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SUNDAY SCIENCE: 50-YEAR-OLD BIOWEAPONS TREATY IS DANGEROUSLY FLAWED,
RESEARCHERS SAY  
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Richard Stone
April 4, 2025
Science
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_ Without enforcement mechanisms, the Biological Weapons Convention
risks leaving the world “completely unprepared” _

A view from a room at the Soviet Union’s former bioweapons facility
in Stepnogorsk that was used to process anthrax, David Honl/ZUMA

 

Some of the world’s deadliest toxins are found in marine creatures
such as the puffer fish and the blue-ringed octopus. For many, there
is no antidote. So when U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) officials in
2019 confronted their Chinese counterparts with concerns about
experiments with marine neurotoxins being conducted in China’s
military labs, they were hoping for reassurance. Prior discussions had
included “good dialogue” on how to keep such research from taking
a nefarious turn, says a former DOD official involved in the sensitive
talks.

But the neurotoxin queries hit a nerve. “We got completely slammed
with disinformation,” including assertions that the United States
was operating its own bioweapons programs, the former official says.
China broke off talks, and then in 2020 Chinese officials alleged that
the U.S. Army had released the COVID-19 virus in Asia as a
bioweapon—a charge the U.S. vehemently denied.

The bitter breakdown highlighted what many see as enduring weaknesses
in the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), a landmark arms control
treaty that this year marks its 50th anniversary. Architects of
the BWC [[link removed]], which has been ratified
by China, the U.S., and 186 other countries, hoped it would eliminate
weapons “repugnant to the conscience of mankind.” But the
convention will need much stronger teeth if it is to keep humanity
safe, said researchers who gathered last week at a meeting
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Washington, D.C., sponsored by the U.S. National Academies of
Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to review the convention’s first
5 decades.

One major flaw, speakers said, is that the BWC lacks a mechanism to
verify compliance—or even meaningful transparency measures. If
international monitors can’t gain access to labs, or glean clues to
what is happening there, it’s hard to judge when dual-use
research—peaceful science that can have military
applications—crosses a line. Adding to the urgency are rapid
advances in the life sciences including synthetic biology and gene
editing, enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI). They could lead to
“weapons that are nastier than what’s found in nature—more
transmissible and more deadly. Or resistant to existing vaccines or
drugs,” says Jaime Yassif, who leads the biosecurity program at the
nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI).

BWC working groups and nonprofits have been exploring a variety of
approaches to strengthening the pact. Monitors could use AI to sniff
out suspicious signals in trade data, scientific articles, and
satellite imagery, for example, while companies that sell DNA
sequences could use sophisticated screens to weed out those that might
be used to construct weapons. Drug companies could be coaxed to stand
in as proving grounds for inspections should treaty parties adopt site
visits as a way to force violators to move or shut down work.

But efforts to strengthen the BWC face stiff headwinds. In December
2024, a treaty meeting ended in acrimony after Russia derailed
consensus on measures for international cooperation and assistance in
implementing the BWC and for the provision of science advice to treaty
members. In his closing statement
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Italy’s top negotiator, Leonardo Bencini, lamented the impasse.
“If a biological weapon were to be used tomorrow, we would be caught
completely unprepared. The world would look at us and would ask:
‘What have you done to prevent this?’” 

The first international agreement to ban an entire category of weapons
of mass destruction, the BWC has led to the closure of more than 20
offensive bioweapons programs since it entered into force on 26 March
1975, including the clandestine weaponization of everything from
deadly human pathogens such as anthrax and smallpox to rinderpest, a
virus lethal to cattle, and stem rust fungi against wheat and rye.
“It’s important to remember that before the BWC, the U.S. had one
of the largest biological weapons programs in the world. Leaders chose
to walk away from that capability,” says Gigi Kwik Gronvall, a
biosecurity expert at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health
Security.

Still, although bioweapons are unwieldy—they can be tricky to deploy
and sicken the aggressor’s own troops or civilians—they remain
appealing because they are cheap and terrifying. In an April 2024
nonproliferation report, the U.S. Department of State decried what it
views as worrisome dual-use research in China and Iran. And it
concluded that two nations—North Korea and Russia—currently have
programs to develop and stockpile offensive bioweapons. Unclassified
details are sketchy, but “there’s no uncertainty in that
assessment,” says Andrew Weber, a senior fellow at the Council on
Strategic Risks who led threat reduction programs for the U.S.
government, including dismantling a Soviet anthrax facility in
Kazakhstan in the 1990s. The public report, he says, is “the visible
tip of an underwater mountain of intelligence.”

