Center Articles and Publications

Commentary

A New Role for Scientists in the Biological Weapons Convention

Gigi Kwik Gronvall

Nature Biotechnology. Volume 23, Number 10, 2005. © Nature Publishing Group. Reprinted with permission. DOI:10.1038/nbt1005-1213 
 
Moves are afoot that could make individual scientists, not just governments, accountable under international and national bioweapon legislation.

The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC; formally titled the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction) is the first agreement among nations that declared an entire category of weapons to be off limits. When it was signed in 1972, scientists were not considered likely to develop biological weapons on their own, but at the behest of their governments. However, the perception that scientists are just tools of their governments changed with the increased powers of biotechnology and the increased interest in bioterrorism by nonstate actors. The ability to use biology for harm is no longer the province of teams of scientists and large budgets, but a possibility for a trained scientist working alone at the bench. As a reflection of this new era, BWC treaty members are currently discussing measures to influence scientists' behavior, including professional codes of conduct and increased pathogen security. At the next BWC multilateral conference in 2006, treaty members may make decisions that affect how scientists work and how they are trained.

The impact that the BWC or accompanying national legislation could have on the life sciences—such as influencing the sharing of biological research samples, the formation of scientific collaborations or the ability to publish—strongly calls for the involvement of scientists, so that enacted measures will have the desired effect. Life scientists should be involved in measures that protect their profession from being used to do harm, as well; the life sciences need the public's trust for the profession to thrive.

While the BWC is an agreement between nations, not individuals, the intent of the BWC and other international nonproliferation efforts will increasingly rest upon the expertise and judgment of individual scientists. For scientists who are working in biodefense or in threat assessment, it is particularly important to know what the BWC states, and what it does and does not prohibit.

How the ban came into force

The BWC was signed on April 10, 1972, and now has 154 state parties, or treaty members. The treaty is of unlimited duration, which means that it is still in force today. All of the state parties agreed to not develop, produce, stockpile or acquire biological agents, toxins and weapons delivery mechanisms "of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective, and other peaceful purposes." If a nation were to develop biological weapons, they would be violating international law. The BWC does not technically ban the use of biological weapons, but upholds the ban on use in the 1925 Geneva Protocol. Biological research for beneficent purposes is allowed under the Convention, including biodefense research.

Before the BWC, many nations had organized biological weapons programs, starting with Germany during WWI. German spies used Burkholderia mallei (the causative agent of glanders) to infect horses bound for service to the Allied army and Bacillus anthracis (the causative agent of anthrax) to infect livestock being transported to France. Whether the German attacks actually caused harm is unknown—there is little written evidence of what they did, and the attacks were not noticed at the time.¹ Yet, the ability to use disease as a tactical weapon was within reach of the existing technologies. In the years that followed, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, the Soviet Union, the United States and other nations developed biological weapons against livestock, plants and people.

The results of nation-state sponsored tests demonstrated the lethal potential of biological weapons. In the 1930s, the Japanese military killed thousands of Chinese and Allied prisoners with anthrax, plague, cholera and typhoid in biological weapons tests.² In 1942, the United Kingdom tested a bomb filled with anthrax spores on Gruinard Island, off the Scotland mainland, leaving it uninhabitable for 48 years until it was decontaminated at great expense.³ In 1968, a U.S. military exercise took place a thousand miles south of Hawaii, where hundreds of rhesus monkeys were loaded onto barges and exposed to aerosolized anthrax released from a Marine Phantom jet. Monkeys 50 miles downwind died of anthrax.⁴

By the 1960s, however, political pressure was mounting to stop developing and stockpiling biological and chemical weapons.⁵ Groups, such as the Federation of American Scientists, and well-known scientists like Matthew Meselson and Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg actively voiced their opposition to the weapons—all influencing the political will to disarm.⁵ On November 25, 1969, President Nixon renounced first use of lethal or incapacitating chemical agents and weapons, and unconditionally renounced all methods of biological warfare. The U.S. ban paved the way for drafting and negotiating the 1972 BWC.

The BWC stamped biological warfare as an illegitimate, immoral way to wage war. The moral force of the agreement has not extended to every nation—there are countries that almost certainly have biological weapons programs—but no country openly displays their biological weapons capability.

