Jha says he was brought into White House work on biological threats in early 2023. Here he lays out a short history of science as weapons: chemists learned to engineer chemistry around 1900 and chemical weapons were used in the First World War; physics followed, with nuclear weapons in the Second. Biology, he argues, became engineerable only in the last 10 to 15 years. He says he hopes the pattern breaks, but that it would take luck.
…was asked to sort of help answer was that if these things were to be used against us, what would our capabilities be around detection? And I worked on that, but the big picture point here is that that really shifted my thinking about the global risk landscape that we had around. Biological threats.
…chemistry to developments in 20th century physics to developments in 21st century biology and put these all on a string that were the connective string, in fact, was weapons. Can you give me this sort of brief theory of history? Because I found it both incredibly memorable and also quite scary.
…to, when people like Jennifer Doudna, who invented CRISPR and Caitlin Carrico, who also won the Nobel Prize, who did the mRNA work, and these people, what these brilliant scientists did was essentially taught us how to engineer biology. That for centuries we had learned how to study and read biology, but only in the last 10, 15 years have we actually been able to learn how to engineer biology. It would be a historical anomaly if we did not see the use of bioweapons in the upcoming years, not decades, but years. That is what history has taught us: that engineering of natural sciences inevitably leads to the use of weapons. I would hope that we can break that string, but that's, you know, in my mind, that we would have to be lucky in order to break that string. Maybe one more point on that, Derek? Sorry, just biological engineering also arrives at a time when something else has arrived, which is artificial intelligence. And I actually think that accelerates the risk, not diminishes it.
The scientists that you talked about who came up with these chemistry breakthroughs in the early 20th century were also military inventors, right? Fritz Haber came up with the fixing of nitrogen, but also, I believe, built chemical weapons for the Germans in World War I. Leo Sillard and Oppenheimer…
Yeah, so that's a great point, by the way. And of course, and again, I have immense respect, but for Jennifer Doudna. No one is asking us to show you. I won't ask you. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. And so the issue and the difference may be here that you actually needed that deep level of scientific…
What do we know about what's motivating Russia, China, North Korea, Iran to build biological weapons? And what's the most frightening thing that they could be capable of because of those motivations?