From Annie Jacobsen, the author of the bestselling A lab accident, a bio-attack, a global pandemic, and the collapse of human society. In this essential new book, based on dozens of new interviews with experts with high-level political, governmental, medical, and military responsibility, Annie Jacobsen examines this very scenario. It would be only a matter of days from such a global infection before the infrastructure built to handle this gravest of situations would be in a battle for human existence. The fallout: mass death, total societal breakdown, widespread insurrection, anarchy, and a plague-ravaged wasteland that no longer resembles modern civilization. In other words: dystopia. Following the gripping narrative style that launched This is what could happen; a ticking-clock roadmap to the hours, days, and weeks following the release of a biological agent, that serves as the most essential, forward-looking journalism in preparation for urgent societal upheaval.

Autorentext

Annie Jacobsen

Klappentext

*Instant New York Times Bestseller!

New York Times* Editors' Choice
One of People's 15 Most Anticipated Books of Summer
The Next Big Idea Club's July 2026 Must-Read Books
One of the New York Times Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Reading This Summer
Sunset Magazine's 15 New Books You Don't Want to Miss

From Annie Jacobsen, the author of the bestselling Nuclear War: A Scenario, a book on a subject that has long orbited her reporting: biological warfare.**

A lab accident, a bio-attack, a global pandemic, and the collapse of human society. In this essential new book, based on dozens of new interviews with experts with high-level political, governmental, medical, and military responsibility, Annie Jacobsen examines this very scenario. It would be only a matter of days from such a global infection before the infrastructure built to handle this gravest of situations would be in a battle for human existence.

The fallout: mass death, total societal breakdown, widespread insurrection, anarchy, and a plague-ravaged wasteland that no longer resembles modern civilization. In other words: dystopia.

Following the gripping narrative style that launched Nuclear War to the New York Times bestseller list, Jacobsen looks deeply at a situation that is in some ways the opposite of a nuclear bomb: There is no mushroom cloud, no shock wave or blast. Instead, the scenario that could end the world as we know it begins with something so small, and something so malicious, that when used for evil, only evil can result.

This is what could happen; a ticking-clock roadmap to the hours, days, and weeks following the release of a biological agent, that serves as the most essential, forward-looking journalism in preparation for urgent societal upheaval.

Zusammenfassung
**One of People's 15 Most Anticipated Books of Summer
The Next Big Idea Club's July 2026 Must-Read Books
One of the New York Times Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Reading This Summer
Sunset Magazine's 15 New Books You Don't Want to Miss

From Annie Jacobsen, the author of the bestselling Nuclear War: A Scenario, a book on a subject that has long orbited her reporting: biological warfare.**

A lab accident, a bio-attack, a global pandemic, and the collapse of human society. In this essential new book, based on dozens of new interviews with experts with high-level political, governmental, medical, and military responsibility, Annie Jacobsen examines this very scenario. It would be only a matter of days from such a global infection before the infrastructure built to handle this gravest of situations would be in a battle for human existence.

The fallout: mass death, total societal breakdown, widespread insurrection, anarchy, and a plague-ravaged wasteland that no longer resembles modern civilization. In other words: dystopia.

Following the gripping narrative style that launched Nuclear War to the New York Times bestseller list, Jacobsen looks deeply at a situation that is in some ways the opposite of a nuclear bomb: There is no mushroom cloud, no shock wave or blast. Instead, the scenario that could end the world as we know it begins with something so small, and something so malicious, that when used for evil, only evil can result.

This is what could happen; a ticking-clock roadmap to the hours, days, and weeks following the release of a biological agent, that serves as the most essential, forward-looking journalism in preparation for urgent societal upheaval.

Leseprobe
Chapter One

Recombinant DNA

One day in 1971, inside a laboratory at Stanford University in California, an American biochemist named Paul Berg conducted an experiment that would forever change the biological sciences. He successfully spliced DNA from a monkey virus into the DNA of a second virus, known as lambda phage.

Although humans have long blended the traits of plants and animals through grafting or breeding, Berg was the first scientist to create a recombinant DNA molecule by joining the DNA from two entirely different viral species.

He had created a chimera. Two living things at once.

Like a mythical monster of Greek lore.

Berg's seminal biotechnology was not meant to be a weapon. It was a technique: recombinant DNA. Today it is more commonly known as genetic engineering-the deliberate modification of an organism's genes, including humans. But in 1971, Berg's gene-splicing experiment kicked down the door of scientific possibilities. Like the splitting of the atom, the discovery of recombinant DNA technology meant the world would never be the same.

On the one hand, scientists could enhance public health with the development of medical countermeasures and previously unimaginable cures. On the other hand, recombinant DNA could create novel, or new, germs that could kill untold numbers of people, wreak environmental havoc, and even alter evolution.

This is the paradox of dual-use technology. Man-made technologies can be used to help, or to harm. To heal, or to kill.

Initially, Berg's gene-splicing breakthrough remained private. No one outside the small Stanford lab knew anything about the experiment until the following summer. That's when one of Berg's graduate students, a young biochemist named Janet Metz, attended a workshop at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and told her teacher, a virologist named Robert Pollack, that Berg had succeeded in splicing together DNA from two different viral species.

Pollack was stunned. "Pollack told [Janet] he thought that [my experiment] was the most dangerous and outrageous experiment that anybody could possibly do," Berg later recalled. He remembered Pollack asking him, "had I realized how dangerous an experiment this would be?"

Berg's experiment involved inserting a monkey-virus gene, called Simian Virus 40 (SV40)-known to cause cancerous tumors in laboratory animals-into a bacterial virus (lambda phage), with the plan of eventually introducing it into Escherichia coli (E. coli), a common bacterium that lives in the intestines of humans. Pollack's outrage, Berg learned, stemmed from the opinion "that the bacteria carrying SV40 DNA might escape, and cause cancer in [everyone it] infected."

"My first reaction," said Berg, "was that this was absurd. I didn't see any risk to it."

But Pollack's indignation stayed with him. He consulted Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel Prize-winning microbiologist, who ended up changing Berg's mind. "I came to the conclusion that I could not say with 100 percent assurance that this experiment would pose zero risk," Berg said. In an act of scientific restraint unprecedented in the modern era, Berg and ten other scientists published a letter in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which they called for a temporary moratorium on recombinant DNA techniques.

This …