
>>65432427>Annie JacobsenBased or cringe?
>>65432580Given that OP is a faggot and that the summary sounds butt-fucking retarded, clearly cringe.
>>65432427
>>65432427>Yersinia pestis, a bacteria>Is also a virus when treated with antibioticsHighly unlikely that would work anything like that book given those are two radically different types of organisms. Maybe that could work if one uses Y pestis. and gets an intact pathogenic virus inside of it. However, the amount of maintenance needed to keep the virus compatible with both hosts would prevent it from working effectively. Otherwise the bacteria could contain a toxic payload that releases when it lyses. You generally don't need that as bacterial remnants already are toxic. Chimeras typically are made from DNA of similar organisms as the genes still have to be compatible with cell machinery.
>>65432427>where traits of two diseases are rolled into one packageHappens all the time in nature. Not the example you gave though. Plague is caused by a bacteria and VEEV is an RNA virus. Saying you're going to combine those two is as illiterate as saying you're going to crossbreed sea slugs and golden retrievers to make aquatic dogs. Just retarded. Those whole "engineered behavior" angle is also fucking fantasy. The "all women permanently infertile" from the vaccine is pretty stupid too. But back to reality, yeah. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused COVID-19, was recombinant and that helped it become what it became. Viral recombination occurs when a cell gets infected by two, similar viruses at the same time. RNA molecules aren't super stable and can get combined or both genomes could get shoved into the capsid/envelope during packaging. Most of the time that just breaks things or, at best, makes the hybrid virus worse at it's job. Very rarely though, you get a combination of traits that makes it a more effective virus. Some poor animal got infected with a bat corona virus and pangolin corona virus at the same time, and in one particular cell they got mixed together to give predecessor of SARS-CoV-2 that we know and love. That's one of the things that made early origin tracing so confusing.This is generally simpler to do with with viruses, although bacteria can also pick up accessory genes pretty readily. Generally, it's a lot of work for something that will make you an international pariah if discovered and *will* come back to kill your own people if used. She's welcome to use all the citations she wants, but since she's just a journo, I'm inclined to believe the 200 pages of citation for a novel are just gratuitous wankery to bulldoze you with sources and not look at what she fucks up. My Spillover book by Quammen is non-fiction and only needed 27 pages of bibliography. Even really complex review articles aren't going to have 200 fucking pages of citations.
>>65432427I hit the character limit in >>65433277, but you should really read Spillover if this sort of thing interests you. It reads really well and does a good job of not letting the biology swamp a layman. There's a 100% your local library has physical and digital copies, so there's no cost.
>>65432427I've had my fill with the nuclear one. First half was engaging, it built tension well for me, and I like the machinery of nuclear war, but from the failed interception onwards she consistently chose for people to be as retarded as possible and for shit to go as sideways as possible, to the point it felt more of a parody than a scenario. Not that I don't believe for people to be that stupid, but authors are still bound to writing rules that reality simply does not.
>>65432427>Umm ackshually it has a massive neuroendocrine effect for a solid 24 hours before any pulmonary symptoms develop>Umm but it's still infectious during this phase too ackshually>Umm ackshually your children become deformed mutants if you get vaccinatedOkay so it's a retarded book by some nigger without even an undergraduate level education in biology. Lovely. Why the fuck would they even add citations to this garbage? Lmao>>65433277I still think it was a (unintentional) leak of an experimental bioweapon. Too many coincidences, both in the genetics and in the location of the outbreak. The fact that the early chinese response (before it became globally endemic) was so unbelievably aggressive is also telling. I mean, iirc the original strain, which was less infectious than later strains, had the highest r0 of any pathogen ever measured, by a lot. I just don't think that it's coincidence that an absurdly unlikely genetic recombination event happened, that the result of that recombination event was the most infectious human virus in history, and that this occurred like 10 miles from China's top virology lab, in a market frequented by employees of said lab. Keep in mind also that the "pangolin coronavirus" they pointed to as the primary evolutionary precursor had never been identified in any capacity prior to March 2020.Why do I think it's a bioweapon specifically, and not just a regular leak? Because it fits neatly with a hypothetical bioweapon production pathway: figure out the ideal transmission and cell entry mechanisms first, and then focus on adding virulence later. Hell, it could have already been in that phase. Why the fuck does a coronavirus excel so much at entry into myocardium and neurons?
>>65432427Does anyone actually believe that Russia is dumb or evil enough to intentionally engineer a world ending disease and then release it into the wild? This sounds insane.
