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DIANA DANIELS: Everyone can take a seat. We'll get started. This is going to be a very interesting evening, and I'd love to make sure we get plenty of time for questions.
I want to welcome everybody. Good evening. My name is Diana Daniels, class of '71. And I'm a vice chair of the Board of Trustees. And I would like to welcome you to what will no doubt, in the finest tradition of Cornell, be a stimulating, thought-provoking evening.
This is my 17th year of serving on the board, having reconnected with Cornell in the early '90s through the President's Council of Cornell Women and the Council, then becoming an alumni-elected trustee in 1995, and then re-appointed several times as a board-elected trustee starting in 1999. And I had the privilege of serving as the chair of the search committee that brought David Skorton, our 12th president, to Cornell.
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And some of you may have been the recipient of various phone calls from me seeking annual fund gifts over the years through my membership in the Tower Club. For those of you who are not familiar with the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the center provides a forum for a broad dialogue that cuts across disciplines and serves to internationalize Cornell's research, teaching, and outreach agenda.
The center and its programs have made important contributions, which have served to enhance the university's worldwide reputation for excellence in international area studies and expertise on global issues such as economic development, agricultural and rural development, environmental sustainability, food security and nutrition, peace studies, nuclear proliferation, gender politics, tourism, immigration, and globalization. As David Skorton said at the center's 50th anniversary celebration this past fall, Cornell University has been international in scope from its very beginnings.
President Skorton recently reiterated Cornell's commitment to internationalism and international studies as positioning the university to generate solutions to the world's most pressing problems and issues, including global climate change, nuclear proliferation, infectious diseases, trade regulation, and world hunger. In fact, just looking at tonight's topic, bioterrorism, serves to illustrate the multifaceted approach that Cornell can bring to any problem on a global scale.
For example, the Department of Public Health at the Weill Cornell Medical School generated a computer simulation model that is the gold standard for emergency preparedness. The Cornell Institute for Disease and Disaster Preparedness, an intercampus collaboration, spearheaded by Weill Cornell and the Department of Operations Engineering in Ithaca, generated the nation's first complete manual for hospital emergency preparedness, providing directions for creating care centers in case of an influenza pandemic or treating infections in the wake of a bioterrorism attack.
Researchers in the Department of Food Science in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences have been able to put together a complete anthrax analysis lab on a computer chip. This device could provide early detection in the case of an anthrax attack. And at the School of Veterinary Medicine, New York State's diagnostic laboratory, cutting-edge tools and equipment are driving research discoveries that will address the threat of bioterrorism by working with live viruses that have the power to change the landscape.
On our panel tonight, we have two Cornell faculty members and two alumni, which also illustrates Cornell's commitment, in President Skorton's words, to educating students to live and work in a world whose chief problems transcend national boundaries. Fredrik Logevall, the director of the Einaudi Center, has worked tirelessly to promote investment in programs and people that will propel Cornell into the vanguard of international studies in the 21st century.
Kathleen Vogel, associate professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, has a longstanding interest in research on Soviet scientists engaged in the manufacture of anthrax, as well as informing and guiding future policy work in bioweapons threat prevention.
Rocco Casagrande, class of '95, a government consultant, was a UN inspector, weapons inspector in Iraq, and has many years of experience using scientific analysis to address serious issues such as the threat of bioterrorism. And Amanda Ripley, class of '96, is an acclaimed journalist whose 2008 book, The Unthinkable-- Who Survives When Disaster Strikes, was described by NPR as the thinking person's manual for getting out alive.
I'd like to thank tonight's panelists and our sponsoring organizations, including the Cornell Club of Washington, the Cornell in Washington program, the Office of Alumni Affairs, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for hosting this event. I would also very much like to thank the generosity of Cornell's alumni, parents, and friends who are with us tonight and who have given so much and so freely of time, talent, and treasure that makes possible the transformative research and outreach that are Cornell hallmarks.
It is my pleasure to introduce to you tonight's discussion moderator, Dr. Fredrik Logevall. Dr. Logevall is the John S. Knight Professor of International Studies at Cornell, and has served as director of the Einaudi Center since January 2010. He is a specialist on US foreign relations, and is the author of numerous books and articles. In fact, he has a new book coming out in August, The Embers of War-- The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam, which I am sure all of us will want to read when it comes out.
He teaches courses covering the history of US diplomacy and foreign policy, the international history of the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. In 2007, Professor Logevall was the Leverhulme Professor of History at the University of Nottingham and Mellon Senior Research Fellow at University of Cambridge.
He previously taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he co-founded the Center for Cold War Studies. A native of Sweden, he earned his doctorate from Yale University in 1993-- and we won't hold that against him-- and has been a member of Cornell's Department of History since 2004. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Logevall.
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FREDRIK LOGEVALL: Thank you so much, Diana. And thank you all for being here this evening. I'm honored to have this opportunity to be with you and to share this panel. As Diana says, I do teach in the history department. And though my courses naturally gravitate towards historical topics, I try to engage the students very much on contemporary issues, contemporary international issues. And so the subject of tonight's panel is very much one that interests me in that sense, that pedagogical sense, if you will.
But I'm also here as director of the Einaudi Center, as Diana said. We just celebrated in 2011 our 50th anniversary. The Center for International Studies was founded at Cornell in 1961. And for these last five decades, it has been a hub, as I think you all know, a hub of international activity at the university, a very successful first half century, I think it's fair to say, with pioneering area studies programs, a number of thematic programs. We have our own programming in the center, and a lot of exciting things going on. I think as we begin our second half-century, there's much to be excited about with respect to the Einaudi Center, with respect to international studies at Cornell.
Diana referred to the president's white paper. I think some of the things that we are doing at the center and that we want to do going forward-- and I'd love the opportunity to talk with you, anybody who's interested about some of these things that we have planned, but I think they dovetail very nicely with what David said in his white paper about what we need to do as a university and about the core mission we have, not just at Cornell, but at all universities, which is to produce graduates who have cross-cultural awareness, who understand that we live in an interconnected world, as the cliche says, a world that has been reduced to the size of an airplane ticket, which I think has a connection, perhaps, to the subject that we're talking about today.
If you've seen Steven Soderbergh's film, you know what I mean. But I think we have a great opportunity at the university. And I think that the center, the Mario Einaudi Center, has to be a part of that, and is a part of that. And it's been great for me personally to be able to interact with the president and with the provost on issues that pertain to our international dimension.
One of the anecdotes that I tell my students-- I'm not sure this is apocryphal. I think it's true. In fact, I think I recall reading about it in a New York Times piece recently, so maybe it must be true. But it's an anecdote I tell which goes something like this. Sometime, I think it was in 1998, Bill Clinton was given a book. And it was Richard Preston's book, The Cobra Event, which is, if you've read it, it's a thriller about a terrorist attack using a kind of modified, I think, anthrax-- or maybe smallpox, actually.
