Dangerous biology in the post 9/11 world: ethics, transparency, and responsibility

by Plutonium Page

The following is an excerpt from the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972:

[We are] determined for the sake of all mankind, to exclude completely the possibility of bacteriological (biological) agents and toxins being used as weapons;

[We are]  convinced that such use would be repugnant to the conscience of mankind and that no effort should be spared to minimize this risk...

Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain:

(1) Microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes;

(2) Weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict.

As of December 2004, 153 countries had signed and ratified the Convention;  the United States signed it in 1972, and ratified it in 1975.   The U.S. bioweapons facilities were either dismantled, or, in the case of USAMRIID, converted to biodefense research laboratories.  Russia also signed and ratified the Convention (at the same time the U.S. did), but continued its massive bioweapons program through the 1990s, and still refuses to allow Western inspectors into one of its military biological research facilities.  However, like the U.S., one of its former bioweapons labs has been converted to a biodefense research facility, at least officially.

After the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, biodefense research has been stepped up significantly.   Concurrently, new worries have arisen regarding basic research with highly infectious diseases;  specifically, researchers in these areas are being urged to prevent the potential abuse of their research.

Nature news has the story (paid subscription required):

Diplomats and biosecurity experts meeting in Geneva this week are urging life scientists to act responsibly and prevent potential misuse of their work.

Governments can enact laws to prosecute people who use science to scare or hurt the public. And they can make rules to promote safety in research. But laws and rules go only so far in heading off potential abuses of science. When it comes to weighing up the potential risks and benefits of a piece of research, or deciding whether to publish a controversial result, scientists must fill the gap by adopting their own principles for proper conduct, say those at the Geneva conference.

The meeting, which runs from 13 to 24 June, focuses on codes of conduct in life-sciences research. It is the third 'Meeting of Experts' — a series of conferences intended to promote the international treaty that bans biological weapons. Formal negotiations on how to enforce the treaty collapsed in 2001, but are scheduled to resume next year.

Unlike physicists, who were forced to face up to the potential consequences of their work when nuclear weapons were developed in the 1940s, many biologists still do not believe that their work could possibly be misused, say biosecurity experts. But several recent papers have highlighted how bona fide research could be abused by terrorists or governments developing biological weapons.

The article cites the following research as examples:

• In 2001, R. J. Jackson et al.  J. Virol. 75, 1205−1210; 2001 were working with mousepox, a virus similar to smallpox, that infects mice.  There is a certain type of mouse that is genetically immune to mousepox;  however, the researchers changed one gene in the virus, thereby creating a very deadly version of mousepox that killed even the genetically resistance mice.  Similar genetic engineering research has been done with cowpox (which can infect humans), as well as rabbitpox, in all cases making the viruses far more dangerous than they were originally (click here for the New Scientist article).

• In 2002, a paper was published in Science describing the de novo (from scratch) synthesis of the polio virus, thereby proving that "even if all the polio virus in the world were destroyed, it would be easily possible to resurrect the crippling disease...".  The fear is that such a techique could be applied to other viruses as well, such as Ebola, smallpox, etc.

Obviously, the desired outcome of the conference, is not necessarily that international regulations be set (although that would be ideal), but that researchers and their institutions would set ethical standards regarding what sort of work is done, and what security measures are taken at labs.

Finally, the big picture:  national security.  Are government biodefense laboratories subject to the same standards as basic research programs?

The Department of Homeland Security has announced the formation of its National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center.  This center is adjacent to USAMRIID.  Concerns regarding the center were voiced in a 2004 paper entitled "Biodefense Crossing the Line", by M. Leitenberg of the Center for International and Security Studies,  Ambassador James Leonard, head of the US delegation to the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972, and Dr. R. Spertzel of UNSCOM, i.e. UN weapons inspectors..  The paper (pdf) describes the purpose of the Center with respect to research with infectious diseases:

• genetic engineering
• susceptibility to current therapeutics
• host-range studies
• environmental stability
• aerosol animal-model development
• aerosol dynamics
• novel packaging
• novel delivery of threat

The reason for their concern is obvious.

If you still don't get the picture, here's the conclusion to their paper:

Will all the work in the categories listed above be classified, carried out under conditions of secrecy, or will it be open, generating peer-reviewed publications?  The present US administration, if it was willing to scuttle attempts to finalize a verification protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention so as to shield the US biodefense program... seems unlikely to welcome or even tolerate scrutiny of a program orders of magnitude larger and much closer to treaty breach.  Yet circumstances are confounded even further.  Some argue that a biodefense program can be legitimate only if it is transparent.  That  may be so, but if results to be sought as above were openly to be published then information plausibly facilitating BW efforts elsewhere would be disseminated.

Alternatively, if the US program proceeds in secret, what will be the reaction of other countries - including Russia and China?  Will the twelve-year American-British effort to open major BW-capable facilities of the Russian Ministry of Defense be made more likely or less likely to succeed?  Finally, will rivals steer currently legitimate biodefense programs down the new American path, but even more deeply in shadow?

In other words, keeping our program secret would be sending the wrong message to the rest of the world, not the least of which is Russia.

But then, foreign policy is not exactly the Bush administration's strong point.

The outcome remains to be seen.   We can only hope that the government biodefense labs might follow the example for ethical pathogen research set by the basic research scientists.