>>65433611at this point the only thing I'd question is whether they're competent enough to make it in the first place
>>65433611Dumb, absolutely.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vozrozhdeniya_Island
>>65433598>early Chinese responseThey we're freaking out because less than 20 years earlier they had SARS (caused by SARS-CoV-1) that had a case fatality rate of 10%. As the names imply, SARS-CoV-2, was closely related and decided to react hard and fast to COVID-19. Thinking the Chinese response is suspicious would be like thinking it's weird that Americans get touchy over airliners after 9-11.>the original strain, which was less infectious than later strains, had the highest r0 of any pathogen everThis is incoherent. How could a less infectious strain have a higher basic reproduction number than something more infectious? BRN (or R0) is literally a measure of infectivity. Like saying a some surefire supressor has the lowest dB while being louder. Comparing R0 values of different strains during the early pandemic is also pretty hard since R0 is very affected by behavior and social interactions. It's also not indicative of anything synthetic since measles has had stupid high R0 since forever and that's completely natural.>the "pangolin coronavirus" they pointed to has never been identified prior to 2020People don't get budgeted money to do a extensive evolutionary tracing on random viruses unless there's a pressing need. Happens literally everytime there's a novel outbreak. Nobody even knew about ABLV until they randomly stumbled across it while trying to hunt out hendravirus's origin.>an absurdly unlikely genetic recombinationIt's not absurd, it happens literally all the time. Yeah, any particular recombination event is improbable, but with enough events, it becomes a certainty. Like the lottery. Stupid odds, but someone wins it all the time and nobody is surprised.All in all, you just don't sound like you know even the basics of biology and just want to grasp onto some retarded conspiracy since deliberate human action makes you feel more in control than dealing with the reality of you being just another animal subject to uncontrollable chance.
>>65432580horrible pesud>>65432427bioweapons are a solved issue and fortunately for most people they don't really workif it's viral, it will very quickly either burn out or spontaneously mutate to become less virulentif it's bacterial, it's far more difficult to spread and really only takes down old sick people or the extremely youngpretty much every single story about bioweapons is someone hypothecating some strange scenario where they do the equivalent of saying "uhhh what if we had a nuke but instead of a nuke it defied all laws of nuke engineering and actually fused things into MORE uranium to be even nuke-ier" and everyone who knows anything about nukes is like "yeah that would be crazy in a fiction novel, cool story." >>65433598>Why do I think it's a bioweapon specifically, and not just a regular leak?well, post hoc, they admitted that it was a gain of function research project by a collaboration between NIH, USAMRIID, and the PRC, so... pretty much categorically a bioweapon
>>65432590God I wish
>>65432427Well, it's by the person who completely failed to understand nuclear war, so...
>>65432580She's a midwit who skims real sources and outputs shitty liberal woman summaries like a bad LLM
>>65432427The worst biological weapon is genetics.https://tipxy.com/products/diamond-adam-armenian-brandyArmenians do be like this.
>>65432427>>Infection causes 24 hours of engineered endorphin fueled euphoria to spread the disease as much as possible, then pneumonic plague but even more deadly and infectious kills you within a day or sowhen someone writes a sci fi book they should at least put in bare minimum efforts in making it sound not retardedthis is such a stupid premise
>>65435490My favorite part is where she combines a virus with a bacterium.
>>65432768>>65433598>>65435490>>65435496I suspect she intentionally wrote the actual makeup of the bioweapon to be something unwieldy and convoluted rather than going for something much more plausible because she wanted to reduce the risk of distributing ideas for easier ways to do bioterrorism. When reading stuff involving hypothetical terrorism and the like you often run into parts where the author gives wrong processes or comes up with some Rube Goldberg-tier way to commit an attack and it'll stand out so much compared to how competently the rest is written that I genuinely think they are self gimping it. They mostly are trying to raise alarm bells about safety measures and contingency plans, and I think are trying to balance convincing some politician to take it seriously after their legislative aide reads it and gets freaked out versus giving people ideas for causing mayhem. Synthetic prions are an example of something relatively easy to make that would be absolutely devastating, and I think there's something of an effort to keep that idea from getting too broadly distributed.
>>65432427>Biohazard by Ken AlibekI did a report on that book in middle school. I think I got a C
>>65435809Yeah that's true, but it's also way funnier if we distribute a fiction novel whose first 5 or 6 chapters detail the painstaking work the MC does in his garage to cause a common and nearly asymptomatic rhinovirus to initiate cytokine storms in ~25% of healthy hosts (doing a little trolling to the immune system) complete with pictoral diagrams
>>65434129>bioweapons are a solved issue and fortunately for most people they don't really workUntil some chud with ChatGPT Premium bioengineers some nasty shit in a gatorade bottle and wipes out half the world because he got ghosted again
>>65436129You would not believe how much money has been sunk into preventing flagship AIs from doing bioweapons work. I'm not sure if it's their absolute #1 priority but it comes damn close if not, which is honestly wild when you consider how few bad actors would actually try that hard to get around the basic security measures. Honestly until recently it was a case where you kinda already needed to know how to make one to get the models to do indirect tasks to assist you, but nowadays (particularly with Fable) they're basically just becoming wholesale useless for genetics, microbiology, molecular biology, and anything else in that vein. Probably only tightly controlled proprietary in-house LLMs for major biotech companies, from here on out
>>65436134I'm still not hearing why someone wouldn't be able to do it on an offline model where he has removed such guardrails, now or somewhere in 5-10-25 years.I wrote GPT premium as a joke, but I'm dead serious about offline LLMs running in some bitcoin-bought accelerationist chuds' basementAI is gonna be the death of us.
>>65436159Because offline models don't have the compute power for that kind of work and even if they did, it would take a lot more resources to train your own pet model for that shit than to just develop the bioweapon the old fashioned way. And yes I say that with full understanding of how many resources it takes to do anything remotely complex with bioweapons in the old fashioned way.
>>65433611They released a massive amount of anthrax in the middle of one of their biggest cities once so yeah
>>65436174Regardless, I think I finally have a reason to buy a gas mask
