The State Research Center for Applied Microbiology (aka Institute of Microbiology and NPO Biosintez) is a research laboratory in

Obolensk, Moscow Oblast Obolensk (russian: Оболенск) is an types of inhabited localities in Russia, urban locality (an urban-type settlement) in Serpukhovsky District of Moscow Oblast, Russia. Population: References

Urban-type settlements in Moscow Ob ...

History

The facility was built in the 1970s after the

Biological Weapons Convention The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), or Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), is a disarmament treaty that effectively bans biological and toxin weapons by prohibiting their development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpil ...

prompted the formation of the

Biopreparat The All-Union Science Production Association Biopreparat (russian: Биопрепарат, p=bʲɪəprʲɪpɐˈrat, lit: "biological preparation") was the Soviet agency created in April 1974, which spearheaded the largest and most sophisticated ...

directorate at the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

Ministry of Health. It reached a peak level of activity in the mid-1980s. Facilities at this complex "included at least forty two-story tall fermentation tanks, maintained at Biosafety Level 4 (BSL4) inside huge ring-shaped biocontainment zones in a building called Corpus One." A variety of bacterial microbes, especially ''

Yersinia pestis ''Yersinia pestis'' (''Y. pestis''; formerly '' Pasteurella pestis'') is a gram-negative, non-motile, coccobacillus bacterium without spores that is related to both ''Yersinia pseudotuberculosis'' and ''Yersinia enterocolitica''. It is a facult ...

'', were studied during at minimum the last years of the 20th century. As the USSR crumbled, the British and the Americans convinced the Russians to open up for inspection their state laboratory facilities, including their biological ones. The joint British-American weapons-inspection team toured four Biopreparat facilities in January 1991, including the high-security Obolensk facility. They found that the BSL4 production tanks were capable of making enormous quantities of agent, much like a beer brewery. The inspectors reported the tanks were clean. In order to dissuade the staff from collaborating with rogue states, the

Nunn–Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction As the collapse of the Soviet Union appeared imminent, the United States and their NATO allies grew concerned of the risk of nuclear weapons held in the Republics of the Soviet Union, Soviet republics falling into enemy hands. The Cooperative Thr ...

programme offered incentives to former biological weapons scientists, as well as upgrading the physical security and biosafety of the Obolensk facilities. In 1997, a scientist working at the Institute named Pomerantsev published a paper in which were described some genetic modifications to the Anthrax bacteria.

References

Biological hazards * Laboratories in Russia Research institutes in Russia Biological warfare Medical research institutes in the Soviet Union Soviet biological weapons program Pharmaceutical companies of Russia Pharmaceutical companies of the Soviet Union {{Russia-struct-stub