Miles sits down with Dr. Steven Quay—a senior fellow at Hudson Institute as well as the founder and chief executive officer of Atossa Therapeutics, Inc.—to discuss the evolving landscape of emerging technology and artificial intelligence–enabled biological warfare operations. With the increased potential for dual-use technology in hybrid warfare, the international community needs to develop strategies to prevent the proliferation of biothreats and biological weapons, and adequately prepare for future military and public health crises. The conversation pulls from the lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic, provides an assessment of the current capabilities of dual-use biothreats within China’s military doctrine, and critiques the current lack of global governance infrastructure to regulate AI-enabled biotechnologies.
China Insider is a weekly podcast project from Hudson Institute’s China Center, hosted by China Center Director and Senior Fellow, Dr. Miles Yu, who provides weekly news that mainstream American outlets often miss, as well as in-depth commentary and analysis on the China challenge and the free world’s future.
Episode Transcript
This transcription is automatically generated and edited lightly for accuracy. Please excuse any errors.
Miles Yu:
Welcome to China Insider, a podcast from the Hudson Institute's China Center. I am Miles Yu, Senior Fellow and Director of the China Center. Join me each week for our analysis of the major events concerning China, China threats, and their implications to the US and beyond.
Hello everyone. Welcome to Insider Interviews. This is a sister program to our flagship, regular weekly podcast called China Insider from the Hudson Institute. My name is Miles Yu. I'm a Senior Fellow and Director of the China Center. In this week's segment of Insider Interviews, I'm thrilled to welcome Dr. Steven Quay, to discuss the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence and emerging technologies in hybrid and biological warfare operations. In the context of US-China's strategic competition and engagement, it is crucial that we accurately assess the potential impact of bio threats in the context of AI and emerging technologies, and prepare for future military and public health crises.
Before we get started, I'd like to take the moment to introduce our guest, Dr. Steven Quay. As a physician, scientist, and biotech entrepreneur, Dr. Quay has conducted extensive work on dual-use pathogen research, AI enabled bioengineering and synthetic biology, and has contributed in published works and briefings before Congress and the State Department on national preparedness against engineered biological threats. He's the CEO and founder of Atossa Therapeutics, which develops therapies for oncology treatment to combat infectious diseases. [He is also the] co-inventor of seven pharmaceutical drugs, including 94 US patents, and 395 peer reviewed publications. He's a man of many titles and talents, and now most recently, he adds to his resume as a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. Steven, let me extend a warm welcome to Hudson and thank you for joining us today on Insider Interviews, and we're thrilled to have you at the Institute and on this show.
Dr. Steven Quay:
Miles, it's great to be here and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to your audience about some pretty important things. So let's dive into it.
Miles Yu:
Well, full disclosure, you and I have known each other for a number of years and when I was [at] the State Department working at [Fmr. Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo’s office, [and] we had some interactions. At the time, [and] this was the height of COVID, we got to know each other and [I] truly, truly admire your work. You provide the indisputable or undisputable scientific justifications for many of [our government’s] policies. So once again, this is the [the perfect combination of] civilian research and government policy and it's a very, very good tradition. Let me start with some brief background for our listeners [that are] unfamiliar with your work. How did you find yourself, a physician, scientist, and a biotech expert, working and [conducting] research within the foreign policy field?
Dr. Steven Quay:
Yeah, so that's an interesting little saga there. And to complete the COVID work that I've done, my book will be coming out on January 13th. It's titled “The Code as Witness,” and it talks about why the virus clearly came from a laboratory, but also some policy changes we need to put in place for the future to prevent something worse. So what happened was I was looking at this virus coming out of China like everybody did. I wrote what I thought was a very academic paper just looking at the statistical probabilities of which [subway] line in Wuhan seemed to have the most cases at the hospitals near there. And it turned out, the Wuhan laboratory and the airport were on line two. The title of the paper was “The Line Two COVID Conduit.” I put it out there thinking it was good academic work and then suddenly my secretary gets a call from a fellow at the State Department named David Asher who says, are you a spy or what's going on because you seem to have come across what might be confidential information in other parts of the government.
And we got talking and [as] it turned out, I did it all with open source information. But [I] was really privileged to have the opportunity to work with you, Miles, and with the other team members in the fall of 2020 and up until January 8th, 2021, on the origins of COVID. And then of course, there was a change in administration and our work was shut down. But that's how we met and that's how I got into this field. And, as you said, I have testified in the House [and] twice in the Senate. I've advised Senators on some of the legislation around dangerous pathogens and this kind of research. So, it's become an important component for me because we really have to do something about this. This is an important national security issue.
