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Why Do Pathogen Researchers Face Less Scrutiny Than Nuclear Scientists?
Lasrick writes "Derrin Culp of the National Center for Disease Preparedness explores the different levels of scrutiny that scientists in microbiology undergo, when compared to those who work in the nuclear weapons field. His complaint is that, even though America's most notorious biosecurity breach — the 2001 anthrax mailings — was the work of an insider, expert panels have concluded that there is no need for intrusive monitoring of microbiologists engaged in unclassified research."
Let's all pass around some intrusive monitoring, sound good?
Let's do anal probes with the morning latte, and lie detectors with the evening beer!
Huzzah?
It's because no biological weapon could ever be as effective as a chemical one. You want something to worry about? Think about all of the millions of gallons of hydrofluoric acid used every day in glass etching. That is dangerous. Not some little bug that takes four days to incubate and can be eradicated with antibiotics and ultraviolet light.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/washington/02anthrax.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Seems like biowarfare researchers make just as solid scapegoats as crazy nuclear physicists and MIT computer nerds.
is scrutiny from A better and/or more reliable than from B? will multiple scrutinizers provide better data just because they're *more*? my position is: inviting more to the party invites more of absolutely everything.
Why pick on nuclear science and the nuclear industry? For partisan political advantage. In the 70s and 80s, the anti-nuclear crowd was able to spread lots of FUD -- and they got unlimited media help -- because it helped the left gain political power. Pathogen research offered no such advantage.
Where are the protestors for the drone war, BTW? Where was the "grim milestone" protest for Obama's 1000th US soldier killed in Afghanistan? Or his 2000th? No partisan political advantage means no (or very, very little) media coverage and no organized protests.
Remember 9/11 folks. That happened because the government didn't have the proper tools to monitor the terrorists before the act occurred mainly due to the idiotic beliefs in an outdated and itself a terroristic document, the constitution. Now that we are moving away from the constitution, which was a piece of crap anyways, the country can be made secure. We now have a solid globalist President that is on board with the abolition of the constitution, especially the second amendment, which will lead us to a socialist global society. It's time to give up your so called 'rights' and get with the program. FORWARD!
Why is Jerry Jones still calling the shots in Dallas? The Boys have won exactly one NFL playoff game in the last 16 years. An owner and GM are two separate jobs, Jones is messing up both right now.
1. Biological agents are readily available. ;-)
2. Biological agents are naturally dangerous ie H5N1 is killing people.
3. Reseach into these agents will provide positive outcomes. ie vaccines
4. Stupid measures such as profiles fail the best researchers, eg NSA fails more than 50% of maths researchers. Those creative left handed types are dangerous. It's actually true that NSA employs fewer left handed people than the research community at large and is an acknowledged problem.
5. Research doesn't have many resources, wasting them upon dumb controls means much less reseach.
6 The military has oodles of cash (read wasteful) however they're not allowed to play with biological weapons so biology doesn't get much of this cash. (unlike nukes)
The reason there is less scrutiny is simply history. Nuclear weapons were used in the last world war. Biological warfare was not used extensively since WWI. It was used in mid evil times and in the American wars against native Americans but biological weapons are more difficult to contain than other weapons of mass destruction and are less widely used for that reason. Also, there are justifiable reasons for biological research in the medical research field that might be severally limited if over-regulation were applied. This is not to say that misuse of biological pathogens is any less deadly.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Nuclear rhymes with explosion.
REAL explosion that is -- not as in outbreak.
Great sensayional effect,spectacular soundtrack,
great lightshow, tremendous kinetic surround effects,
what's not to like?
Chemical weapons were used extensively in WWI.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Speaking of naive. You're sure of this. Just a 'few sequences' and poof, the end of life as we know it?
Obviously that seems exceedingly unlikely so to try to cut through irrational fears lets try looking at a real disease. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 50-100 million people world wide. If we scale that as a percentage of the population today that number would be 180-300 million and that is for a disease which 80-90% of the people who caught it survived. This is clearly comparable to several, powerful nuclear weapons and for something as infectious as flu it is unlikely that you could stop it once it got out e.g. the recent swine flu outbreak.
So for those involved in researching viruses with the same, or worse, potential as the spanish flu why shouldn't there be similar safe guards to nuclear weapons researchers? The consequences of material getting out is similar in both cases and, in a world with suicide bombers, I'm not sure I'd rely on the fact that a biological weapon may well kill the one who releases it to stop if from happening.
Because there aren't decades of anti-nuclear propaganda to make people scared of it, just a few novels and sci-fi scenarios, and the medical industry is far better at keeping its nose clean in the public's eye.
