(note: this is a nomadic thread, intended to germinate in the Laboratory before moving over to the New World Crisis forum.)
From a New Scientist interview with Ken Alibek, a former head of Soviet bioweapons research:
quote:What about biological weapons that alter human behaviour rather than kill?
That is possible. We know about more than one hundred different neuropeptides-for example, beta-endorphin, encephalins and serotonin. There are many that alter our thinking processes, our emotions. You can do practically everything with neurotransmitters. You can make people depressed or overexcited. We need to keep in mind that the idea is not new. Many intelligence services in many countries, especially like the former Soviet Union, use such approaches to interrogate people. They use neurotransmitters to change people's moods, to suppress people's will. You can make a normal person crazy using these types of substances. We know how they work.
But how do you make them into infectious agents that are suitable for use in biological weapons?
Most neurotransmitters are peptides, each peptide can be encoded by a gene and inserted into a virus, such as an adenovirus. It is not so difficult-you can insert practically anything into a virus. I would say that this work is now well under way in Russia because it started in the 1970s. At that time, genetic engineering techniques were not sophisticated enough to develop something substantial. But it is 2001.
You trained as a doctor, and you seem like a nice person, but you spent a large part of your career developing biological weapons that can kill hundreds of thousands of people. How do you reconcile this?
It is very difficult to answer that question. We are sitting here in the US, a normal sort of civilised country. But we need to go back to the era of the cold war in 1975. You are a junior lieutenant, and you take not just one oath, but two different oaths. The first is the Hippocratic oath. The second is the oath of a Soviet military officer. In the first, you promise not to cause harm. The second pledge is to protect your country using any means possible. You are told that, first, you are your country's defender, and, second, you are a physician. People in the Soviet Union were not monsters. They were normal people. Loving their wives, their families.
Alibek was one of hundreds of highly trained scientists who specialized in things like anthrax cultures and mass infections.
He's also, by the way, got some interesting ideas about Britain's recent foot-and-mouth epidemic.... |