Miles Yu:
Yeah, I actually didn't do much specific research on COVID[’s] origin. I just provided cover from the Secretary's office and you guys did a lot of work. David Asher, fabulous colleague and a true patriot, and I'm sure you and him at some point will tell a lot of stories about that particular chapter. Now [let me just] switch gears [here] a little bit [and] talk about COVID-19 and information warfare. The Chinese government is an expert in human duplicity and [this] comes from their joint deployment of information warfare and disinformation campaigns. Now listeners, if you just pay attention to what I'm going to say, you'll be surprised by this. If you go to China today, 2025, [and] you ask 10 people, “What's the origin of COVID-19?”, nine out of 10, most likely 10 out 10, will tell you, it has come from the US Army Biodefense lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. That's what they're told and that's what they believe because that's the only information they have. That's the influence they [the Chinese government] have. So this is really, really important. China is trying to spread that kind of disinformation to the rest of the world. So Steven, some analysts argue that China's information warfare and information campaign during the COVID-19 pandemic was kind of a form of soft hybrid warfare. Do you see that?
Dr. Steven Quay:
Oh, absolutely. Miles, it's without question. And see what happened was there was an event at the end of October called the Wuhan Military Olympic Games where 11,000 soldiers from 64 countries came to Wuhan for two weeks to do Olympic-like military games. So [they] run really fast and then shoot a gun at a target, those kinds of things. This was planned years and years and years ago. But what you have said is exactly right. China has used that event as a likely scenario where the virus was introduced by our [American] soldiers who did attend that event. And that's a very clever use of a true set of circumstances, but with a false component, which is to say that it came from the US. I include an analysis of that event and the subsequent spreading of the virus in this upcoming book I have, “The Code as Witness,” coming out in January of next year, but it is an example of taking a true event and then misappropriating the details to make it sound like that was the origin.
Miles Yu:
Yeah, people remember [those] October, 2019, Chinese hosted military games for two things. Number one, the host, China, was caught cheating. It is just very embarrassing for them. Secondly, before that, I believe sometime in September before the games even started, they had a drill, a bio threat drill, with the specific objective of preventing a new coronavirus spread. That's pretty telling to me. That's a well-documented event. In other words, they knew what was going on, otherwise it wouldn't have been that specific about that particular kind of virus. Let me just ask you about the artificial intelligence and dual-use dilemma. Artificial intelligence is accelerating biotech research, both for good and ill. How do you see the dual-use nature of AI-enabled biology evolving and are our current government frameworks capable of keeping pace with the risk, especially in authoritarian states like China?
Dr. Steven Quay:
Yeah, so first let's talk about the scientific situation and then we can flip it to how it impacts policy. The scientific situation, as I describe it, is the following way. During World War II, when the Manhattan Project was charged with developing a nuclear bomb for the first time, the fundamental science of nuclear physics was well understood by humans and was used in the development, [specifically] the engineering of the bomb itself. With biology, we have this remarkable situation where, because of the complexity of viruses, because of the complexity of the cells that they attack, we humans do not understand this field as well as we understood physics before the bomb was developed. However, in the last three years, artificial intelligence systems have been specifically trained on the biology of life and the biology of viruses and the biology of pathogens. And so now, inside artificial intelligence computers, the understanding of how to create a bioweapon or how to enhance the pathogenicity of a virus is better known that it is for humans.
The best example is the leading coronavirus engineer in the world, Ralph Barrick [who works] at the University of North Carolina. He specifically took a bat virus and converted it to human infecting cells. There were six letter changes in the 30,000 letter virus genome. He understood two of the changes and what they did to make the virus pathogen in humans, the other four mutations, he had no idea what they did. So he created a virus that could infect humans and kill humans at about a 10% rate if it escaped the laboratory, which it didn't, but he did not understand what it did. I now believe that the artificial intelligence systems that have been trained on this raw data understand better than we do these pathogenicity pathways, and that creates unique risks for any person, any government that uses this technology with these kinds of pathogens.