Obama is not the n word. In fact, his character is refined and he does have a sense of cuth. The problem with Obama is that he's your typical passive-aggressive authoritarian that somehow feels he can get around the law by making it an executive branch issue. Despite the fact communist progressives are toxic to maintaining a harmonious and prosperous culture, the American people voted for these ideal multiple times. Thus I'm reminded that presentation, not substance, matters. Therefore, if it takes being a bullshitter to make it in life, so be it. I can play that game too.
Life is not for the lazy.
You don't want to be seen as a 'racist' after all as that's a fate worse than any other.
Whoever modded OP as insightful should have mod privileges revoked. This is pretty basic.
In the past seventy odd years or so, how many nuclear scientists / chemists / biologists / etc. have gone awol?
There's your answer.
I am John Hurt.
There is something humorous about the story right below this being a nuclear water containment leak....
Am I lying when I tell you that im telling the truth? Or am I telling the truth when I say that Im lying?
Of course, there are plenty of dangerous pathogens that are researched actively in the US and other countries. However, Anthrax for the most part is not one of them. As my undergrad microbiology professor said, Anthrax is a "weapon of mass distraction", as it is of little value in terms of actually causing fatalities. It is incredibly difficult for someone who has caught Anthrax to actually transmit it to another individual. Even when you have spores (such as those that were mailed) it is not easy to actually infect someone with it as the required number of spores to infect someone is highly variable. And on top of that, if it is quickly diagnosed the outcome is usually quite good.
In other words, you could do almost as much by mailing letters with powdered sugar instead.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Nuclear devices have demonstrated capability to kill many people and cause much damage in a short time.
Biological/Chemical weapons may have large mortality, but not quickly. Bhopal was smaller than Hiroshima (8k vs 150k). Biological and chemical weapons/accidents do not cause property damage (loss of use, perhaps, in a transient sense "sowing a field with salt")
The articles (and the ones referenced) describe controls on nuclear workers and ask why bio researchers aren't under similar restrictions, but neglects that the vast majority of people who have capability and knowledge of nuclear info are not restricted in any way.
The controls on nuclear workers are on the sophisticated end products (the SNM itself, design *details*). There are no real limitations on someone doing nuclear experimentation in their garage or lab other than "occupational safety". Basic design information and, of course, the underlying theory, is in the open literature, and totally unrestricted. It is very possible for someone to come up with a workable design using library materials (demonstrated multiple times, see, e.g. "the N-country problem"). Nuclear weapons are somewhat unique in that the essential materials (fissionable materials) are hard to come by.
The situation is a bit different for biological weapons. Building a lab in your garage is certainly possible at relatively low cost. The "bench skills" needed aren't hard to acquire and are well within the ability of high school students (look at the International Science & Engineering Fair for examples). (Or Frank Herbert's "The White Plague") The "hard parts" are things like weaponizing (just as the hard part for nuclear devices is in making a small portable bomb), and that's more in the nature of "trade secrets" and should be protected in the same way as design details in the nuclear biz (e.g. security clearances and whatnot).
Just as in the nuclear field, though, there's a long distance between talented researcher in well equipped university lab and weapons developer. We don't engage in security restrictions on students doing nuclear work.
It all comes down to the fact that there are LOTS and LOTS of people who possess knowledge of how to cause mass casualties or to cause them directly (the driver of the hazmat truck: we transport millions, if not billions, of tons of hazardous materials every day. A truckload of dynamite has no special precautions, neither does a truckload of phosgene or HF or any of a zillion things). And most people do not do "bad things".
What about regulating mechanical engineers: they could be designing a high rate of fire machine gun to be mounted on a small private plane re-equipped as a UAV. Or what about aero/astro majors.. they could modify a crop dusting plane to serve as a CBW dispersal vector.
because nobody could distribute the daily HF etchant load so as to kill very many people. Contrast that with the Black Death, which killed 1/3 of Europe through the movement of fleas on rats on ships. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
Chemweapons have to be distributed and don't extend their effects very far beyond their delivery locus. Bioweapons can propagate. Engineer a latency between infection and onset of symptoms of say, 100 days into an airborne pathogen with high clinical mortality and watch it spread far and wide before it surfaces.
I understand that such bioengineering may be nontrivial, but to say that "no biological weapon could ever be as effective as a chemical one" is, I believe, incorrect.
(1) People have an irrational fear of radiation and anything "nuclear".
(2) It's damned hard to create a deadly pathogen that's any worse than what already is out there.
(3) Radioactivity is trivial to detect, new pathogens are pretty much impossible to detect, so it's hard to "scrutinize" the work.
Can you tell the difference between a bacteria that is pathogenic and one that is safe with video surveillance? No.
