Technology / Weapons & Security

DF: You're more likely to be hit by a truck. We lose 440,000 people to smoking related illnesses every year... We lose 20-80,000 people to influenza every year, 120,000 people to automobile accidents. We lose five people to bioterrorism.

I'm sure you know where I'm going: Why spend money on this, which might not ever happen, instead of on these known things?

DF: One reason is that we're willing to let our fellow citizens die if they know it is going to take a long time and they kind of enjoy what leads up to it. Like smoking. We are willing to let people die of influenza if they are old and their immune systems aren't very good and they are probably going to die soon anyway. We are not wiling to have even a very low risk of dying if someone intentionally does it. We can do it to ourselves, but nobody can do it to us.

If you were an ingenious bioterrorist, wouldn't you work on some unexpected, not-so dangerous organism, and make it worse?

DF: The bad news is biology is very squishy; the good news is biology is very squishy. For those of us interested in countermeasures, you think you've got a vaccine nailed, or you think you have the perfect antiviral drug – then you find out it is toxic, or the vaccine protects mice but not primates. Fortunately the same holds true for the person who would use biology against us. You can get a group of experts, molecular biologists, virologists, together in a room and they say "I can do this" but you get in a lab and it is not as easy as in the conference room.

What are you most worried about?

DF: I am probably most concerned about the highly contagious human agents—influenza, smallpox—which could have a huge impact on this world, because the world is smaller and we have HIV/AIDS today.

Why does that matter?

DF: I don't think we would ever eradicate smallpox again, because you couldn't immunize AIDS patients or maybe even HIV patients [because they would be vulnerable to the virus in the vaccine].

The other thing that I worry about a concept called "reload." Say you have two kilos of high-quality, powdered anthrax in ten American cities. It might not be totally efficient but can infect a lot of people. Then you say 'in two weeks, I'm going to do the next city and I won't tell you what it is,' then you do the next city. That is feasible, and would be very hard to deal with. 

Because of the injuries or the psychological damage?

DF: If they said 'it's going to be Detroit next,' you could deal with it. If they didn't say [where], it would have a real psychological impact. Would you want to go downtown or anywhere if you knew that there were 10,000 people suffering from inhalational anthrax and a lot of them would die?

If anything is scary to me, it is the contagious agents, because an outbreak can start with such a small group of people and just... go.

DF: I think we would change our lifestyles very quickly. We would probably travel a lot less, we would probably wear masks when we go to the grocery store, we would probably wash our hands a lot more. 

How much should we worry about agricultural bioterrorism?

DF: The ag threats fall below the threshold that we might compare to large natural disaster. But foot-and-mouth disease is one I worry about because it could devastate our economy. Foot-and-mouth could take us into tens of billions of dollars of economic damage.

If you rewrite history and the 9-11 attacks never happened, would anyone have thought it likely that planes would be hijacked and crashed into targets? So isn't it possible that future attacks will be things you're not looking for?

DF: Go back to my equation that bioterrorism is emerging infectious disease plus intent. We have a good medical infrastructure and public health infrastructure looking for emerging infectious disease. So I think we're in better shape with regard to biology than we are to the next terror event—someone flying airplanes into bridges, those off-the-wall kinds of things.