Miles Yu:
That's a very good point, and I think what you said about the Manhattan Project, humans unleashed the enormous potential of nuclear energy and for good use. The dark side of that is [that it] could also be very destructive. So humans use our scientific knowledge to create some kind of powerful thing. That thing comes back to torment humans. That's the dilemma of nuclear energy. And I think today's geopolitics on a global level is pretty much driven still by that dilemma. That is, how to contain the spread of nuclear technology and nuclear energy to prevent total nuclear catastrophe. In a similar vein, of course, viruses can do good things. If we can use these good biological studies to study viruses, to prevent disease, to eradicate some of the chronic diseases and infectious diseases, this [is the good part] of vaccine research. On the other hand, viruses can be weaponized and you have a regime like China who sees the [negative] potential [of viruses]. Since the 2003 SARS crisis, the Chinese military basically got a hold of the enormous potential of viruses as a weapon. So that's where the problem comes in because you have so much destructive potential in bio research. [And] in the meantime, you have to really consider biosafety. You have to really consider the ethical side of that. So [in] biosafety, biosecurity, something was lacking. Secretary Pompeo and I wrote an oped, which was published in the Wall Street Journal about three years ago. We did not talk about the scientific aspect of the Chinese bio research, but about the biosafety and biosecurity part of that. You have so many deadly viruses in Chinese labs, but the biosecurity procedures and the ability to handle these deadly viruses was terribly lacking and ultimately it's not [just] a Chinese problem. [It’s] everybody's problem.
Dr. Steven Quay:
You're absolutely right, Miles, there's a couple of things that came to mind as you were talking about that. One of the remarkable differences between nuclear energy and its risks on the world stage and biotechnology and virus research is the issue around attribution of the event or of the materials. We know, for example, that with nuclear energy, you can actually tell what reactor in the world a particular isotope was made in and what day it was made because the mixture of isotopes are a signature of that event, of the manufacture of it. So even if a weapon shows up a few years later coming from a supply chain that is circuitous all over the world, once you have the material, once you have an event using that material, you can trace it back to its origin with high certainty. We know now from this event, I mean even outside of China, the question of the attribution of SARS-CoV-2 to a laboratory in Wuhan is iffy, iffy. I mean, no one has officially said that. All of the governments in the world have noticed that attribution of biological events can be obfuscated fairly easily. So that's something important to keep in mind.
Miles Yu:
Yeah, so you talk about attribution, obviously that has something to do with accountability. A few minutes earlier you mentioned AI can assist us [in] dealing with the kind of a precarious nature of virus research. That also brings me some concern because AI [is] very much like nuclear energy, very much like viruses. AI is also human created, but [this] human creation may someday come [to haunt] the creator. You never know. So this is a perpetual dilemma that has not been solved. Let me just move the gear a little bit to a different speed: bio terrorism and non-state actors. Besides China, do you know of anyone else, like Russia, Iran, North Korea, the bad guys, that is actually actively pursuing bio research [or] designing new pathogens or carrying out bio-terrorism? Is this part of their own sort of security strategy?
Dr. Steven Quay:
So the history is very clear: the USSR had a very active bio weapons program in which pathogens were created in the 80s and 90s. And some of those facilities that went dormant after the Biological Weapons Treaty became more extensive. There was just in the last year, the refitting of HVAC air handling systems on the roofs of some of these old facilities from the 80s and 90s suggesting that they're being revamped for bio weapons research in Odessa, Ukraine. Then-Senator Obama cut the ribbon on a bio weapons research laboratory, a joint research laboratory between the US military and the Ukrainians, where many samples, feeder samples, small stock feeder samples of most of the pathogens that were developed under the Soviet regime were kept. And as far as I know that laboratory is still in existence, as far as I know it's not in Russian occupied territory at this point in time, but it's an example of the extensive world basis of this very research.
As far as China's concerned, in my original work in 2020, I found inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology evidence with some forensic techniques that I developed with folks around the world to be able to go in and sample the laboratory from afar. It was quite a remarkable forensic capability. We found research work where they were taking the NEPA virus, which is 70% lethal, apart and putting it back together like you do with gain-of-function research. Fast forward to last year with David Atcher and others, we wrote a report that the PLA [People’s Liberation Army] is now in collaboration with Bangladesh and Pakistan setting up laboratories doing NEPA research ostensibly for public health reasons. Although the NEPA virus cannot exist in China because it requires equatorial species and China's too far north for its activities, but in the last four years, there are now 14 laboratories on the edge of India, in Pakistan on one side and Bangladesh on the other, where the PLA and local scientists are collaborating on NEPA research. This is seriously problematic because you could obviously be developing a vaccine, [and] you could obviously have “accidental” entry into the neighboring country [India] to cause local chaos.