And apparently Clinton, if this is true, the president stayed up all night reading this thing and was completely mesmerized, and then the next morning called in his national security team and other advisors and said, what is this? How prepared are we for biological terrorism? And I guess there were murmurings about what was being done. Point was, not much was being done.
And then subsequent to that, of course, not a heck of a lot happened, I think it's fair to say, although I may be corrected here shortly, until, of course, 9/11 and the anthrax letters that followed. And then we've seen, of course, a great deal of attention paid to this issue.
But it occurred to me in thinking about tonight that maybe Clinton's question still resonates, the question being, what are we doing to prepare for this? Are we doing the right things? How prepared are we in the event of an attack of this nature? And that's, of course, why we're here. And I'm honored, as I said, to be here and to be moderating our discussion.
The talent, which I'm now going to introduce, will be guiding us through this. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to have the panelists speak for about 10 minutes each, and then we're going to open it up for discussion. I know that, in fact, in the audience, we have several people, or maybe more than several, who themselves know a great deal about the subject that we're discussing. So I do want to leave time for questions, for maybe pointed questions. And so we'll make sure that we have that time. So about 10 minutes each for the presentations, and then we'll open it up.
Our first speaker, Rocco Casagrande, is a director in the Homeland Defense practice at Abt Associates in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Casagrande, who was previously a United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, is building the company's Homeland Defense program with an emphasis on bioterrorism defense, including agricultural biosecurity and public health preparedness. He has extensive experience in biosurveillance and biological threats. He has been widely published on the subjects of agricultural and biological terrorism, and is a prominent lecturer on these subjects.
He has been a researcher for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and was a member of the Controlling Dangerous Pathogens Project at the-- that sounds pleasant-- at the Center for International and Security Studies. He is, as we've already heard, a graduate of our fair university, with degrees in chemistry and biology. Less importantly, he holds a PhD from MIT in biology.
Following-- I'll introduce all of our speakers at once-- following Rocco will be Kathleen Vogel, who is an associate professor in Science and Technology Studies, and I'm also happy to say is the incoming interim director of the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, which is part of the Einaudi Center. So starting, I guess, this summer, Kathleen and I will be neighbors.
Kathleen holds a PhD from Princeton and a BA from Drury College that is in chemistry, and has worked on a range of issues, has a whole number of publications, a book titled Bio Threats and Public Logics-- or I'm sorry, and Policy Logics, which examines the social context and the processes of how US governmental and non-governmental analysts produce knowledge about contemporary biological weapons threats, in which she draws on theoretical perspectives from the science and technology subfield, and in that book examines a series of historical and contemporary case studies involving state and non-state actors.
Clearly, doing work that is precisely of the type that we'll be discussing this evening. She is this year on sabbatical leave as a senior fellow in the International Security Studies program here at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Our third and final speaker is Amanda Ripley, who has been for years, who covered a number of issues for Time magazine as a journalist. Among other things, she covered hurricanes Katrina and Rita, helping Time to win two national magazine awards for stories that detail the years of dysfunction leading up to the storms. She covered 9/11 from Manhattan, the sniper attacks from Washington, and the catastrophic 2003 European heat wave from Paris.
She has written prolifically. As Diana mentioned, she's the author of a book, The Unthinkable, which has been published in 15 countries. She has appeared all over the airwaves and spoken at conferences on leadership, homeland security, emergency preparedness, and public health.
At the moment, she is Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation, and has also published work in The Atlantic, in Slate, The New York Times Magazine, The Times of London, National Geographic Adventure, and The Washington Monthly. Most important is the fact that she is a graduate in government from Cornell University. And I'm just delighted, again, to present this panel to you. And join me, please, in welcoming our first speaker, which is Rocco. Thanks.
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ROCCO CASAGRANDE: Good evening, everyone. Some of you, I'm glad to see so many of my colleagues here. Some of you have been my colleagues for so long. You do remember my days at Abt Associates. Most of you remember me more since 2005, when I left for Gryphon Scientific. I'm also happy to see a lot of my colleagues from the Cornell in Washington program, where we help students who are coming to Washington to learn a little bit more about environmental policy do some networking, and get to know some of the great work that a lot of the alumni are doing.
So my friends from the Cornell in Washington program will be happy to learn a little bit more about what I do than a one-minute talk, one-minute spiel that we all give about our work. And my colleagues will be happy to hear that my presentation probably doesn't contain any graphs. So that'll be nice.
So I'm going to give a little bit of a talk about uncertainty in biodefense and how the federal government handles that. And then I'm going to have the hubris to lay out a couple of my own personal opinions on what smart biodefense looks like in the face of that uncertainty. So let me put out a couple of points of why uncertainty is problematic in biodefense.
First of all, the technology to execute a massive biological attack has existed for several decades. I mean, if you just look at the weapons systems and the agents developed by the United States in the 1950s, those would do quite well, thank you. Yet no large attack has occurred, and may never occur. So investments in biodefense, if they are focused solely on biodefense, may never afford a payoff, which is a good thing. That's what we hope. But still, you wonder what other things we could be spending the money on.
Also confounding the issue is there are many ways a biological attack could be executed, and many countermeasures are specific for a particular agent. There's a variety of disease-causing pathogens that could be used in an attack, a variety of targets, a variety of venues. And the defense community is a bit stymied in stockpiling countermeasures that are specific for only a handful of those agents and routes.
In light of all this, we know that thousands of people will die from non-bioterrorism-related causes. Crime could be partially mitigated by additional spending on public safety. A great quote from the former Police Chief Ramsey of this city stated that he had 150 or so murders in the city each year, and none of them were caused by al-Qaeda, as far as he knows. Also, you think of the tens of thousands of people just in the US who die of preventable diseases, and those that could have their condition made a little better by further research, we could be spending on that.
So that's why uncertainty is a bit problematic. But the question is, does it frustrate all spending on biodefense? Someone might make the point, well, there's so many ways to execute a biological attack, and it may not happen, and there's a lot of better things to spend money on, so let's not even bother. Biodefense is inherently fruitless. A good counterpoint that I like to make, not just because that's how I get paid, but for good reason, is you could address this uncertainty by directing your defenses at mitigating the most likely or most damaging means of attack, which is called the threat space.
And there's a number of efforts throughout the government that attempt to define the threat space so that you can make smart investments in biodefense. One that many of you may be familiar with is the select agent list. They're basically a list of all the possible bad biological agents that could hurt humans or livestock or plants. They've collected those agents, thought hard about them, and then made a list of just the couple that are the most damaging, that we should have the most controls over to make sure that people don't get their hands on them, or to make sure also that we can detect those agents and that we can defend against them.
There's also a variety of vulnerability assessments that are done. And I'll give you an example from one we've done in the past. Our company did an assessment of the food system and looked at what would happen if people, bad people, put various pathogens or chemicals in the food.
That analysis was done to understand where would be the most damaging attacks so that you could understand where you would need to defend to basically cut out the space that is most damaging should it occur. On top of all this, both those two things, just look at the art of what is possible. If someone really, really knew what they were doing, what harm could they inflict, and how could we mitigate that harm.
