Credit: Rowena Dugdale, Wellcome Images.
The biotechnology revolution is seeing an explosion of new knowledge, materials, skills and technologies, nearly all of them produced with the benign aim of improving public health. But those same scientific findings and products could also be used in bioterror or, worse, biowarfare - a problem known as the dual-use dilemma. How real is the threat and what can we do about it? Penny Bailey talks to Trust-funded researchers who are investigating. In June 2000, biologist Professor Matthew Meselson wrote: "Every major technology - metallurgy, explosives, internal combustion, aviation, electronics, nuclear energy - has been intensively exploited, not only for peaceful purposes but also for hostile ones. Must this also happen with biotechnology, certain to be the dominant technology of the twenty-first century?"
This potential for scientific findings produced to improve public health to be used for malign ends, such as war or terrorism, is known as the dual-use dilemma. While biosecurity experts are increasingly concerned about the possible hostile misuse of biotechnology, scientists have tended to see the threat as either remote, or outside their responsibility, and few bioethicists have focused on the issue.
In 2009, a collaboration of researchers at the Universities of Bradford, Exeter and Bath, and the Australian National University in Canberra, was awarded a Wellcome Trust Enhancement Award, to build sustainable capacity among bioethicists globally to explore the dual-use dilemma.
Although the threat may not be large at the moment, it is real. That has already been demonstrated by the series of large-scale offensive biological warfare programmes carried out by major states such as Japan, France, the USA, the USSR and the UK in the last century, and by recent bioterrorist attacks such as the 2001 anthrax letters in the USA.
Controlling weapons
Clearly, if biological weapons were to become a routine part of states' armed forces, the consequences for international security and global health could be devastating. The Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, signed and ratified by 163 states to date (with 13 additional signatories), came into force in 1975, to deter state-level assimilation of such weapons. The Convention commits all parties to prohibiting the development, production and stockpiling of biological and toxin weapons. However, it has no organisation to look after it and no system of formal verification, such as onsite inspections, to ensure compliance. This means that countries could, in practice, stockpile biological agents for offensive ends. Moreover, although it bans research for offensive purposes, the convention permits research into biological agents or toxins for medical and defensive purposes, in small quantities. And faced with the shadowy threat of bioterrorism, many states have thriving biodefence industries. Such research, as Dr Tom Douglas at the University of Oxford points out, could be used to enable biological attack capacities as well. He commented: "There's a thin line between defence and offence."
In the USA, the biodefence industry has grown tenfold in the wake of the anthrax letter bombs in 2001 - ironically, expanding the pool of potential terrorists. "So there are now ten times as many people who could defect, or become deranged in some way, and decide they have a grudge they want to follow," says Dr Douglas. Indeed, the perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax attacks was later revealed to have been a scientist employed in the US government's biodefence laboratories.
Sceptics counter that we still don't really know how to make a pathogen dangerous or to disseminate it widely, and that to do so requires state-of-the-art technology. However, Dr Douglas points out that what is state-of-the-art now probably won't be in ten or 20 years time. "Amateur biologists could make weaponised agents in a garage or basement lab. You could argue that there are enough crazy people in the world, and it's only a matter of time before someone does."
A few high-profile cases have illustrated how easy it could be to create such agents. In 2001, scientists accidentally created a highly virulent mousepox strain, simply by inserting one extra gene into the viral genome - and published the information, albeit with a warning to scientists to be aware of the potential consequences of research. And in 2006 a Guardian reporter purchased a 78-nucleotide sequence of DNA based on the smallpox genome from a commercial company with alarming ease - bearing in mind the fact that the full-genome smallpox sequence is readily available on the internet.
Those cases can be disregarded to some extent. The mousepox strain was eventually shown to be less virulent than at first feared, and reconstructing the 185 000 base-pair smallpox genome from such a small sequence would be extremely challenging, if not impossible.
However, Dr Brian Rappert at the University of Exeter believes that the more problematic issue is the general development, proliferation of knowledge and expertise in science, which open up huge new possibilities, and are widely published in journals and on the internet. "Basic blue skies research, which is so needed for public health issues, is the same kind of proliferation that security people look at and think, 'oh dear'," he says.
Protecting freedom
One of the difficulties is finding a way to prevent hostile misuse of science, without impeding scientific progress and the freedom to publish.