Miles Yu:
China's most famous, or infamous, military personnel is a major general in the PLA Dr. Chen Wei (陈微). She's the person who actually took over the Wuhan lab after the COVID outbreak. She made her career by going to West African countries, equatorial regions, to study this kind of virus [that] you are talking about. So obviously they [the PLA] have a lot of investment in this. Which brings me to another question that is: since this is a global health issue, to say it mildly, you would think there will be global governance taking place. But no, we seem to have a global governance vacuum here about bio technologies and global health, particularly in the global policy [sphere].
When I was working for the State Department back in the day, I was asked to find out the origin of Wuhan from open sources. This is like late January, 2020, just a couple of weeks after the outbreak. I found out that the Chinese military were actively involved in some of the deadly, bizarre, and Frankenstein-like research weapons. For example, in 2011 they submitted their projects to this international organization based out of Ottawa and London, this international biological and toxin research regime. Every other year, they have conferences over there. There are 19 member states. Each one of them has a bio weapons program, and they're obligated to submit what they're doing. By that time [2011], China's submission would include [the] biological weapons they're working on, [which were] population-specific biogenetic marking weapons. [If you] translate [this] into human language, basically they [China] can develop biological weapons specifically targeting particular ethnic groups. And that's pretty serious. That's pretty damaging. That's 2011, the Chinese military's own submission. So this is very, very scary. And another thing that's really interesting is, I found out, when we talk about China's biosecurity, it's not like the Chinese scientists didn't know. The director of Wuhan lab is a guy by the name of Yuan Zhiming (袁志明). He actually has been openly championing for enhancing China’s biosecurity [and] biosafety [measures]. He even published a journal called the International Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity in English.
He's not the person who actually didn't do the research in the lab. He's just the director. So I think he was pretty worried about that. Of course after the outbreak of COVID, he's totally gagged [and] you cannot find anything about his remarks. So, Steven, do you think that we need a new international governance regime on these kinds of issues? WHO obviously is anemic on this and we do not have global bioweapons regulations and research.
Dr. Steven Quay:
Well, yes, it is necessary, but it's very, very complicated. The United Nations does have a Biological Weapons Treaty Convention, which China is a signatory to [and] the US is a signatory to. But, it has no inspection capabilities whatsoever. It's simply voluntary. And obviously it didn't identify the outbreak in China or China didn't report it as necessary. Taiwan was actually the first to report to the WHO about the outbreak in Wuhan via an email in the December timeframe. So there is certainly a need, but I don't think there's a will from the countries that are doing what they ostensibly call Biodefensive weapons research. Whether you're doing defensive or offensive research is really in your mind [because] the research is identical. If you showed me a laboratory experiment, I could not tell you whether someone was doing that to create a weapon, or to create a vaccine against a weapon. The research is the same.
Miles Yu:
You're right, a bio weapon cannot be used unless you develop a vaccine, at least to vaccinate your own people. Otherwise you'll be basically the same target as your enemy.
Dr. Steven Quay:
Yeah. And so all of my evidence is that the chaos within the Wuhan CDC and the Hubei CDC and then ultimately up to Beijing, all of my research indicates that there was probably initially an accidental leak probably in July to August of 2019 based on the genetics of that. But having said that, there was a vaccine that was being developed that was part of a patent in February of 2020, which is pretty hard to do without having been working on it prior. That vaccine did not work very well. And as far as I know, the inventor of that in May [of 2020] died and some sources say that maybe he fell off the roof of a building, but I don't have direct evidence of that. But certainly he was a decorated scientist who died very quietly in May of 2020 under kind of unusual circumstances.
Miles Yu:
So I guess we actually should not be surprised by any kind of stuff. Now let me just say you gave us a very pessimistic view about the [complications of] global governance. Is there any kind of self-regulating ethics code among the researchers themselves? I'll give you one example. It's awfully difficult for any biologist to do a lot of human subject research in this country, [and also difficult to do research on] mammals and primates because you have to go through all kinds of approval and vetting processes over here. However, in a country like China, they have a very lax policy on this kind of stuff. So for a researcher first starting his career in an American university for example, he has to work five, six years to get his tenure and then he's really in a rush to get his research done and published.
