SCI/TECH: Cast a Wary Eye On Bio-Weapons Research

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Even more worrisome to many experts is the apparent growth in secretive, or "black box," biodefense research by the U.S. intelligence community. "There's all kinds of secret research going on right now," says Matthew Meselson, a Harvard biologist who has worked closely with the military. "The more you create secret research in biology," he warns, "the more you create risk." One program that has become public is Project Jefferson, a Pentagon effort to genetically engineer a vaccine-resistant version of anthrax. After the program's existence was revealed by the New York Times in 2001, the Pentagon announced that it intended to complete the project and that the results would be classified. "[The military's] natural instinct is to exploit the technology and keep everybody else away from it," says John D. Steinbruner, director of the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland. "In their hands, this technology is potentially extremely dangerous."

Programs like Project Jefferson have already raised concerns that U.S. scientists are treading dangerously close to the limits of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, which prohibits offensive research. Just months before September 11, the Bush administration walked away from negotiations to impose biological-weapons inspections, in part because American pharmaceutical companies did not want to open their labs to international inspectors. The abandonment of the talks left the world without any way to enforce the treaty's restrictions. Now, experts fear that the explosion of American research�including programs such as Project Jefferson that are widely viewed as potential violations of the treaty�might encourage other countries to disregard the convention.

Despite these fears, the administration is pushing to expand research programs even further. In a rare unclassified report on the Pentagon's biodefense plans, James B. Petro, a top official in the Defense Intelligence Agency, recently called for a new federal "threat assessment" facility for advanced bioweapons. Such a facility, he wrote, would investigate topics with "limited implications for the general bioscience community, but significant application for nefarious scientists."


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