A next step from that is a product called the Terrorism Risk Assessments that the Department of Homeland Security has created that takes the art of what is possible, the technical information, and fuses it with intelligence information about what bad guys are capable of and what they would like to do, what their motivations are, to refine from what is possible to what is likely. And all those tools can get used to basically help you hone in on where the problem is.
And an analogy I like to use for biodefense is that of bulletproof vests. A bulletproof vest-- and they're just bullet-resistant, but a bulletproof vest just protects your torso. But yet they're worn often. And the reason isn't because it's impossible to get shot in the face. It's quite possible.
But the fact is, you're covering a large part of the threat space. Getting shot in the chest is one of the worst things that can happen to you, and it presents a very large target. We can take the same type of approach to defending against biological attacks, cutting out the most damaging and most likely avenues of attack.
So since I only have 10 minutes, let me cut to the chase. Let's take these principles and come up with-- or excuse me, these points about uncertainty, and come up with a couple of what I would like to say guiding principles for biodefense. And once again, this is my opinion alone, and I'd be happy to have some of my colleagues throw rocks at this. And also, let me warn my colleagues not to take this as an opportunity to cut off funding on anything I'm working on currently, because they don't always match these principles.
So the first big principle or guiding principle is to increase the chance for a payoff, meaning that the most likely that if something bad were to happen, your investment would be worthwhile. And so there are two subpoints to that. One is that biodefense research should also address problems in public health.
We would know that we're doing-- well, I'll get to some examples in the future, but that even if an attack doesn't happen, there's some benefit to the spending. The second principle is that biodefense research should address a large portion of the threat space. It shouldn't be focused on a single agent that may be used or may not be used. It should be focused on if there's a biological attack, it is useful.
Secondly, we have to work on decreasing the cost of biodefense. And I don't mean that in the monetary cost, but I mean the other attendant costs that come with a lot of defensive programs. And the first of which is biodefense research should not enable adversaries. And the second of which is biodefense research should not appear to violate the Biological Weapons Convention. Those two points are-- let me illustrate somewhat what I mean by that.
A lot of times-- and this is done less by the federal government, but often by academics working in biodefense, they publish papers on pathogens that are particularly nasty, or they publish modeling results that show a vulnerability to the whole world. Those types of research also could be read not only by people in the defensive community, but by the bad guys. And they are being read by the bad guys. So that should be minimized.
As far as biodefense research not violating the Biological Weapons Convention, it's been shown in past biological weapons programs in World War II, or the absence of biological weapons in World War II, that certain countries, just the perception of an offensive weapons program sparks a development program in an adversary. So it kind of creates an arms race that otherwise wouldn't exist.
So just some sound biodefense projects, some ones that adhere to these principles, I'll list here. So systems to improve surge capacity in hospitals. And the introduction mentioned a project that Nathaniel Hupert led at Cornell Medical School that I was privileged enough to help out on. So these are systems to help hospitals take care of a surge, a sudden surge of hundreds or thousands of victims that are coming in, well beyond what they're used to in the worst times.
How do they do what's called reverse triage, look at everyone who's in the hospital and decide who's OK enough to go home, who's OK enough to go to a nursing home, so that you can free up hospital beds for people who are sickened by anthrax, smallpox, or a large fire, for instance.
Similarly, also helping out capacity in hospitals are systems for mass patient transportation and tracking. So if you have an event in one area, we're fortunate enough that we live in a very large country that is geographically diverse and also population-diverse. But the geographical diversity helps us in that we have more than one center of our medical capability.
So if there's an event in New York City, if we have the capability of shipping people to Philadelphia, Washington and Boston, we could take advantage of a lot of the health care capacity in those areas to treat the victims. And we need better systems to enable that mass transportation, and then when the event is over, get those people back to their homes and also back in contact with their loved ones.
We need public education programs-- and these are ongoing-- to increase resilience to any disaster. So basically having people have a go kit at home. How many people here have a go kit, they have a bag that they can take? Well, good. I'm glad to see that some people from FEMA have a go kit at home and the people working on disaster management.
But other than that, OK, a couple. So it's basically a kit that enables you to get out of your house and sustain what you need for 48 hours or longer so that you can evacuate competently, so you don't become part of the problem. And that's one component of population resilience.
Also, developing systems for the more rapid mass prophylaxis of cities. So there are programs that encourage cities to be able to dispense medication or vaccinations as quickly as possible if there's an infectious disease threat. These programs need to be a bit more robust and continue.
Going to the basic research side of things, research into the basic mechanisms of pathogenesis and the host/pathogen relationship can lead to broad-spectrum countermeasures, potentially, for any biological agent. So not just ones that work like vaccines, where you have one vaccine for one agent, but something that understands basically the basic mechanisms of how, let's say, a whole subset of bacteria or viruses cause disease. And hopefully, that will have the dual benefit of treating normal infectious disease, as well.
It was mentioned that, in my past, I've done a lot of work on the spread of agricultural disease. There are very few systems out there that can help mitigate the spread of some of these diseases. Foot and mouth disease is a great example. It is the most contagious virus known.
It's about 50 times more contagious than flu. And yet it would be devastating if it came to this country. So we need to work on ways to track animals to determine where they've gone so we can track where the infection goes when they go. We need better systems to cull the animals, to destroy infected herds, and to identify infected herds.
And also, just back to the public health dual benefit, natural antibiotic resistance is becoming a problem. And we need to research more classes of antibiotics, new classes that would have new targets, so that we don't go back to the preantibiotic age. And I believe that's all I want to say in 10 minutes.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: Perfect timing.
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KATHLEEN VOGEL: Should I stay here, or?
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: Up to you.
KATHLEEN VOGEL: I think, actually, I'll just--
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: If the mic is-- or we're good?
KATHLEEN VOGEL: Is it OK just to sit? I think I'll sit. I have no PowerPoint, so I won't-- I know sometimes you in Washington have death by PowerPoint, so I'll spare you from that this evening. So it's such a pleasure to be here tonight with all of you. And I just want to say the idea for this emerged last spring when I was a faculty in residence in the wonderful Cornell in Washington program.
And I remember it as Linda Johnson approaching me and suggesting the idea to do a policy forum. She has a slightly different recollection. She somehow thinks I came up with this. I don't think that that's true. But I definitely appreciate all of her support in mobilizing to get this idea going, and that we could make it happen this evening, and for the so many other entities that have already been mentioned that really made this happen tonight.
I also want to do a brief thank you to the Woodrow Wilson Center. I'm here on sabbatical this year, and one of the reasons I was interested in coming here was their wonderful motto of knowledge in the public service. And I think that really resonates very much with efforts at the Einaudi Center, with the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, with Cornell in Washington, and so it's so nice to be able to bring all of these minded communities together this evening.