According to the report, Russia has spent millions of dollars
renovating Soviet-era bioweapons labs of its 48th Central Scientific
Research Institute. In October 2024, The Washington Post highlighted
satellite images
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the ongoing refurbishment at Sergiyev Posad-6, the institute’s virus
lab near Moscow. Before the Soviet Union collapsed, researchers there
weaponized smallpox, Ebola, and other pathogens. The new imagery
indicates a “massive buildup,” including the installation of a
high-level containment lab, that “rang a lot of alarms,” Yassif
says. Russia has insisted it is modernizing the labs to develop
defenses against bioweapons. Arms control analysts also believe Russia
is helping North Korea evade sanctions to acquire biotech equipment.

The ranks of potential violators is expanding, from nations to
terrorist groups, as new technologies make it easier to manipulate
life. “Emerging technologies might lower the barrier to entry,”
says Bonnie Jenkins, who served as undersecretary of state for arms
control and international security affairs in former President Joe
Biden’s administration.

Potential acts of subterfuge also remain a major worry. One nightmare
scenario Weber envisions is Russia unleashing a pathogen via the Port
of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Europe’s largest, then claiming it
was an accidental lab release from nearby Erasmus University.

To reduce risk, NTI last year launched the International Biosecurity
and Biosafety Initiative [[link removed]] for Science to
safeguard biotechnology from misuse. The initiative has begun to offer
free screening software to DNA synthesis companies to help them avoid
selling genes for, say, new bacterial toxins. The screening tool can
pick up dangerous new proteins designed by AI, Microsoft’s Bruce
Wittmann and colleagues reported
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December 2024 on bioRxiv. But novel sequences generated by a
pioneering technique that creates proteins from noncanonical amino
acids—beyond the 20 protein building blocks found in nature—might
slip past. Such genetic code expansion is “the risk I’m shouting
about right now,” says Katarzyna Adamala, a synthetic biologist at
the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

In unpublished work, Adamala and colleagues sent the sequence of a
harmless protein, a luciferase, to a collaborator at a DNA synthesis
company and asked him to alter his screening database to flag it as a
sequence of concern. Then, they sent a version of the sequence that
coded for a luciferase built in part from noncanonical amino acids,
which passed the screen. They repeated that with a couple other benign
sequences, then with pathogenic sequences without ordering the DNA.
All evaded the screen. “We were able to fly under the radar,” she
says, suggesting “we need to change how screening works.”

BWC backers hope that in talks scheduled for coming months treaty
parties will hammer out a mechanism for triggering inspections. “You
don’t need inspections to be perfect. You just need them to raise
the cost of cheating,” says Christopher Park, an arms control expert
who last week retired from the U.S. Department of State. “Moving,
hiding, or destroying material can destroy a bioagent,” adds Sonia
Ben Ouaghram-Gormley, a bioweapons expert at George Mason University.
“Even if a program resumes later, you’ve delayed it. In biology,
that’s a big win.”

Any progress, however, will come only after treaty parties move past
the ill will generated by last year’s meeting. And U.S. President
Donald Trump’s new administration has not yet articulated a stance
on the BWC. The general mood in nonproliferation circles, Jenkins
says, is that “political will is still lacking” to make
significant changes.

For now, the taboo that bioweapons represent to much of humanity may
be the strongest safeguard against their use.

doi: 10.1126/science.zah2mbg

_RICHARD STONE contributes to Science as its senior international
correspondent with a focus on Asia. His writing has featured datelines
from challenging reporting environments such as Cuba, Iran, and North
Korea. Stone also serves as a special adviser, science diplomacy and
engagement, for the Human Frontier Science Program organization. He
has contributed to Discover, Smithsonian, and National
Geographic magazines, and is the author of the nonfiction
book Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant. His overseas
experience includes stints as a Fulbright Scholar at Rostov State
University in Rostov-on-Don, Russia in 1995–96 and at Kazakh
National University in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2004–05._

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How Has Cosmology Changed From 2000 to 2025?
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Ethan Siegel
Big Think - Starts With A Bang
25 years ago, our concordance picture of cosmology, also known as
ΛCDM, came into focus. 25 years later, are we about to break that
model?
April 8, 2025

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