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Biological War: A Scenario
It looks like I have some more reading to do...
At the end, Cummings turned to me and asked what I thought. I said that much of what had just been declared impossible I had personally seen done in a laboratory five years earlier. Such work was, and is, openly published. Furthermore, President Obama had paused funding ‘gain of function’ engineering on human-transmissible pathogens back in 2014, after scientists had developed a flu virus to transmit more effectively between ferrets, the standard model for human transmission. In short, not science fiction.
(Via Spectator.)
Science fiction fans recall reading Blood Music, by Greg Bear, in 1984; we know what he is talking about:
Removing the finest biologic sequences from the altered E. coli, he had incorporated them into B-lymphocytes, white cells from his own blood...Using artificial proteins and hormones as a means of communication, Vergil had "trained" the lymphocytes in the past six months to interact as much as possible with each other and with their environment - a much more complex miniature glass maze.
Every lymphocyte in the sample he was watching had the potential intellectual capacity of a rhesus monkey...
They were beautiful. They were his children, drawn from his own blood, carefully nurtured, operated upon; he had personally injected the biologic material into at least a thousand of them. And now they wre busily transforming all their companions, and so on, and so on...
As far as I know, the first science-fictional description of the idea of biological warfare was in The War of the Worlds by HG Wells:
Of course, biological warfare has been around for at least 2500 years. In the sixth century B.C., the Assyrians used rye ergot to poison enemy wells. In the fifth century B.C., Scythian archers dipped their arrows into animal dung to cause wounds to fester.
In the summer of 2020, while the country was between ‘waves’ of Covid, Dominic Cummings convened a meeting at my urging in Downing Street on pandemic biosecurity. Around the table sat the types of people you would want: scientists, key national security figures and officials. They explained that the thing Cummings was worried about, namely an engineered pathogen, obtained or built cheaply by a small group or even one person, was essentially science fiction. ‘You can’t beat Darwin,’ we were told.
His first E. coli mutations had had the learning capacity of planarian worms; he had run them through simple T-mazes, giving sugar rewards. They had soon outperformed planaria...
...there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to and fro.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 7/1/2026)
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