Main content

What should we do with the last stocks of Smallpox?

Should the two remaining stocks of smallpox be destroyed?

Scientists are divided about the USA's decision to renege on the agreement to destroy its last stock of smallpox. This is one of the organisms apparently developed into Soviet biological weapons, says defector Ken Alibek, aka former Soviet microbiologist Colonel Kanatzhan Alibekov. Are the 5,300-year-old signs incised on pottery discovered in Harappa, Pakistan, the oldest known writing? Physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center are trying to discover why there was anything left in the universe after the Big Bang – and where all the antimatter went.

Release date:

Available now

24 minutes

Â鶹Éç World Service Archive

This programme was restored as part of the World Service archive project

Podcast