From Here to Biosecurity: Advice for an Incoming Administration

摘要

Not so long ago, “biosecurity” was neither a word nor a concept. Nor was it a goal of governments, a cornerstone of industrial and academic ventures, a distractor of investigational intentions, or a prod to community protest. Biosecurity, in its expansive sense, is as vital a global good as can be imagined. Nearly every nation has come to see this. But no other nation has sought biosecurity as the United States has.nnAmerica's progress toward biosecurity cannot confidently be measured. Graphs might be drawn plotting surrogate markers known or surmised: dollars spent, firms surviving, Biosafety Level 3 and 4 laboratories registered, people employed, “select agents” studied, surveillance methods and countermeasures devised, results withheld, patent- disclosure applications filed, and papers published.nnOne marker would be at zero. No big “second event” has followed the anthrax attacks of 2001, the Amerithrax case, despite claims of inevitability, if not imminence. Yet little assurance can be taken from—and no credit assigned for—this remission. If the current theory of Amerithrax guilt holds, then modern history's signal act of bioterrorism will resolve into a tale of crank criminality distinguished chiefly by the scandalous news that a murder weapon had been mixed in and stolen from a government-regulated biosecurity laboratory. Fifty-seven billion dollars later, and with a new government assembling, several observations might be made.