There have been significant violations of the BWC. In 1992, Russia acknowledged that the 77 cases and 66 deaths from anthrax that occurred in 1979 in Sverdlovsk were not the result of tainted meat (the Soviet line for some years) but the result of an accident at a biological weapons manufacturing plant. Defectors revealed that about 60,000 scientists were employed in the program, and a variety of weapons were developed, including 'weaponized' forms of anthrax, plague and smallpox. The decision to weaponize smallpox was made in 1980, soon after the World Health Organization announced that smallpox was eradicated from the globe.⁶

The Soviet Union was not the only proven violator; Iraq also had a large biological weapons program, which they started in 1973, a year after signing the BWC. In 1995, after the Gulf War, it was revealed that Iraq had developed bombs and rockets containing B. anthracis and botulinum toxin. South Africa also had a biological weapons program, which it dismantled in 1993.

Limitations of the BWC

Bioweapons program revelations exposed a major weakness in the BWC. In contrast to other nonproliferation regimes like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention, international inspectors do not enter the treaty member's countries to prove that the treaty isn't being violated.

Verification of BWC adherence is difficult for several reasons. State parties are allowed to support biological research, and much of the research and equipment is dual use, useful for medically relevant research as well as for biological weapons development. Although nuclear weapons and chemical weapons require specialized starting materials or equipment, there is no special equipment or process that makes biological weapons production different from the production of a vaccine. Biological agents, by definition, reproduce, so a tiny amount of a seed stock can be grown into huge quantities. The starting materials (pathogens) for biological weapons are found everywhere, and the potential to make the weapons is accessible to all nations, and to thousands of scientists.

The BWC is largely built on the intent of the state parties not to violate it; this makes threat assessment for biodefense contentious. In 1999, the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) directed 'Project Bacchus,' in which a group of scientists were given $1.5 million to set up a mock bioweapons facility from off-the-shelf components. They used Bacillus thuringiensis and Bacillus globigii as anthrax simulants. They purchased what they needed without arousing suspicion, and developed 2 lbs. of dried simulant with a 1- to 5-μ particle size, ideal for inhalation.⁷ Many have argued that this research violated the BWC, or it could be perceived by other countries to be in violation of the BWC.⁸

The newly created U.S. Biological Threat Characterization Center in the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC) is also likely to be internationally controversial; the director of NBACC affirmed that they will not be making weapons, but that "we've got to leave open the possibility [that] fabricating a pathogen might be necessary for defensive research if the government believes that another country has developed such a pathogen already."⁹

The BWC is open to interpretation regarding threat assessment. Each state party "undertakes never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain...weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict." Some would say that making a weapon is never allowed; others would argue that the DTRA or NBACC scientists never intended to use a weapon for "hostile purposes or in armed conflict," but to defend against such a weapon or to stop one from being built. Judgments of whether a given experiment is allowed under the BWC may rest only upon the intent of the experimenter.

Another limitation of the BWC is that it is a treaty among nations; it does not deal with bioterrorism. As a result of the anthrax attacks in the United States in 2001 and the increased interest in bioweapons by nonstate actors, the major focus of biodefense in the U.S. is bioterrorism, not noncompliant nation states.¹⁰ In 1984, a cult in Oregon, Bhagan Shree Rajneesh, doused salad bars with salmonella to influence the outcome of a local election, making over 700 people ill. Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that released sarin in a Tokyo subway in 1995, had also explored bioterrorism and attempted anthrax and botulinum toxin aerosol attacks.¹¹ Larry Wayne Harris, a member of the white supremacist group Aryan Nations, obtained Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of plague, from American Type Culture Collection (ATCC) in 1995. Presumably, he was not interested in pursuing peaceful or legitimate research. The perpetrator(s) of the anthrax letters of October 2001 have never been identified; they could do it again. Documents found in an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan—such as methods to culture Bacillus anthracis and Clostridium botulinum—indicate that Al Qaeda has been engaged in a bioweapons effort.¹² The U.S. Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction revealed that although "questions remain about the extent of biological research and development in pre-war Afghanistan," Al Qaeda's biological program was "extensive, well organized and operated for 2 years before September 11."¹³

The protocol fails, but BWC endures

In the nineties, an attempt was made to address the BWC's limitations. As the BWC is a living document, it can be added to or amended providing that the state parties agree. The 'BWC Protocol' was thus intended to be added on to the original BWC, by legally requiring inspections of declared and undeclared suspicious sites, including commercial pharmaceutical plants. The Clinton administration did not believe true verification for biological weapons was possible but promoted the process because they felt it would deter violations of the treaty.¹⁴ The policy shifted when the Bush administration took office, and on July 25, 2001, the U.S. announced that they would reject the BWC Protocol. They felt on-site inspections of potential bioweapons facilities would not uncover illicit activity, would not detect the bioweapons efforts of rogue states and would pose a great burden on the United States and U.S. companies, with little result.¹⁵

