Why FBI was at BIO, and why scientists should wake up

May 13, 2010 – 12:07 pm by Chris

In the far back of the exhibit hall in McCormick Place at BIO 2010, in a quiet corner, two well-dressed men were sitting at an understated booth. But they were not with any pharmaceutical or biotech company, or a law firm, or with any of the state, regional, or national pavilions that dominated the convention.

They were from the FBI.

William So, Ph.D., from the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate and another agent were there to promote the FBI’s Biological Sciences Outreach Program. The goal of the program, according to the brochures Dr. So gave to me, is to make scientists and lab managers aware of how they could be targeted by potential terrorists and pumped for knowledge that could be used to create bioweapons.

The Scientist did an article about FBI’s efforts to reach out to synthetic biologists, and apparently there are tons of trust issues from scientists, if you read the comments. Most of them have to do with the way the FBI ham-fistedly handled the case of distinguished researcher Thomas Butler. (I agree that the way that the FBI handled the case was idiotic – but looking at it retrospectively, if someone reports that 30 vials of bubonic plague are missing from their lab, two years after the deadliest terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil, it’s equivalent to poking a wasp’s nest with a stick. The real surprise would have been if the FBI and federal prosecutors had NOT overreacted.)

In Dr. Butler’s case, he was also charged with improperly transporting his bubonic plague samples from Tanzania into the country (he was acquitted of the charges). This article claimed that more researchers were leaving the infectious disease field because of what happened to Dr. Butler.

Interestingly enough, though, Nature has reported a study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that found although security restrictions had increased the cost of research of dangerous pathogens, more researchers have entered the field and the number of publications has actually grown.

I love scientists, I really do. I enjoy a healthy life and a standard of living because of their discoveries that would make my Sicilian, donkey-cart-driving great-great-grandmother goggle in amazement.

But the naivete about human nature I see from them is, especially on the academic level, is quite astounding. Take this quote from The Scientist article, from Jay Keasling, a synthetic biologist from the University of California at Berkley: “… If I were a terrorist I would not choose to use biology. It’s easier to fill a truck up with fertilizer than it is to engineer biology.”

It is true that it’s still relatively easy, in theory, to buy large amounts of ammonium nitrate, since there are technically no federal restrictions – a House bill was proposed in 2007 and referred to a Senate committee, where it was read twice and referred to the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. Now it seems that there are going to be federal restrictions, with rules under consideration at the Department of Homeland Security. But several states - including Michigan, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas - have passed their own restrictions on who can purchase ammonium nitrate, and track these purchases. It also turns out that many agricultural dealers, of their own volition, are not stocking the stuff anymore, for a number of reasons, most of which are related to liability.

And if Dr. Keasling is thinking an al-Quaeda-type terrorist would be able to get access to the supplies needed to construct a large fertilizer-fuel oil bomb on American soil – just imagine someone of a more, um, ethnic persuasion trying to buy a large amount of ammonium nitrate from an agricultural supplies dealer that still actually sells the stuff. Go ahead and hold that picture in your head for a moment.

What is making me roll my eyes here is that there seems to be an unspoken assumption by these scientists that no terrorist could possibly acquire the knowledge, connections, and understanding to get access to dangerous pathogens, culture them successfully, and construct a delivery system that would kill a lot of people. This is breathtakingly arrogant. Humans, overall, are a very ingenious species.

Now, look at the FBI’s point of view. I used to cover police as part of my beat, back when I was a newspaper reporter. My father was a cop. I got to know some of the local cops pretty well. And if you spend any time at all talking with law enforcement and understanding what they do, you can only wonder why they are not completely cynical about human nature. They may not be scientists, but the one thing every one of them knows is that some humans are are absolutely geniuses in planning and perpetrating the most degraded, monstrous, idiotic, and destructive acts.

The average criminal is dumb (I for one will never forget the bank robber in Trenton, N.J., who actually stopped at a chicken and rib joint and ordered up a bucket of hot wings to go after a heist). But terrorists are not average criminals.

So, you’ve got more researchers working with dangerous pathogens and more papers being written; and a huge increase in the availability of information, courtesy of the Internet; and please pay attention to this last bit here: a younger generation of scientists and students who have spent the last 10 years inhabiting Web chatrooms and social media sites as a natural part of their lives, considering the people on there, that they’ve never actually met in real life, as friends and colleagues.

Those who think scientists are too savvy and too selfless to fall for ploys from “dumb” terrorists to pump them for information – please wake up. And if you don’t like the way the FBI is going about this outreach program, please suggest ways for the organization to better its relationship with the scientific community beyond basic exclamations of ZOMG GOVERNMENT PIGS UR DOIN IT WRONG. For all of our sakes.

Tags: BIO 2010, FBI, pharma, security