So my talk is going to build, I think, quite a bit on what Rocco just mentioned. My remarks today are going to focus on essentially one critical pillar that I believe that's critical for preparing intelligently for bioterrorism, and that's the need to really better understand the bioweapons threats that we face, and that we really need to devote more attention and resources for that purpose, because there's still so much that we just don't understand, even with a lot of time and resources devoted to trying to understand these threats. And as Fred mentioned, there has been a long interest, including, yes, dating back to President Bill Clinton, who definitely made this a personal interest of his back in the 1990s, and that was further supported with the 2001 anthrax attacks.
Yet, even though we've devoted billions of dollars to trying to prepare for bioweapons threats since September 11, there's still a lot very central questions that we still have yet to adequately answer. I think there's still a lot of questions about exactly what kinds of bioweapons threats do we face, and I think Rocco's presentation highlights a lot of the uncertainty with whether we're talking about state or non-state actors. How exactly has September 11 shifted that question? How have advances in biotechnology shifted and are continuing to shift that particular question? And then in light of that, what should we do for some of these issues?
And I think, unfortunately, US analysts and policymakers have the very difficult job of trying to struggle with these different questions as they try and anticipate everything from a rogue state hiding a covert biological weapons program to a non-state actor, to even now, the possibility of rogue scientists or what's been referred to now as perhaps teenage biological hackers trying to dabble with biological agents in garage or basement labs. So there's a lot of different things that now the US government is trying to anticipate. And I will say, to make things more difficult, unfortunately, I would say the US track record on assessing bioweapons threats has not been very good. There have been a lot of shortcomings, and I would say both on the US government side as well as on the non-governmental side. If you look at non-governmental folks who have been assessing these threats over the years, a lot of shortcomings in that area as well.
Just looking back historically, during the Cold War, the US analysts had a lot of problems and really did not detect the Soviet bioweapons program, even though it was a large, massive covert program. And I would say even today, even though we're well past the Cold War, there's still a lot of questions of exactly how do we understand that program? What do we make of the size and scope of that program? Before the Gulf War in '91, US analysts also failed to detect that Iraq had developed an offensive biological weapons program. And then after the '91 Gulf War, as many of you know, there were so many questions about exactly what Saddam Hussein's intentions were, what he was actually doing in the bioweapons area. And I know Rocco has, I think, some really interesting insights from his time in Iraq, and he can speak more about that.
So again, if look historically, there have just been a number of different questions and issues, problems in making accurate assessments. And again, this is even with a lot of resources and attention to this problem across multiple administrations, that there's this problem of underestimating or overestimating these threats. And as we were sitting here in this presentation, I was thinking a Goldilocks problem, where it's sort of too much, too little. It's hard to get assessments just Right, And I think that's still something that needs attention.
Now, I would say, with that said, trying to assess the intentions and capabilities of either a state or non-state actor bent on hiding its bioweapons activities is always going to be a notoriously difficult problem to solve. So I think we can't expect perfect knowledge. There's always some kind of shortcoming that should be expected. I think former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, Thomas Fingar, who I should also point out is a Cornell alum, has stated, and I think he says this very well, that intelligence is not omniscient. So I think we shouldn't put too much burden on expecting perfection in knowledge about these threats. But I think both the difficulty and the stakes, with which Rocco has identified, of the bioweapons problem highlight that we need to really also put more resources to better understanding these threats in order to try and mitigate future failures, future errors.
As Fred has mentioned, a lot of my research at Cornell has been trying to understand how knowledge in these bioweapons assessments have been produced over time, just to try and better understand what exactly have been these gaps and shortcomings, and then how do we try and propose strategies and policies that can deal with those. And I would say, although there has been a lot of focus on different technical issues related to bioweapons assessments, I would say, one critical area that has not gotten a lot of attention is how do we understand more contextual factors, for example, of how these weapons programs develop by either state or non-state actors.
And when I talk about that, it's the broader sort of social, economic, political kind of local context and local factors that really shape whether a state or non-state actor chooses to develop these weapons capabilities. And although having a technical background myself, I'm very much in agreement that we need a focus on technical expertise and technical studies, but I think also seeing that there's a lot of other kinds of information and expertise that we need as well. So when we talk about, for example, a bioweapons capability, that is, the actual ability of specific state and non-state actors to develop biological weapons, that goes into much more of complicated set of details.
So assessing a bioweapons capability involves trying to understand a lot of very important local political, economic, social dimensions that underpin weapons development, for example, how weapons know-how is developed by particular actor. And there are a lot of different organizational leadership, political issues, political structures that are involved with supporting certain kinds of weapons development. And also thinking about the different motivations and intent of actors wishing to pursue these capabilities are also critical to integrate as part of any kind of assessment. And I think this is an area, however, though, that's gotten less attention, in part, I think, because it's more challenging, it's more difficult, it's messier to try and better understand how do we better integrate technical expertise, technical knowledge, along with broader sort of social expertise, social science expertise, social science knowledge, to produce more holistic assessments.
And just to give you one example of this, where this kind of disconnect has come up, since I've done a lot of work on the Soviet bioweapons program, as some of you may throughout the Cold War and early post-cold war period, we've learned that the Soviets had a very massive, hidden bioweapons program that involved over 40 facilities across Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus, and this employed thousands of weapon scientists who worked on researching, producing, and weaponizing a number of different biological agents. And I think it's without question that the Soviet program was the largest program of its kind in history.
And typically, when you look at different reports over the years that have been written about the Soviet program, there tends to be a lot of assumptions about the capability of that program, a lot of assumptions about, essentially, the-- I would describe it as a homogeneous character of the Soviet program in its composition. But a lot of what my research has done is go in and understand, OK, how do we understand the capability that the Soviets had. And so my research, with a collaborator that I have at George Mason, Sonia Gormley, what we've learned is sort of in looking in detail at the Soviet program, that it was quite actually uneven.
And you look at this, again, by looking at the kinds of technical work, how these institutes were developed, and how they operated in the Soviet program. And so you find, for example, that there were these 40 different institutes. They had very different management and leadership styles and organizational structures. One institute had a management style that really promoted scientific innovation and accomplishing weapons tasks, while a sister facility had a management structure that really stymied weapons work and actually caused scientists working in that program a lot of difficulties to get weapons work done.
And so what you see, for example, when you look at these different institutes, some of them developed very good and in-depth types of weapons know-how, but that weapons know-how was very centralized to that particular facility. It was very difficult to transfer that know-how to other institutes. And this caused a lot of delays and problems in their own program, again, even though they had a lot of time and a lot of resources in the Soviet period to develop biological weapons.
And also, although the Soviets had a very extensive security apparatus to hide their bioweapons activities from the US and other intelligence agencies, what you find also is that these secrecy practices actually also had negative impacts on work that was done in the laboratories that, again, caused problems in terms of Soviet research and development activities.
