The Demon in the Freezer

In these days of gene splicing, genetic engineering, cloning and DNA fingerprinting it is easy to overlook the simple power of selection. I was just reminded of this by reading Richard Preston's book about bioweapons - the Demon in the Freezer. (I like the way he gets a quote from Stephen King on the back of the jacket - 'One of the most horrifying things I've ever read in my whole life.' It's like the official stamp of scary).

In chapter 4 he describes the Soviet bioweapons program at the Biopreparat facility and how this came to the attention of the UK and the US in the late 1980's via a couple of high profile defectors. First Vladimir Pasechnik and later Ken Alibek. Ken Alibek is a whole other story, it's hard not to admire a man who is now regarded as a great humanitarian and philanthropist but was once responsible for making weaponised smallpox by the ton. The relevant bit here is the description of how the Soviet Union created antibiotic resistant strains of plague - the Black Death that killed a third of Europe back in the 1300's:

One of the principal weapons was genetically modified (GM) plague that was resistant to antibiotics. The Soviet microbiologists had created this GM plague with brute-force methods: they had taken natural plague and had exposed it again and again to powerful antibiotics, and in this way they forced the evolution of drug-resistant strains.