How many virulence factors does a "safe" strain need to be a harmful strain? Probably 1-3 in the case of bacteria (such as Anthrax's capsule and toxin) and 1-2 for a virus (one human gene added can make a vaccine useless).
How many people are already dying from pathogens that are freely available?
Let's snoop on everyone! Or we could just establish real world precautions that prevent people from smuggling anthrax out of labs and that sort of thing.
"expert panels have concluded that there is no need for intrusive monitoring of microbiologists engaged in unclassified research."
For good reason.
First, the knowledge is more widespread.
We have large numbers of researchers/lab workers/hospital lab techs that could do the neccesary techniques for much of biological work.
We have to have them in large numbers to keep us safer from the NATURAL bioweapons we face every day.
Such well known killers as malaria, bacterial pneumonia, a whole range of virii, the various strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria we keep a running treadmill race going with, etc, etc.
Putting all of these lab/hospital workers (Yes, they are working with pathogens. Why else do you think they're doing culturing of that throat swab your doctor took?) under a magnifying glass is needless, discouraging to those who might enter the field, and actively disruptive to trying to fight disease.
Second, nature completely outclasses us.
Someone in a lab can do one experiment every few days/weeks, maybe. Mother nature can and does do billions to trillions of experiments all in parallel.
The bioweapon arms race has been going on in nature for billions of years (yes, billions. Single cell life has been around that long and competing. Multicelled life and armor/teeth is a latecomer at 600 million or so). Every nasty trick you're likely to think of to put into your superbug has been tried multiple times naturally.
The metallo-beta-lactamases that are the hot new nasty in antibiotic resistance? They aren't new. They were old genetic material that were present in a minority of bacteria, and then spread due to it being an advantage for some bacteria in some cases. None of the antibiotic resistance we see is "new". It's all relics in the bacterial genomes that have become useful again. Why? Because Mom Nature already tried those tricks.
And,it's the same for virii or any other one you can think of.
It seems like it's mostly because of bad PR for the word "nuclear". The sciency types here on /. know that nuclear power plants are not as dangerous as other types of power plants, yet the majority of the public is against nuclear power systems. The PR for "nuke" is so bad that it even caused medical types to change the name of one of their diagnostic devices:
.
MRI machines (magnetic resonance imaging) are called that because when they called them NMR machines originally, people were afraid of the word "nuclear" in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Even though MRI machines are still exactly the same thing and still measure nuclear magnetic resonance, they no longer use the word "nuclear", because no one wanted to be stuffed in a tube of a machine that had "nuclear" in its name!! People confused it with nuclear imaging in which radioactive isotopes really are injected into the human body and then imaging is performed to see how the isotope is distributed and if it clusters in certain parts of the body.
.
People are scared of "nukes", and not-so-much of teeny little microbes, though look at all of the wacky episodes of ReGenesis, a canadian show about the canadian equivalent of the CDC and a genomics lab, to see the crazy plotlines of what could go wrong with bio-organisms. Psych also did an episode, "Death is in the Air", Season 4, Episode 13, that used "Bob" from Regenesis as the same sort of scientist. See my other post here for links to those episodes.
the 0.1% are more concerned about property than lives and they control legislation and regulation
Nuclear weapons destroy buildings and other capital assets.
Bioweapons kill people, but those are easily replaced, at lower cost. Dead people don't require paying pension benefits.
Destroyed factories require rebuilding at substantial expense.
Intrusive regulation "may" discourage infectious disease research? Of course it would. It has done just that for (non-medical) nuclear research.
We sent a UCLA professor to jail when a student in his lab died in an accident related to poor training. Maybe that's the right idea.
If a deadly accident or malicious release occurs from your lab, you go to jail. Just reiterate that to everyone: you're ultimately responsible for what comes out of your lab. It's a lot less harsh than the permanent label you earn as a terrorist and an enemy of civilization for a nuclear mistake.
There was a little Spanish Flu
A deadly pathogen you know
He'd heard of microbes like Tetanus
Malaria spread by mosquitos
Why not a little Spanish Flu
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
The Wired Article : Anthrax Redux: Did the Feds Nab the Wrong Guy? makes me wonder if the anthrax mailer got away with it. Also the Wiki article says one of the 19 involved in 9/11 may have had anthrax based on a doctor which I had never heard before.
I don't think anyone's mentioned this yet, wouldn't an easier way to bio-screw up a country be to target it's main food crop? They're pretty much monocultures so if you can bypass their resistance then nothing's going to survive, I imagine it'd be easier to infect static fields of wheat than a specific human population.
Added bonus is that the evil biologist won't be at risk himself, he can fly back to evil country before the food riots start.
The trustworthy people in the physics department always have a suitcase nuke on standby, in case the microbiologists get unruly.