So, as it turns out, the Soviet program, although it was quite massive, was actually quite fragile and uneven in its technical progress and its end results. But again, if you only look at certain kinds of information, if you only count the number of people or the number of facilities or the number of pathogens, you lose sight of this more contextual understanding of exactly what the capability was that structured this program. And I think that that has had implications for a variety of nonproliferation programs and policies that have been developed to try and deal with that particular proliferation threat, the Soviet program.
So, again, there's a lot of questions, I think, that remain in terms of how do we understand the specific conditions, resources, and time scales that constitute a weapons programs by different state or non-state actors. And also, I think we don't fully understand what conditions or factors cause failure of these programs to develop. Oftentimes, I think there's a lot that one can learn by studying failure, why particular programs don't develop, why particular actors don't choose to develop weapons capabilities. But oftentimes, I think this focus is overlooked.
So again, there are a lot of important intelligence and policy implications, depending on how one understands how weapons programs develop and proliferate. And the US intelligence policy communities are aware of this, and I think that they're interested in trying to draw on additional resources to try and answer these questions. I know in 2008, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a new directive on analytic outreach, which is really trying to reach out to the academic and other non-governmental communities to interject new thinking and to try and introduce analysts to unclassified ways of thinking about some of these problems. You also have a recent National Academies of Science report that focuses on new methods and new techniques in the social and behavioral sciences that actually could be applied to some of these weapons issues.
So I think some of these new developments highlight and indicate how we need to think more outside of the box, beyond just focusing maybe on just particular technical issues, although they are important, but also thinking about broader disciplines and issues to better anticipate bioweapons threats as well. A lot of my work here at the Wilson Center is trying to foster new dialogues between academics and those in the intelligence community. However, I would say, there are challenges here in terms of how do you open up conversations between these two very different communities.
And I would also say some of the other challenges come in also in terms of budgetary issues as well. A lot of private foundations used to do a lot of funding to help academic scholars do research in this area or to engage with government folks in this area. A lot of those funding streams have been cut over the years, and even, I've heard, within some folks that I know within the US government bioweapons analysts there, a lot of their budgets have been cut to do training activities, to go to meetings, to go to conferences where they could actually learn new knowledge. So again, the kind of budgetary environment that we're in does pose challenges if we're looking for new ways to improve analysis.
So I think that's going to be a continual challenge. So with that, I think I will end, and I'll turn it over to Amanda.
AMANDA RIPLEY: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, I want to thank Linda and Kelly for inviting me here. Even though it was back in 1995 when I did my Cornell in Washington tour, it feels not that long ago. Newt Gingrich was in the headlines. There was fear of an ineffectual president in the White House. And as a soon-to-graduate Cornell student, I was warned that it would be impossible to get a job. So we've come full circle, which makes me feel very young. But I think, obviously, I don't bring the kind of expertise that these folks do, and I've been fascinated to hear some of your perspectives on this. My only value, really, to this conversation is as a storyteller, so that's what I'm going to do in the nine minutes I have remaining.
In 2001, I was living in New York City and working for TIME magazine. And it's funny, because when the anthrax attacks happened, I don't know how many of you would agree with me on this, but it felt like it happened a while after 9/11, at the time. But it really was, like, a month. I mean, it was not any time at all. But it was such a strange and surreal time that it felt like months and months, if not a year, between the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax attacks. But I do remember, because I was working on the 23rd floor of Rockefeller Center, which Rockefeller Center was the recipient of one of the anthrax letters at NBC, it was interesting to notice how your friends and colleagues responded to this kind of risk. Never mind destruction of the World Trade Center down the street, another interesting experience to watch how people respond.
But with anthrax, I noticed that my most rational colleague, who I won't name, but really just a very smart, very rational, very reasonable, almost annoyingly so person, a dear friend of mine, was the one who was hoarding Cipro during the anthrax. I mean, I never would have predicted that. To this day, I'm not really sure what to make of it. And then I remember myself getting-- I often got letters and packages that look like they were written by a crazy person or a 12-year-old. And often they were 12-year-olds, actually. A lot of 12-year-olds read TIME magazine.
So I got one of these packages. It looked very strange and I didn't know what to do, and I really wrestled with my own kind of ego. And I eventually did call Rockefeller Center security, and I was like, I don't know what to do with this. And some poor guy came up and took it away, and I never know to this day what was in that package. But it was interesting to also reflect on the tension in my own brain with trying to normalize and minimize the risk and also not overreact, which for me was a lesson that I learned, again and again, which is that with all kinds of terrorism, and I think especially with bioterrorism, it is as much a psychological and social threat, if not more, than it is a physical threat, because by its nature, terrorism requires fear, and that is the force multiplier of terrorist attacks.
And fear requires a sense of helplessness. You really can't have fear without a little dose of that. And the good news about this-- I bet you didn't think I was going to say that-- is that those are things we can influence. So what I would argue is that there's a lot we don't know, obviously, about bioterrorism, but there's a lot we do know about the things that I think matter almost as much, if not more, as the actual threat. We do know a lot about human behavior under conditions of extreme stress and uncertainty. And I think that's where our best returns of investment are going to be when it comes to sorting out how to prepare for unpredictable events.
For example, here are a couple of things that I can predict about the future. I love saying that. So when we have the next bioterrorism event, perceived or real, the person with the biggest microphone will probably-- or his advisors will probably downplay the threat while it's happening, which we know is what happened in the White House with anthrax, that there was an attempt to normalize and downplay and treat it like spin control. And there was an attempt to, in the beginning, downplay the virulence of the anthrax that was found. And I don't think this is because people were evil or malicious. I think that there are two things going on.
The first is that the human brain operates under a system of pattern recognition. So we fit everything that happens to us into patterns for things that have happened to us before. And if this hasn't happened to us before, which is almost always true with these kinds of threats, then we will work very hard to fit it into things that have happened before. So what you saw among some of the president's advisors was an attempt to treat it like a rumor mongering campaign by an opponent, which was very familiar way to respond to threats and, again, totally normal and understandable, particularly in times of great uncertainty. So you will revert to those scripts. And the thing is, we all do that. So when we talk about how the public responds to uncertainty, I think it's really important to think about how public officials, and particularly politicians, respond to uncertainty. It's the same problems.
Another thing I can predict is that probably, unfortunately, the person with the biggest microphone will tell you not to panic, which we know actually leads to more fear and distrust among the public. So when you say, don't panic, does that make you feel better? Does anyone feel better? In fact, one of my biggest pet peeves about living in DC is the Metro. I think they still play it. They have this sort of taped recording. Has anyone heard this, where it says, in the event of a fire or emergency, do not panic. It sort of played on rotation, like the station ID. It's a certain every number of hours you have to play this thing. Do not panic. Listen for instructions, which I can tell you, having interviewed hundreds of survivors of all kinds of disasters all over the world, that is a terrible plan. That is a terrible plan. Do not wait for instructions. Do not do that. Will not come.
And the message it sends to me, that Metro recording, God bless them, is, we don't trust you. We don't think very highly of your intelligence, and we also are ignorant. None of this reassures me. And it also has now taken-- It's distracted me. I paid attention, and what a waste. That has actually had a negative effect, a negative net effect on my relationship with the Metro authorities.
