Argues That Risks of Harmful Usage Should be Minimized
On Dec. 7, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a warning on the possibility of new gene assembly technology falling into the hands of terrorists to create biological weapons.
In an address delivered at an international convention in Geneva intended to review the decades-old Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, Clinton challenged diplomats to ensure that while scientific research is maximized, the risks of its usage for harmful purposes should be lessened.
Clinton acknowledged that genetic material has been made more available with a flourishing gene synthesis industry. The latter involves the manipulation of genetic material in laboratories towards the production of organisms such as bacteria and viruses.
The Secretary of State said that while it is a boon for research, the technology could, at the same time, be utilized for the creation of organism for more sinister or terrorist purposes.
Clinton remarked that “A crude but effective terrorist weapon can be made using a small sample of any number of widely available pathogens, inexpensive equipment, and college-level chemistry and biology.”
While the threat of nuclear proliferation takes center-stage in US or UN-led initiatives especially with nations categorized as ‘rouge’ such as North Korea or Syria, the danger of biological weapons being used by terrorists has not met an equally serious attention.
Clinton noted several reports on Al-Qaeda recruiting specialists in chemistry or microbiology to create weapons of mass destruction and events in the past which showed how real the threat of biological warfare could be- like the cult Aum Shinrikyo’s efforts in the 1990s to acquire anthrax and the attacks in the US in 2001 using anthrax that resulted to five deaths.
While the US government wants countries to exercise transparency in their activities to combat bio-terrorism, it has not supported calls for an international system which – like the IAEA – will check on these threats.