MOLECULAR BIOLOGY

The great achievements of molecular biology and genetics over the last 50 years

have produced advances in agriculture and industrial processes and have revolutionized

the practice of medicine. The very technologies that fueled these benefits to society,

however, pose a potential risk as well — the possibility that these technologies could

also be used to create the next generation of biological weapons. Biotechnology

represents a “dual use” dilemma in which the same technologies can be used

legitimately for human betterment and misused for bioterrorism.

Events over the 1990s focused growing attention on this balance of risks and

benefits, part of a larger concern about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction

(WMD) — chemical, nuclear, or biological. In early 1992, President Yeltsin

acknowledged that, despite being an original signatory and State party to the Biological

and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC), the Soviet Union had maintained a major

clandestine biological weapons program into the early 1990s.1 Yeltsin ordered the

program shut down, but concerns about other possible secret programs remained.

Policymakers in the United States became increasingly concerned that so-called ”rogue

states” would turn to WMD to counter the overwhelming U.S. conventional military

superiority. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin launched the “Defense Counterproliferation

Initiative” in December 1993 to develop additional means to address these threats.

Official statements continue to cite at least a dozen countries believed to have or to be

pursuing a biological weapons capability.2 U.S. and British concerns about Iraq’s

reported biological and other WMD programs were a primary reason for launching

preemptive military action to find and destroy these weapons capabilities.3 The terrorist

attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent anthrax letters accelerated already

existing concerns that terrorists would seek WMD capabilities as well. President Bush, in

a speech at West Point in 2002, said: “The gravest danger to freedom lies at the perilous

crossroads of radicalism and technology. When the spread of chemical and biological

and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile technology — when that occurs, even

weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike great nations.”4

States, groups, and individuals are pursuing a biological weapons capability — and the

means for them to do so are widely available.

Biological weapons have long been stigmatized as “indiscriminant agents of

unnecessary suffering, [whose] use … contradict(s) the universal principles of war.”5 As

discussed below, since November 1969 the U.S. programs linked to biological weapons

have been restricted to research and development on defensive measures only. Thus

few biologists in the United States today have knowledge of our country’s past offensive

weapons programs or of the concerns of the national security branches of government.

In this respect the life sciences community is in a different situation from that of the

physics community, which in large part has been continuously involved in governmentsponsored

weapons research programs since at least World War II. The scientific

community and the government jointly face a double challenge: (1) to establish a

working relationship with the national security branches of government, and (2) to help

craft a system that will minimize the risk of wrongful use of biological agents or

technology without damaging the scientific infrastructure that has made biological

research so vital to the health of the nation.