So a lot of people I know in real life, from university at least, will go to China, just sign some deal with their Chinese colleagues where there's very little regulation at all. So you can easily work on primates, for example, [even] some human subjects. So that is one reason I found out, which sent chills through my bones, that so many so-called scientists, in the aftermath of a COVID outbreak, came out to openly defend China and to basically completely rule out the possibility of a lab leak. So this is not really scientifically driven, this is purely ethically-challenged behavior. So if we all have a very stringent sort of ethical code, regulated by university research labs, do you think that might ameliorate the problem, the risk?
Dr. Steven Quay:
It is a remarkable situation. You've indicated here, Miles, and again I'd like to use historical precedent here. So if you recall, it was Einstein and some of his colleagues who actually wrote to President Truman saying that there are potential dangers of this technology and it should be regulated. Oppenheimer, of course, got in huge trouble for having taken that path.
Miles Yu:
I think you mean FDR.
Dr. Steven Quay:
Yeah, FDR. So then fast forward to what we're doing now, and the answer is that there seems to be no ethical concern whatsoever about doing the most dangerous research. And that is not restricted to China. It is in the US, it's in the Netherlands, it's in Germany, it is in China, of course. But these individuals are doing, and again, I have invented seven drugs [that are] FDA approved, and I can't do a single human study without a complete IRB that looks at its ethics, and even in China that occurs. So the fact that these people can do this research in your neighborhood, so to speak, at a university near you, that could kill you or your family without anything but self-regulation is just phenomenal because as you said, they are denying that this came from a laboratory, many of them to this day.
And the science is so clear that it came from a laboratory. Their ethics are completely challenged and I don't know whether it's just because their paycheck depends on this kind of research or something else. It is very easy to do research to get funded when you take a dangerous virus and you make it more dangerous and you publish a paper because that's very easy to do. You can get tenure very quickly with that kind of research because it scares everybody. But at the same time, that research is hugely dangerous for an accidental leak, which happens. I mean, SARS-1 escaped from a laboratory in Taiwan and actually killed a few people. These viruses are very hard to contain, even with reasonably good containment [measures].
Miles Yu:
Yeah, there's subsequent leaks of SARS virus from a Chinese lab, Chinese CDC, outside Beijing after 2003. I think the Chinese government obviously was very, very scared of that. But even though it didn't cause a large amount of human casualties, it was a constant occurrence. I think the Chinese government knew about this and so did a lot of people in the west. One sort of collapse, a moral collapse of the scientific community, is group thinking and [a] complete lack of independence as a scientist. So this is probably one of the biggest lessons we should learn from the pandemic. I think in addition to the scientific side of that, of course there's a political side. I don't think China right now is still a very safe place to do a lot of virus studies. Look at how they do nuclear power plants. I mean there were pretty scary regulatory regimes in there, yet they're building scores of nuclear power plants right now to solve their energy problem. So of course, many things that happen in China follow this kind of irony. They build these environmentally devastating landmark projects, hydroelectric dams, and all kinds of other things [come from this ironic mindset]. I think there should be some kind of price that people should pay.
Dr. Steven Quay:
I don't disagree.
Miles Yu:
Yeah. Okay. So that's probably the time we have for our podcast, this Insider Interviews. Steven, could you repeat the upcoming book that you’re going to publish so that our listeners can buy.
Dr. Steven Quay:
“The Origin as Witness.” It's available on Amazon in pre-order. It'll come out in January, and has four sections. So the first two sections are why it came from a laboratory and why that laboratory is the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Section three is my prescription that governments and international organizations should take to try to prevent the next one. And then the fourth section is some hardcore science for anyone who wants to sort of challenge things because, as you say, many in the scientific establishment refuse to admit that it came from a laboratory. I've done several debates defeating these individuals on a one-on-one basis, but as a book, I wanted to have preserved for all eternity the arguments of why this came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Miles Yu:
Okay, “The Code as Witness”. And that should be a very good script for the Hollywood production and maybe it should be part of the 007 series. But on the other hand, Hollywood, of course, like much of the scientific field, is totally afraid of losing the Chinese market. So anyway, it is what it is. Alright, Dr. Steven Quay, thank you very much for joining us today and for [our] listeners, thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
Dr. Steven Quay:
Thank you Miles.