Advances in life sciences and bioterrorism

©2003 EUROPEAN MOLECULAR BIOLOGY ORGANIZATION EMBO reports VOL 4 | special issue | 2003 S53 The First World War left millions dead on the battlefields of Europe, and the survivors returned home with the experience of the first industrial-style war fresh in their minds. It was particularly because of the horrors created by the use of chemical weapons and the mutilation that these gases caused that the main players in the war started to consider a widespread ban on such methods of attack. After several years of negotiations, on 19 June 1925, the major industrialized countries signed the protocol for the ‘Prohibition of the Use of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare’ in Geneva, which is now known as the Geneva Protocol. But less than 20 years after its creation, this protocol did not prevent some contractors of the treaty from engaging in offensive biological warfare programmes. Furthermore, the development and use of biological weapons by Japan in the Second World War led to an expansion of these programmes in various Western countries and in the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, Western countries started to critically assess their biological weapons programmes because of technical problems in the production and storage of the agents involved. In addition, it became clear that biological weapons are of limited military use because they pose a considerable risk to the attacker as well as to the attacked. The USA and the UK therefore concluded that the size of their existing conventional, chemical and nuclear weapon inventories was sufficient to retaliate against a Soviet attack and that biological weapons were no longer required. This conclusion eventually culminated on 10 April 1972 with the signing of the ‘Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction’ (BTWC) (www.opbw.org) that entered into force in 1975. However, rumours then started to circulate about the Soviet Union’s offensive biological weapons programme, which was clearly in breach of the treaty. Since then, the number of states suspected of conducting research into, and producing, offensive biological weapons has increased. Why are biological agents once more considered to be valuable weapons? There are two main reasons. First, the tremendous advances that have been made in biology and all the related aspects of the life sciences, coupled with the progress in production technologies, might provide cheaper access to unconventional weapons, particularly compared with investments in nuclear and chemical techniques. Second, an increasing number of countries believe that their political and security interests could be protected or achieved only through the possession of such weapons, especially in view of the overwhelming superiority of the US armed forces in terms of conventional weapons. To be correct here, this is not an excuse for anyone to breach the BTWC; it is only the description of a reality that has to be faced.