The failure of the United States to agree to the Protocol remains controversial. In the end, after 6½ years of negotiation, the BWC Protocol was suspended as U.S. participation could not be secured (in contrast to the Kyoto Protocol, the Landmine Treaty and the International Criminal Court, which went on without the United States' imprimatur). Regardless of what happened to the BWC verification protocol, the fact remains that the original BWC is still in force. All of the state parties are still under obligation to not develop, produce and stockpile biological agents for use as weapons. The original BWC endures.

After the failure of the BWC Protocol, a 'New Process' was agreed on. BWC state parties would "discuss and promote common understanding and effective action" on voluntary measures to enhance the BWC, in meetings that take place twice a year. The first time any multilateral treaty action could result from these discussions will be in 2006. State parties have already discussed penal legislation that would make it a criminal offense for any person to engage in activities prohibited by the BWC, as well as global epidemiological surveillance and the investigation of suspicious outbreaks of disease. Most important to working scientists, treaty members discussed the security of pathogenic microorganisms, including background checks for the scientists handling the pathogens, in 2003. This year they will discuss codes of conduct for scientists.

Codes can serve several purposes. They can be useful for raising awareness about the powers of biotechnology and resultant ethical responsibilities for scientists, they can set out ideal behavior that scientists should aspire to or they may codify behavior that can be enforced.¹⁶ The development of standards of practice may also promote public trust that the risks of powerful biotechnologies are being taken seriously by life scientists. In any case, working scientists should be involved in the creation of codes meant to guide their behavior in their profession. Just how responsible should an individual scientist be for the downstream consequences of his or her research? Should all experimental results be made public? These questions will be important points of contention in the development of a code or standard of professional practice.

Whether or not the BWC state parties take action in 2006 on mandating codes for scientists, individual countries may decide to establish their own codes. Several professional scientific societies have begun discussions to include codes for misuse of research along with established codes for research integrity. These codes have the potential to lead to enforcement; broadly accepted codes of conduct have been used in the past by courts to establish legal standards.¹⁷

Relevance of the BWC to life scientists

When President Nixon signed the BWC, he said, "[A]ll of the scientists of the world, certainly a universal community, whatever their language, whatever their race, whatever their background, instead of working to develop biological weapons which one nation might use against another nation, now may devote their entire energy toward working against the enemy of all mankind—disease."⁵

From Nixon's statement, life scientists were set free by the BWC. They were not considered likely to develop biological weapons on their own, but as part of their nations' defense. The perception of scientists as tools of their regimes is the justification for programs that employ former Soviet bioweaponeers to work on peaceful, legitimate research in Russia. Organizations, such as the International Science and Technology Center (Moscow, Russia; http://www.istc.ru) and the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation (Arlington, VA, USA; http://www.crdf.org) aim to prevent scientists with biological weapons expertise from being forced for financial reasons to immigrate to places where their weapons expertise would be highly valued.

However, the perception that scientists are just tools of their governments has changed. When the United States abandoned biological weapons development in 1969, there was no such thing as PCR, biotech companies, PubMed or genome databases. Many PhDs working in laboratories today were not even born. The techniques used in the past to create new viral or bacterial strains for weapons would now likely seem quaint to the modern post-doc, and much more laborious than necessary. Now, individual scientists and small groups of scientists have more technological power to cause harm, if they wish to. Thousands of scientists have the capability to develop a biological weapon, as many of the techniques used for beneficent, legitimate research are dual-use. Many areas of research could also be considered to have weapons applications, even if they are undertaken for medically important reasons. For example, studying the mechanisms of virulence of viruses and bacteria is necessary to understand the diseases they cause and could lead to cures or vaccines; but exploiting mechanisms of virulence for weaponry could make bad pathogens worse. The applications for the biological sciences (good and bad) are only going to increase with time and future discoveries.

