Bioterror causes extinction.

I’ve lived through disease outbreaks, and in the previous chapter I showed just how unprepared we are to face a widespread pandemic of flu or another new pathogen like SARS. But a deliberate outbreak caused by an engineered pathogen would be far worse. We would face the same agonizing decisions that must be made during a natural pandemic: whether to ban travel from affected regions, how to keep overburdened hospitals working as the rolls of the sick grew, how to accelerate the development and distribution of vaccines and drugs. To that dire list add the terror that would spread once it became clear that the death and disease in our midst was not the random work of nature, but a deliberate act of malice. We’re scared of disease outbreaks and we’re scared of terrorism—put them together and you have a formula for chaos.

As deadly and as disruptive as a conventional bioterror incident would be, an attack that employed existing pathogens could only spread so far, limited by the same laws of evolution that circumscribe natural disease outbreaks. But a virus engineered in a lab to break those laws could spread faster and kill quicker than anything that would emerge out of nature. It can be designed to evade medical countermeasures, frustrating doctors’ attempts to diagnose cases and treat patients. If health officials manage to stamp out the outbreak, it could be reintroduced into the public again and again. It could, with the right mix of genetic traits, even wipe us off the planet, making engineered viruses a genuine existential threat.

And such an attack may not even be that difficult to carry out. Thanks to advances in biotechnology that have rapidly reduced the skill level and funding needed to perform gene editing and engineering, what might have once required the work of an army of virologists employed by a nation-state could soon be done by a handful of talented and trained individuals. Or maybe just one.

When Melinda Gates was asked at the South by Southwest conference in 2018 to identify what she saw as the biggest threat facing the world over the next decade, she didn’t hesitate: “A bioterrorism event. Definitely.”2

She’s far from alone. In 2016, President Obama’s director of national intelligence James Clapper identified CRISPR as a “weapon of mass destruction,” a category usually reserved for known nightmares like nuclear bombs and chemical weapons. A 2018 report from the National Academies of Sciences concluded that biotechnology had rewritten what was possible in creating new weapons, while also increasing the range of people capable of carrying out such attacks.3 That’s a fatal combination, one that plausibly threatens the future of humanity like nothing else.

“The existential threat that would be most available for someone, if they felt like doing something, would be a bioweapon,” said Eric Klien, founder of the Lifeboat Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping humanity survive existential risks. “It would not be hard for a small group of people, maybe even just two or three people, to kill a hundred million people using a bioweapon. There are probably a million people currently on the planet who would have the technical knowledge to pull this off. It’s actually surprising that it hasn’t happened yet.”