Policy makers and biosecurity experts have advocated downstream regulation, such as export controls and laboratory security requirements, to prevent dangerous agents and technologies from falling into the hands of possible hostile users. But, says Dr Rappert, they generally haven't thought deeply about the wider implications of scientists conducting and publishing work.
The problem is compounded by the fact that many scientists have tended to believe that knowledge in itself is intrinsically valuable and ethically neutral, and that how it is used is the responsibility of politicians.
However, ethics work by the researchers funded by the Trust Enhancement Award has concluded differently. "The question is, what can you reasonably ask of a scientist?" says Professor Malcolm Dando at the University of Bradford.
"It's not reasonable to ask people to have responsibility for things that are way outside their control. But you can reasonably suggest to them that they should be aware of the possibility of misuse, and that there is an international convention, nationally implemented, attempting to prevent the misuse of their work. And they've got some responsibility for maintaining and developing the convention. For instance, they should make sure that their students are educated about these dangers and what might be done."
On a practical level, engaging the scientists is essential. "Without scientists involved I don’t think there are going to be effective or sensible policies," says Dr Rappert. "Oversight and codes of conduct can't be put in place by security and policy people who have no connection to how life science research is practised. So until scientists are aware of this problem, and thinking about it, it's difficult to see anything meaningful being done."
Culture change
The need to think about their work in terms of its potential for harm is likely to be counterintuitive for many scientists, who see their research as something of immense value for society - a means of enhancing health and lives.
Getting them to think about the possible ways that the new knowledge they generate could be misused is not something that can happen overnight."We're looking for cultural change,"says Dr Judi Sture at the University of Bradford, who is overseeing the development of an ethical framework with which to approach the dual-use dilemma. "We want to see the community of life scientists undertaking the transformation that medics undertook after World War II. As I understand it, it's very difficult now for a medical student to graduate without being aware that there are ethical issues in almost everything they do. And that they have a responsibility to think about these things and to act in an ethical way. It's going to go through a process of professionalisation and become part of professional identity."
To set the ball rolling, in 2004 Professor Dando and Dr Rappert began delivering interactive workshops, which they have since taken to 13 countries, including Argentina, Uganda and Japan, to engage scientists with the issue. "As we went to all these seminars, we were becoming more and more wide-eyed at the fact that we could hardly find anybody who knew anything at all about how their work could potentially be misused," says Professor Dando.
They realised they needed to start earlier, by educating science PhD students on the dual-use dilemma. "People with advanced degrees should have some more meaningful training or education and at least have thought about these things," says Professor Dando.
To this end, the group have developed an online educational module resource, in collaboration with Japanese colleagues. It can be incorporated into life science and associated teaching modules and is freely available online.
The Bradford group has also developed a Master's-level distance learning module, to be rolled out in October 2010, which offers students two hours of lectures on the dual-use dilemma per week, and a seminar and discussion group requiring them to think about a range of ethical dilemmas, such as whether they would undertake or publish a piece of work, based on ethical analysis using the principles and underlying ethical themes developed within the Bradford group's framework.
The group will be presenting its educational module and ethical framework, along with findings from international surveys exploring existing thinking on the dual-use dilemma, at the 2011 Review Conference of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. "We're hoping that the state parties will agree that scientists should have a legal obligation to train young scientists in these issues, and show that they've thought about them in relation to their work. That's the holy grail", says Dr Simon Whitby at Bradford.
There are signs that things are changing. In a significant development in the USA, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity recently recommended that all federally funded institutions should be required to provide ethics education, including biosecurity and the dual-use dilemma.
However, the researchers believe that ultimately the spur to get scientists deeply engaged with the possible misuse of their work will be when they actually see it happen, in an event such as a bioterrorist attack. Says Professor Dando: "It's down to what Macmillan said: 'Events, dear boy events'!"
References
Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention http://www.opbw.org/
Disarmament at the UN Office at Geneva http://www.unog.ch/80256EE600585943/(httpHomepages)/6A03113D1857348E80256F04006755F6?OpenDocument
The Life Sciences, Biosecurity, and Dual Use Research http://projects.exeter.ac.uk/codesofconduct/BiosecuritySeminar/
US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity http://oba.od.nih.gov/biosecurity/biosecurity.html
Bradford distance learning dual-use module http://oba.od.nih.gov/biosecurity/biosecurity.html
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/2010/News/WTX063071.htm
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