Comments

[Mimikatz]

You don't understand. We are a "culture of life." You have to know how to destroy the village in order to save it.

[Plutonium Page]

Mimikatz - it's scary stuff. We need the biodefense research (we've pissed off the entire world, and it's relatively easy for terrorists to get hold of the bad stuff). However, where do you draw the line between biodefense research, and violation of the BW Convention?

As Dick(head) Cheney said, "9/11 changed everything". I hate to agree with him, but it really did.

(Of course, he said that in an entirely different context than this blog post!)

[Mimikatz]

Well, if you want a serious answer . . . . I don't know how we draw the line. Neitzsche once said that science is never really neutral.

I remember reading an article in the New Yorker about a defector from the Soviet bioweapons program who just stunned our people because the Soviets had kept on researching when we had shut our chemical and bioweapons programs down, and we were way behind them. Before the Bush Admin I would have said yes, maybe we do need to do this kind of research to know how to counter weapons that might be used by an enemy or terrorist. We can be trusted never to use them except defensively, can't we?

But now things are so complicated. It is clear that chemical and bioweapons can get in the wrong hands, even if it is only the elusive Anthrax person, who has never been identified much less caught, and people can die as a result. It is also clear that there is a tiny minority of the world's people who want to kill us, but that is still a significant number. They can get access to such materials.

So the question is whether the risks of having materials get into the wrong hands outweighs the benefits of being able to defend ourselves against chem/bioweapons attacks.

I guess where I come down is that the only true security is in reducing the risks to the point where we can live with them, including pursuing policies that would reduce the numbers of people who want to kill us, and promoting a sense of responsibility and interdependence in people who work on these programs so that they would see the risks and blowback potential. We would promote those goals by making our research more transparent and increasing ethical education of researchers. I don't see BushCo going in that direction, though, so I think we are better off not having the programs.

But since we will regardless of what i think, by all means we should promote responsibility and ethical standards for researchers. ALL researchers.

[emptypockets]

My first reaction to this post is that it encourages people to conflate the extraordinarily small fraction of biological researchers who need to even think about these issues with the vast majority of biological researchers who really don't need to worry about opening the door to bioterrorism with their work.

I'm not saying it's not a real issue -- although I'm not sure terror from bioengineers is any more of a threat than terror from computer engineers, agricultural engineers, or whatever. I know it's a real issue though.

My fear is that the Bush administration, which wants to cut science for religio-ideological reasons, will jump at any chance to interfere and regulate ALL biologists... including the 99% working on projects as far removed from killer viruses as a Word 2007 software developer is from bringing down the air traffic control system.

I appreciate that you are making the appropriate distinctions between basic biologists and biodefense workers in the text of your post. But just seeing a title like "Dangerous biology in the post 9/11 world" sets off alarm bells for me -- this is music to Bush's ears, and the tune is called "Let's cut all the research."

[Fred in Vermont]

I hope that there is also some focus on this conference on less dramatic threats such as the one discussed in this article yesterday in the Washington Post "Bird Flu Drug Rendered Useless -- Chinese Chickens Given Medication Made for Humans"

 Where we learn that the deadly bird flu  starting to move to humans, and which is resistant to the most available anti-viral drug, probably developed that immunity in the mid 90's on Chinese Chicken farms because of practices that are banned in other parts of the world.  It seems that advances in bio science made it possible to produce the drug amantadine for only a few dollars a pound.

>In 1987, researchers at a U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratory demonstrated that bird flu viruses developed drug resistance within a matter of days when infected chickens received amantadine.<

>Still, a veterinarian with personal knowledge of livestock practices across China said Chinese farmers responded to the bird flu outbreak by putting the drug into their chickens' drinking water. The veterinarian asked that his name not be published because he feared for his livelihood.<

>"This would explain why we're seeing such high resistance levels," said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. . . .<

>A popular Chinese handbook, titled Medicine Pamphlet for Animals and Poultry, provides farmers and livestock officials with specific prescriptions for amantadine use to treat chickens and ferrets with respiratory viruses. The manual, written by a professor at the People's Liberation Army Agriculture and Husbandry University and issued by a military-owned publishing company, prescribes 0.025 grams of amantadine for each kilogram of chicken body weight.<

>Farmers also use the drug to prevent healthy chickens from catching bird flu, giving it to their poultry about once a month or more often when the weather is liable to change and chickens are considered susceptible to illness, veterinary experts said. The antiviral is often mixed with Chinese herbs, vitamins and other medicine.<

>In the United States, amantadine was approved in 1976 by the Food and Drug Administration for treating influenza in adults. Amantadine and it sister drug, rimantadine, known collectively as amantadines, work by preventing a flu virus from reproducing itself. Both are now ineffective against the H5N1 strain<

>International health experts stressed that amantadine could have been vital in stanching the spread of the bird flu virus in the early weeks of an epidemic.<

The idea of chicken farmers in rural China developing a deadly new drug-resistant human endemic is not as dramatic as some Visions of Apocalypse but seems to be very real.  For some reason I don't quite understand, people seem to find it easy to believe that there are "evil doers" who would deliberately create such a thing but hard to believe than that a failure to supervise the use of drugs in agriculture is more threatening.