Measures taken by the U.S. government also demonstrate the view that individual scientists, not just governments, could develop biological weapons, and that individual researchers could unknowingly help terrorists achieve their aims. The U.S. Patriot Act¹⁸ and the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act¹⁹ imposed new regulations on who may perform research with 'select agents'—the several dozen pathogens that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention judges to be the most dangerous potential biological weapons. In addition, the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity was created in 2004 to provide guidance on how research institutions should handle potentially dual-use biological research^.20

Currently, the BWC only vaguely addresses the issue of individual responsibility. It requires each treaty member to prohibit activities on its territory, "in accordance with its constitutional processes," that are prohibited under the Convention, which could imply that states must hold their citizens responsible for violating the BWC provisions. However, the New Process of the BWC—the discussions being held now—focus heavily on the behavior of scientists, such as for pathogen accounting and security, as well as scientific codes of conduct. If the state parties to the BWC agree to enact measures at the multilateral review conference next year, individual scientists, not just governments, could potentially become part of the enforcement mechanisms of the BWC. Even if there are no changes to the BWC itself, the ideas promulgated in the discussions may lead to national legislation that may affect research practice and training of life scientists.

Biological research is crucial for the advancement of medicine and an understanding of the world around us, but it could be misused to develop a catastrophic weapon. The details of why this is, and what could be done about it, will require a lot of explanation from scientists to policymakers as well as some constructive solutions. The opinions and judgments of scientists will be crucial for promoting the beneficent uses of biology, attempting to stem the misuse of biology, and preparing to respond quickly to a biological attack with therapies and vaccines.

Donald A. Frederickson, former head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health during the recombinant DNA debate in the 1970s remarked that "one of the most important lessons to be learned about controversy over use of high technologies...is the absolute requirement for expert opinion."²¹ Without the expert judgment of scientists, the promise of biology could be hampered and the risks could increase. This is true for efforts at the national level, as well as international efforts like the BWC.

Whether provisions are added to the BWC that adapt it to the modern age of biotechnology, whether other treaties are negotiated, or whether national governments increase governance of research, the moral force of the BWC and Geneva Protocol endures: no nation shall develop, stockpile or use biological weapons. In the new era of biotechnology, with its promises and risks, scientists will be an important force in keeping that peace.

Acknowledgments

This paper was commissioned by the Policy, Ethics, and Law core of the Southeastern Regional Center for Excellence in Biodefense and Emerging Infections.

References

1. Smart, J.K., in Medical Aspects of Chemical and Biological Warfare. Textbook of Military Medicine, part 1, vol. 3. (Sidell, F.R., Takafuji, E.T., Franz, D.R., eds). 9−86 (Office of the Surgeon General, Washington, DC, 1997).
2. http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/Japan/index.html
3. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/1457035.stm
4. Preston, R. The New Yorker, 52−65, 9 March (1998).
5. Frank, F.R., in U.S. Arms Control Policymaking: the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention Case. PhD Dissertation. 42−97 (Department of Political Science, International Law and Relations, Stanford University, Stanford, USA, 1974).
6. Alibek, K. et al. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World, Told from the Inside by the Man who Ran it, edn. 1 (Random House, New York, 1999).
7. Seper, J. The Washington Times, 26 October, p. A5 (2001).
8. Miller, J. et al. The New York Times, 4 September, p. A1 (2001).
9. Rood, J. Congressional Quarterly, 24 September (2004). http://page15.com/2004/09/dhs-germwar-research-bugs.html
10. Bush, G.W. National Security Presidential Directive #33: Biodefense for the 21st Century, 24 April (2004). http://www.whitehouse.gov/homeland/20040430.html
11. Pollack, A. The New York Times, 29 March, p. A10 (1995).
12. Petro, J.B. et al. Science 302, 1898 (2003).
13. Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Report to the President of the United States. (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 31 March 2005). http://www.wmd.gov/report/wmd_report.pdf
14. Tucker, J.B. The Nonproliferation Review, Spring (2004).
15. Mahley, D. Statement by the United States to the Ad Hoc Group of Biological Weapons Convention States, UN Mission Geneva, July 25, 2001. http://www.us-mission.ch/press2001/0725mahleybriefing.htm
16. Rappert, B. Biosecur Bioterror 2, 164−174 (2004).
17. Atlas, R.M. et al. Biosecur Bioterror 3, 51−60 (2005).
18. USA Patriot Act. Public Law 107-56. 107th Congress, 1st Session. (2001).
19. Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act. Public Law 107-188. 107th Congress, 2nd Session. (2002).
20. http://www.biosecurityboard.gov
21. Fredrickson, D.S. T (ASM Press, Washington, DC, 2001).

Links will open in a new browser window. To return to the Center for Biosecurity of UPMC close the window in which the publication appears.