The real reason that people in nuclear establishments undergo extensive screening relates more to a cold war philosophy than public safety. They're just making sure that you don't sell those secrets to the Reds.
I hear everyone arguing about what a scientist could produce, and how, and how bad it could/would be...but that isn't the issue at all here. If you're going to talk about nuclear technology vs. pathogen technology, then you need to talk about proliferation. The treaties at stake, the classification of information, export controls...none of these are about *doing* research, they're about the control of knowledge needed to do research. The controls on nuclear research and engineering are about proliferation, about containment of what is known rather than direct prohibition of learning more or experimenting by people who are not in the trusted circle.
Here's the problem: what's needed in terms of expertise to make effective (more on that word in a moment) nuclear weapons is only known to a relatively small and contained population of scientists. But what's needed to do the kind of research which is feared here on the pathogen side of things is, quite simply, not. You could make all kinds of arguments about why this is, but the fact of the matter is that the horse has left the barn (or whatever the rural metaphor is) with regard to the issue of proliferation on the biological side of this. Maybe it's because of organizations like Biopreparat and what happened when it disbanded, maybe it's because dangerous pathogens have always existed naturally (unlike nuclear weapons or, for that matter, any of the key materials used to build them). Maybe it's because there's a genuine value to the public good for many people to study how pathogens work...and ironically, the nastier the pathogen, the more the public good is studied by intensive and widespread study.
But however you slice it, you can't restrict sharing knowledge nor the research methods around pathogen-focused microbiology now. And even if you could, restrictions on either sharing knowledge or generating new knowledge through research would inevitably cause unintended consequences because you would also hamstring benevolent research that seeks to do things like develop vaccines and decipher previously unknown pathogens like SARS.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
It is easy to make a nuclear device that kills exactly everyone you hate, and no one else. It is not possible to make a pathogen that kills only your enemy. So while a revolutionary may like the taste of nuclear winter, only a true cartoonish supervillian will deal in a weapon that can easily kill himself.
That inside job likely had approval.
Steal 20 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium and you have 20 of raw material that you need a Ph.D. and a lot of engineering knowledge to convert into a bomb
That is not the slightest bit correct. Like mots technical things, it is a smart cow problem. Practical designs for 'basic' nuclear weapons are well known. You can even get a t-shirt with one such design. It is the acquirement of material and enrichment processes that are hard.
I'm attaching this here instead of under a more relevant OP, because otherwise it will quickly be buried.
I have a few family friends that have done work for the government (biology-related, the sort of "let's figure this out before somebody else does so we can combat it if it ever gets released into the air" sort of work), and one of them is now retired. He left because he eventually found out what they were using his work for. I can safely say that the government keeps _very close_ tabs on these guys, and they face a TON of scrutiny. I don't know who this guy is that wrote this article, but it's complete codswallop. If you work on anything remotely dangerous in this field, the kind of thing our government actually takes seriously, they will keep tabs on you, very close tabs, and they'll never let you out of their sight unless they absolutely can't help it.
The second paragraph of the linked article makes this bogus assertion:
Since 2008, when investigators led by the FBI's Washington Field Office identified Bruce E. Ivins, an Army civilian research scientist, as the sole perpetrator, the collective response has been to minimize discussion of the problem, indulge in wishful thinking, and enact cosmetic changes.
Here is a Wednesday, Feb 16, 2011 article by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, titled "Serious doubt cast on FBI’s anthrax case against Bruce Ivins - A scientific panel concludes the Government overstated its genetic evidence against Bruce Ivins": http://www.salon.com/2011/02/16/ivans/
We have no ability at all to predict whether a person will strike out or not. The notion that we can watch, predict, or stop bad actors is a fantasy.
First we have no way to determine if an individual is acting on his own impulses or is being coerced. A family member could be held by terrorists for example. We also have big problems spotting people with abnormal levels of greed who might be bribed. Follow that up with the fact that we have found no way to determine whether a person simply is the type to want to commit mass murder.
Yet somehow our rather limp response is to pass laws, form panels, hire some people, and waste tax dollars trying to prevent things which will surely happen from time to time.
This mentality is rather like the chumps who walk into a casino and just keep gambling. The more you participate in the gambling the more certain your failure. The more money we toss down the rat hole of predicting anti-social acts the more we will lose until some technology is born that will aid us.
Probably the same line of reasoning that will be moving a disease lab from an island to the campus of a centrallly-located public university (also within eyesight of the stadium, coliseum, and rec center): greed and pork-barrel politics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bio_and_Agro-Defense_Facility
12 Monkeys Damn the taxpayers, full speed ahead...
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
I am an actual practicing biologist in academia at a major research institution...
Screenshots, or it didn't happen.