On an unrecorded day in 1938 a Soviet economist was sentenced by his government to life imprisonment in an old monastery town east of Moscow. But in this case the condemned didn’t end up serving much of his sentence because on the same day of the ruling, Nikolai Kondratiev was taken to a park on the outskirts of the city, and executed by firing squad.
In a now widely circulated 2018 interview with Chinese state TV, military scientist Chen Hu was asked about the capabilities of an engineered bio-weapon. Hu described the effects of such weapons as ‘devastating’ and ‘equaling that of an atomic bomb’. He then went on to appeal the need for creating defensive capabilities against such events.
A year after he gave that interview Dr. Chen was dead at age 57. In his obituary the numerous achievements of the scientist were outlined, among them the fact that despite being a military doctor, he had helped develop groundbreaking research using CRISPR gene editing; specifically the mice embryos that had been given an engineered resistance to HIV in 2017.