But yet, I think that public officials, politicians, people in charge of Metro recordings suffer from the same biases and blind spots that we all do plus one more, which is we all think there's a sort of turfism. We all think that we know our thing better than outsiders, than the public. So there's a certain built-in bias against the public, I think, that is very, very dangerous in these kinds of situations, and I would argue has probably killed more people, at least in the United States, than bioterrorism. The fear that the public will misbehave, that the public will panic, is incredibly lethal and has led people to make all kinds of bad decisions over the years. And those are very hard decisions to live with later, because what we actually know is that people tend not to panic.
And when I first started working on a book about this, all these academics and researchers, they would tell me, just make sure, because they saw me and they were like, oh, no. Make sure you tell people that no one panics. And it was almost it felt like political correctness. Really? No one panics? So I almost didn't believe them. So I sort of went around systematically looking for evidence of panic in everything from stampedes to sinking cruise ships to terrorism attacks. And it is, in fact, very hard to find evidence of widespread panic. What you do find is evidence of widespread denial, delay, lethargy, shutting down, normalization. All those kinds of things are very, very common.
And the frustrating thing is that probably many of you in this room already know that. In fact, if you look at the WHO's 2004 manual on "Best Practices for Communicating with the Public During an Outbreak," which I just happen to have, weirdly, that I was looking at, during H1N1, there's this great section. It's like, despite the urge to say such things as, "I want to reassure you," "don't panic," "stay calm," don't say them. Could it be more clear? Couldn't be more clear. Instead, be reassuring and be calm. Messages that assure the public there's no need to panic have been shown to actually increase the level of fear, as they leave the following impression. A reason for panic, though not yet here, is nonetheless looming on the horizon.
So there you have it. That's great. That's great messaging, right? And in fact, my impression from interviewing many public health officials in the United States and around the world during the H1N1 outbreak was that they followed this advice. They did actually a pretty good job of communicating the fact that-- admitting there was uncertainty and communicating what they knew without telling people not to panic. The problem is, they didn't have the biggest microphone. So apparently someone who said, "this is a cause for deep concern, but not panic," this person did not read that WHO 2004 "Best Practices." That was President Barack Obama.
Then we have the EU health commissioner, who said, there is no need to panic. Then we have White House press Secretary Robert Gibbs. It's not a time to panic. And my personal favorite, State Department spokesperson Robert Wood. We don't want people to panic at this point. Maybe 20 minutes. So again, it's easy in retrospect to poke fun at people, but it's also fun. And I think that it proves that this is very typical behavior, if not for early interventions, before things happen, educating ourselves about how the brain responds to fear and uncertainty, than these things will happen with almost 100% certainty.
So again, I want to return to the idea that this is good news, because in all the things that we can't predict, here are some things we can. We know it's very important to help people assess risk in these kinds of situations, and we know how to do it. It's difficult. It's very difficult, but we know what causes dread in the human brain. We know how to manipulate that feeling, how to make it worse and how to make it better. Certainly, we in the media know all about that. And those are things that I think every attempt to prepare for bioterrorism should have at the center of their efforts. So thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: Very often that these kinds of events, one now gives the panelists a chance to rebut or to comment on one another. I'm not going to do that here. What I want to do instead is turn things over to you in the form of questions. And I would just ask this, three things. First, identify yourself. Second, keep your question brief so that we can get more of them in. And then third, speak up. Yes, right here.
SPEAKER: Microphone is right here.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: Oh, there are microphones. Maybe don't speak up then. Speak in a normal voice. The microphone is coming, if you'll.
AUDIENCE: Thank you to everyone for coming. I loved everybody's viewpoints. I have a two-part question, and my name is Gabriela. I'm a Cornellian, class of '99, Arts and Sciences. My two-part question is, part 1, we talked about the risk assessments and looking at what is the most probable, maybe, I don't know, serious threat, and I wonder why haven't we learned more from the ones that we've had, like the ones that were mentioned, anthrax and all of the different scenarios, because when I look at what happens when a snowstorm happens completely and everything is paralyzed, I wonder why aren't we learning more of the best practices and implementing them. And then the second part of my question is, right now there's talk about the water system, whether they should have mandatory computer science, cyber crime, cyber terrorism regulations implemented to prevent that, and I wanted to hear the panel's thoughts. Thank you.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: Thank you.
ROCCO CASAGRANDE: Well, I would argue that we did learn a lot from the anthrax attacks and some of the previous other attacks. I mean, the select agent lists that were created was in direct response to some people who claimed to have a legitimate reason to have some bad agents, like the causative agent of plague and anthrax. But they were just wacky folks, and so it was decided that, wait a second, we need some regulations to describe who is actually allowed to have these pathogens and who is not, and under what conditions can you transfer them and hold them.
So we have learned a lot of lessons. We've learned a lot about how to respond to an anthrax attack, a small one. We've learned a lot about decontamination. And I think, though, drawing too many lessons from the anthrax attack after September 11 is dangerous because, well, it's hard to get into the mind of the person or persons who perpetrated it, but they obviously took steps to try not to kill people.
Yet they had the expertise to make a relatively sophisticated agent formulation. Those two things are probably pretty rare, thankfully, basically, the desire to undertake all that effort to make a relatively decent agent yet to not use it in the most effective way. So it's difficult to extrapolate that to any of the actors we really care about, like al-Qaeda or other types of folks. So we can only draw so many lessons.
KATHLEEN VOGEL: I guess I can go next. I would say, definitely there have been some lessons learned. I guess, from my perspective and looking at over time how assessments have been done, I think one of the things that I've found is that there tends to be a tendency to-- and I understand why this is the case, but a tendency to assume that the past will not predict the future, that the emerging and new threats will be fundamentally different than threats that we've encountered in the past.
And I will say, although there is some truth in terms of not locking yourself up into the past, I think there's actually a lot that you can learn by looking at past state or non-state actors and what have been the factors that have enabled either successful weapons development or unsuccessful successful weapons development. I think there is a lot that you can glean from that, again, not to say that the future will be exactly as the past, but I think if there can be certain patterns, ways that weapons are developed, that I think you can pull away from different understanding the past more clearly.
And one of the challenges, I think, with this is just in terms of what is sometimes valued in pressing policy environments. I just recently was talking to one intelligence analyst who I know who was talking about this problem of learning from the past, and he mentioned to me, he said, well-- at least in his intelligence world where he works, he said, anything beyond 2006 is not relevant. Anything before 2006 is not relevant for us in terms of our assessments that we're doing today. And I found that to be a rather interesting commentary of what is being left out to understand the present.
And again, I understand in some ways why that statement is. Analysts are working in very pressing environments where they're asked to do a lot of reporting under very short time frames. But I think that that's something interesting to take a look at.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: I saw a hand down here. Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: My name is Terry Horner. I get on said Metro system every day to go to work at one of the Senate office buildings that was decontaminated with chlorine gas after that attack, and was on Cipro because of exposure, or at least feared exposure to that. And I'm just wondering, what would that Metro announcement look like if you were to write it?
