It is very difficult to answer that question. We are sitting here in the US, a normal sort of civilised country. But we need to go back to the era of the cold war in 1975. You are a junior lieutenant, and you take not just one oath, but two different oaths. The first is the Hippocratic oath. The second is the oath of a Soviet military officer. In the first, you promise not to cause harm. The second pledge is to protect your country using any means possible. You are told that, first, you are your country’s defender, and, second, you are a physician. People in the Soviet Union were not monsters. They were normal people. Loving their wives, their families.

So what went wrong?

The entire system was an evil system. The country had lost millions and millions of people in different wars. A human life was nothing. What was important was the country’s fate. It was a matter of propaganda. You were told that what you do is in response to the US’s evil efforts to develop biological weapons against the Soviet Union. The US was lying, and was going to destroy our country with nuclear weapons and biological weapons. To protect our families, our children, ourselves, we needed to do exactly the same but with more powerful weapons. When you put everything together you come to a conclusion: I need to protect my family. I need to protect my children. I need to protect my country.

You developed the biological weapons, not deployed them. If you’d had your finger on the button, knowing what they can do, would you have deployed them?

The easy response would be to say, “no, I wouldn’t have done it”, but I cannot say that is true. The person who is sitting just in front of you wouldn’t do this. Now I know what really happened. Nobody wanted to destroy the Soviet Union. Nobody wanted to kill Soviet Union citizens. Physically I am the same person, but psychologically I am different.

What did your family think of what you were doing?

Fortunately, practically nobody knew. They knew I was doing some secret work. My children found out after they came to the US. They love me. They love me because they think I am not a bad father. But at the same time I know they don’t like what I’ve done.

You’ve often said that vaccines are not a good way to protect people against biological weapons. What’s wrong with them?

In general, nothing is wrong with vaccines. They have made a huge change in the world over the past two hundred years. They are perfect for protecting against many infectious diseases. But what is different with biological weapons is that they can be based on a huge number of different biological agents-in my opinion, at least 70, and you never know which kind is going to be used. Can you imagine vaccinating somebody against 70 different infectious agents? It is virtually impossible from the health standpoint, the financial standpoint, and the scientific standpoint.

So what’s the alternative?

Our approach at Advanced Biosystems is significantly different. There are two subsystems of the immune system: acquired immunity, which is activated by vaccines against specific antigens, and innate immunity, which works non-specifically. We are targeting innate immunity, which is theoretically capable of protecting against any infectious agent. The project is funded by the US Army. Biological weapons work mostly by infecting people through their respiratory tract, so we want to enhance innate immunity in the respiratory tract. We have identified a group of cytokines capable of activating the immune cells of the respiratory tract. Our objective is to develop an inhaler containing micro-encapsulated cytokines to prevent degradation and toxicity. The inhaler could be used to treat people before a biological weapons attack and after they are exposed. We believe that this approach could reduce casualty numbers significantly in the event of a biological attack, and it could also be used to protect against some naturally occurring respiratory infections such as influenza or tuberculosis.

The US government must have been very interested in your research . . .

No. It took me quite some time to persuade them to fund it. They were very cautious.

Why? Were they afraid that such work might be seen as offensive and so contravene the Biological Weapons Convention?

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