Los Altos Town Crier » Forum speaker says controlling biological weapons urgent

By Laura Brown

Image from article Forum speaker says controlling biological weapons urgent

Dr. Christopher Chyba told the March 4 Morning Forum audience that although humans have been using biological materials against their enemies for centuries, the next 20 years are crucial in controlling the use of infectious and contagious agents by terrorists and rogue governments.

Chyba said that Koch and Pasteur’s discovery of the germ theory of disease was a huge benefit for humanity, but on the darker side of the equation, it opened the door to the development of disease as a weapon.

Conventional thinking used to be that terrorists wanted a lot of attention but not many people dead, Chyba said. That view began to change in 1993 with the World Trade Center bombing, followed by the Oklahoma City bombing and the nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995. The attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, made it clear that terrorists now seek widespread destruction.

“We are now developing the technology that allows us to engineer deadly diseases. We are entering an era where very dangerous manipulation will be possible by very small groups of people. Biotechnology is going to roll over the world, and we can’t control it,” Chyba said.

Chyba was one of a group of scientists who applied in 1991 to the National Science Foundation for a grant to search for signs of life using DNA probes in the dry valleys of Antarctica, believed to be a sterile environment. The foundation denied the application because they did not believe the group was technically capable of extracting DNA from the soil.

In 1997, while at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Chyba noticed a DNA soil extraction kit in a microbiology lab. Reading the instructions in the kit, Chyba said, he realized that in just six years, what had been deemed impossible for experienced researchers “could be done by a high school student following the recipe.”

In 2001 a group of Australian scientists attempting to control rodent populations genetically altered mousepox bacteria with interleukin 4, expecting it to cause the autoimmune systems of the females to sterilize them. Instead, the mice died, including those who had been vaccinated against mousepox. A super-germ had been created. Mousepox, which is confined to rodents, is analogous to smallpox in humans, and “there is every reason to think that same process will work on humans,” Chyba said.

The publication of the research led to an ethical debate on how much information should be published for fear of creating a “how-to” manual for bioterrorists. The American Academy of Science has instituted a screening process for such articles, but the world scientific community continues to debate the issue.

Unlike nuclear weapons, biological weaponry is hard to monitor and control, Chyba said. Nuclear weapons require huge reactors and factories, as well as materials that are difficult to obtain. Because biological agents can replicate themselves, only a small amount is required initially, which can be taken from nature (”as close as the next disease outbreak”) or stolen from a laboratory. Iraq received a variety of disease-causing organisms from the United States in the 1970s, Chyba said.

Deterrence, a major component of nuclear proliferation control, is based on the theory that once attacked, the victim will launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. A biological attack using pathogens with a long incubation period would not be discovered until weeks after it was launched.

The Geneva Convention in 1925 outlawed the use of biological weapons. In 1975 the Biological Weapons Convention outlawed their manufacture. After the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, we learned from defectors that although the U.S.S.R. was one of the primary signatories of the pact, it had proceeded to produce hundreds of tons of biological weapons, Chyba said. He also noted that there are still three bio-weapons laboratories in Russia that have never been inspected.

In 1991 United Nations Order 687 required Iraq to destroy all weapons of mass destruction, but in 1995 an extensive program of biological weapon development was still in place, Chyba said. “It is naive to think that Iraq has biological weapons and will not use them in the event of a war,” he said, adding that he believes the U.S. military forces will be well protected with detection, vaccine, and protective suits and masks.

In 2001, after seven years of negotiating a biological weapons inspection program, the United States refused to sign, saying that it was “inherently unverifiable” and gave a false sense of security. Chyba, who once worked for the National Security Council, said that this refusal “makes it very difficult to work with the international community and damaged our ability to be world leaders.”

Chyba said that he supports a voluntary vaccination program for everyone now, so that it can be done in a thoughtful, measured way. He believes that the government should take responsibility, along with insurance companies, for the anticipated one person in 1 million who will have an adverse reaction to the vaccine.

“We will never be able to guard our borders against people with incubating contagious disease,” said Chyba, noting that AIDS was present in four countries before it was recognized. He said the only hope of preventing the spread of deadly diseases, especially those with long incubation periods, such as smallpox, is to establish surveillance and rapid reporting systems worldwide. This would improve public health worldwide, even if a bioterrorist attack never occurred, he said.

The cost of such a system is likely to be prohibitive. The Centers for Disease Control has a budget of $5 billion for domestic surveillance and response. There is no funding allocated for international programs, Chyba said. A bill for international disease surveillance and response sponsored by Senators Biden and Helms died, and there is no funding for the World Health Organization.

Chyba, who won a 2001 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for his “passion for understanding life on Earth and for protecting human civilization from self-destruction,” is an astrobiologist and co-director of the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation, as well as the Carl Sagan Chair for Study of Life in the Universe at SETI Institute. He was director for international environmental affairs at the National Security Council, and chairman of NASA’s Solar System Exploration Subcommittee. Chyba said he continues to work on space and deep earth exploration because “despite the threats and challenges we face in the next century, we also need to focus on social and cultural goals.”