AMANDA RIPLEY: That's a great question. Wow, I never get to answer this. Nobody ever asks me. So I think that the biggest mistake most warnings like that make is they don't tell you why. So let's think backwards. If Metro is saying, listen for instructions and don't panic, why are they saying that? That's because probably in a real event, no one will really know exactly what's going on. It'll be very confusing. There will probably be, nine times out of 10, smoke in most kinds of Metro events. So that means it's very difficult to know what's going on.
And so what I would do if I were actually trying to design a warning for Metro based on how the brain actually works, to get people's attention and actually give them information that would make them less frightened and give them more agency, which tends to lead to better performance, then I would say, in the year 2011, there were 17 fires in the Washington DC Metro system. I'm making that up. In all of those fires, everyone survived, but it was very important to know which was the third rail.
Now I have your attention. I'm giving you a specific warning that's personal, recent, speaks right to the parts of your brain that listen to risk and warnings. You always prioritize personal experience. It needs to be customized. I could also say, the people who tend to be in most danger in most train evacuations are the elderly and the disabled. So now I'm targeting my message at the people who are in the most danger, and just say it. It's like, I think there's a real like we dance around these things. So we know that in all evacuations, for example, whether it was Three Mile Island or Katrina, the elderly are the least likely to evacuate. And in fact, after Katrina, age, not race or income, was the number one predictor of who did not leave New Orleans.
AUDIENCE: True in Fukushima as well.
AMANDA RIPLEY: True in Fukushima as well. That's a great point. So we know there's a lot we know. There's actually very little we don't know about human behavior in disasters. And to bring it full circle, I would argue that of the problem, part of the reason we keep repeating our mistakes, is that we often focus on armaments or physical threats, as opposed to human behavior, which is very predictable over time and space. So thank you for asking.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: Is there-- not a contradiction, Amanda, but you said earlier that in fact, research shows that people don't panic. So that leads me to wonder if, when the guy with the biggest microphone says, don't panic, at first, I thought you were saying that's harmful. But if people don't panic, doesn't matter if he says it. In other words, it's useless. Or are you suggesting it's in fact harmful if he or she--
AMANDA RIPLEY: Yeah, no, it's in fact harmful. There is some research, not a lot, that says that they don't panic, but they do feel more distrust when the person in charge says "don't panic." So it actually corrodes the most important currency that you have as a person in charge in a community, by corroding the trust. Yeah, but they don't panic. It doesn't cause them to panic. That's right.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: Yes. You've already got the microphone. I don't even have to call on you.
AUDIENCE: I don't need to stand up. I'm Linda Weinberg, and I'm a graduate in '87. I spend all of my time talking about human behavior and how we communicate with the public in disasters. So thank you so much. I totally agree.
AMANDA RIPLEY: What would your Metro warning say?
AUDIENCE: I would like to acknowledge the issue, acknowledge the problem, give the protective action, explain why, what you might think that you might want to do. If it's right, it's right. If it's not right, if what the instinct is isn't right, you need to explain why and why what you're recommending is safer, and I think, identifying those most at risk. In 9/11, in the World Trade Center, we saw people helping everyone else. People don't abandon each other. People actually rise to a much higher level. So all of what you said about how we need to acknowledge the people's instincts is, I would say, dead on.
I want to just-- a couple of things. One is I want to go back to the why don't we learn from the past. I would take issue with the idea that anything that happened pre-2006 is irrelevant, perhaps from a technology perspective, but not from a human behavior perspective. What we know about psychology of behavior in crisis is somewhat timeless, and we've learned huge amounts. And we see through the sniper attacks, through every sort of major thing that's happened in the last 10, 20 years, we've been applying more and more of risk communication theory, which is all of what you've been talking about, to those situations, I think, with ever increasing degree of success.
What happens, though, is that leadership changes. So in your job, in my job, trying to keep those people with the biggest microphones skilled and being interested in being skilled is getting harder and harder. Every time we get further away from a disaster, it gets harder to get the new leaders on board with basic risk communication, not saying stupid things, like "don't panic." I feel like every time we get a cohort of leadership on board, they leave. So it's very, very hard. Anyway.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: OK. Did one of you want to comment on that, or on--
AUDIENCE: It's not really a question as much as thank you.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: Thank you for that. Yes, sir. And then I'll go over on this side of the table.
AUDIENCE: John Dubeck, engineer, so I want to get back to the technical. With the advent of synthetic biology and the increased accessibility of larger gene constructs that can be made, is there any hope that the select agent list will be up to date?
ROCCO CASAGRANDE: This is an excellent question. So another project that I worked on that I didn't talk about, recently the government published guidance to the industry that makes genes to order. Our company basically provided the content for that guidance. It's been criticized as being a little weak, a little bit soft on the industry. And the problem is that that technology is moving so fast, that something that, when we were developing the guidance just four years ago, that you required, basically, to outsource to one of maybe 10 companies that could make very large pieces of DNA. So when we're talking about some of the more dangerous viruses, we're talking about 10,000 letters in a row. Something of that size was for very few companies and was very expensive.
Now, slightly more companies, about 20 companies can do that. The cost is about a tenth of what it was. And more importantly, there are methods pioneered to take very tiny pieces of DNA that are cheap and synthesize them into a large piece all at once in a laboratory. So it's going from a problem-- a problem-- an issue that was somewhat controllable by working with the companies that had that capability to something that's a lot more diffuse. And so, yes, it does question the relevance of the select agent list for certain pathogens.
That being said, going back to addressing a threat space, it would still be easier, if this were legal still, for someone to just order a pathogen from a cell bank and get it. If there weren't those controls in place, it would still be easier than synthesizing it. The types of technology that are needed to synthesize something like Ebola virus de novo is still in the hands of very few people and very, very competent scientists and would be beyond the hope of people who aren't those scientists for a long time to come yet. So it's still relevant to cut out the lowest hanging fruit. So they shouldn't be scrapped for a while, but yeah, it is worrisome that a different type of adversary may find that technology enabling to get their hands on an agent.
But one thing to keep in mind is an agent is not a weapon. They might have the pathogen, which they could load into a munition to make a weapon, but that still doesn't enable them to get the device to disseminate it efficiently. You need both of those to have an effective weapon.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: Yes. Right here.
AUDIENCE: Good evening. Jason Smith, class of '98. Thank you all for your comments. Over 10 years after the anthrax letters were sent, there's still at least some controversy in the press about who sent those letters. I was wondering if you could comment on the state of our ability to do forensics after an attack, which would then impact our ability to deter future attacks, and the relative importance, if you will, of developing that capability as opposed to, say, biosurveillance or improving hospitals' ability to respond after an attack.
ROCCO CASAGRANDE: So your question was on the deterrent effect of forensics?
AUDIENCE: The ability to do forensics and determine who initiated the attack.
ROCCO CASAGRANDE: So not as a political science-- I can't speak to the deterrent value of anything. I can tell you that the technology with anthrax specifically, it's somewhat challenging, because anthrax strains are extremely congenic, meaning that there's very low mutation rate in that species, and so it's difficult to distinguish one strain from another. So the work that the FBI did was actually quite challenging, but quite interesting as well. I don't know if anyone wants to speak to the deterrent effect. I have no idea.
AMANDA RIPLEY: I can't speak to the forensics of it, but I just will say, as a reporter, it was a very dissatisfying experience, the level of transparency, or the lack thereof, from the US Justice Department during that investigation. And I do wish there had been a trial, and I understand why there wasn't, but I think that would have helped.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: Let's go there and then we'll come down here.
AUDIENCE: Oh, me?
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: Yes
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] SDS '96. I work on the Japanese biodefense and bioweapons from World War II, and Soviet and US had a program from the World War II. Actually, Russian case is much before the Japanese case. And I was wondering how different from the historical biodefense attitude to present and also between the countries, so I'm curious about the panelists' opinion.
KATHLEEN VOGEL: So can you-- sorry, can you explain that just a little bit more?
AUDIENCE: Yes. So the biodefense attitude between countries, like Russia, US and, well, I know very well about Japanese case, but versus historically during the weapons, the World War II period, people looking at biodefense versus current situation. And I do know that nanotechnology is really involved now in biodefense.
KATHLEEN VOGEL: That's a challenging question.
ROCCO CASAGRANDE: Well, I mean, just speaking to my experience at the United Nations, where I got to work with biodefense folks from many countries, it seems like there are many people in many countries throughout Europe and Asia, and even Africa in many cases, that are taking the problem very seriously. They have laboratories devoted to addressing some issues of pathogenesis and protective vaccination. Obviously, US biodefense spending dwarfs a lot of these other countries, and that's a policy question, or a political question. I can't speak to why that is, but I would say that there's high-quality science going on in a lot of different countries, especially in the Scandinavian countries, actually, and Germany are some of the standouts.
KATHLEEN VOGEL: I mean, I'd probably just add, one of the controversies that's come up since September 11 is the proliferation of biodefense activities and whether that's creating a new and maybe different kind of threat. For example, if you have so many new entities, new countries that are working on biodefense, they're working with these pathogens, which is the research level, a lot of the tools and techniques that you would use to do legitimate research could also be used for offensive research. So, I mean, that's been one controversy. I would say mostly-- I mean, it's been building since the 1990s, but more after September 11, just this proliferation of biodefense work that's going on, and whether to what extent that is increasing security, but yet at the same time introducing maybe unintended risks by having a lot more people, a lot more scientists now who have possible access or skill sets that could be used for both protective measures, but then also maybe for potential offensive capabilities as well.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: The lady here on the second row. Diana, am I right that we're going till 9:00?
AUDIENCE: Frances Lee, Art, '62. What are your thoughts about the recent controversy over the attempt to suppress publication of the enhanced, more infectious, and more lethal flu virus?
ROCCO CASAGRANDE: Can I rephrase that question? How about we could call it, instead of the suppressing of the publication, but the modification of what was published? I think that in very few cases, and I think this is a good example of one, is a smart idea. If the changes are easily replicable by others and extremely problematic, should they occur, in a pathogen that is readily accessible, we have a problem. So the getting as much control over that information as possible is a good idea.
The problem is, in science, publication is often the last step of telling people about it. This group's been at conferences many times. Their graduate students have been talking about the work. And so we can't just act at the level of publication. Part of the controlling dangerous pathogens group that was mentioned was to how do you control scientific research so that it's less likely that dangerous research search occurs? How can you control the research community to still publish interesting work that still furthers our biodefense or public health efforts, yet is less likely to generate information that could be abused? And it's a very, very difficult question.
But one thing that could be better is better oversight of research projects when they're proposed by institutional boards and often by national boards, similar to the RAC, the recombinant DNA measures. So it's a very difficult problem, especially when you consider the fact that probably the most interesting results in science are the unexpected, that an unexpected result happens. You generate a hypothesis and test it, and all of a sudden there it is. If you had to get approval every time something new happened, it would really stymie science. So it's a very, very difficult question. But as far as my personal opinion on that particular piece of research, I believe the right move was made.
KATHLEEN VOGEL: I--
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: OK, sorry.
KATHLEEN VOGEL: I can just add. I would say from my take, and this goes back to what I was talking about earlier, I think there's just a lot that we don't fully understand about those experiments, or know, if you followed any of the reporting about it. We actually know what was put in the manuscripts, or at least some know. The manuscripts have not been publicly available, but there's actually a lot that we don't know about what actually went on in the lab. How are the experiments conducted? What was involved in doing the experiments? And I think if you talk to a lot of scientists, I think they will talk about how a lot goes on in the laboratory that doesn't get put in the final publication, just for various scientific communication reasons.
And so there's a lot that we actually don't know. And I think that's more important, I think, more recently, if you've seen some of the reporting that is saying that, initially when at least one of the scientists presented their results at a scientific conference seemed to indicate that with these scientific results, that there were, in terms of the infection-- this is the H5N1 experimental experiments, where it seemed like it was very lethal to the animal models, the ferrets that were used, which indicated more lethal transmissible strain of H5N1. That was the initial scientific reports that were done last-- I think it was last summer when those came out.
What you're finding more recently, though, however, he follows from the press, is now that scientist is saying, well, actually, there's a lot of data that we didn't share initially, that we didn't include in the original manuscript, but it actually doesn't show that at all, that shows that actually the ferrets, some of them didn't get infected, some of them didn't die. And so there's this now contradiction in terms of what actually is the experimental findings. So from my perspective, I would say, we actually need to go back in and figure out, beyond just looking at what the published manuscripts say, what was the actual experimental work? What was the actual data, and what explains now this discrepancy that's emerged?
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: We're out of time, but let me ask one final question. I see more hands, but I'm sorry, but I'm going to use the chair's prerogative and ask one final question, and it's the question of the evening. At the end of this evening, how prepared would you say that we are, in 60 seconds or less. Would each of you take a stab at that question?
AMANDA RIPLEY: So-so, I would say. I don't know. It's a very difficult question to answer. I mean, I do think that we have gotten much more sophisticated in some areas. And certainly the technology, I think, is ahead of, particularly for something like H1N1, so not a terrorist attack, but is ahead of the ability to process and communicate the risk to the public.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: Kathleen?
KATHLEEN VOGEL: I actually would say I feel pretty good, actually, about our preparedness. And I say that just in terms of thinking about what has happened, both as a result, a lot of the investments that were in the '90s, as well as essentially what we learned, for example, about the anthrax attacks. And I think one of the things that the anthrax attacks showed us is that actually the US government can actually mobilize and our medical systems can react quite quickly and quite aggressively if there is, for example, an outbreak that's been detected. And I think the fact that there weren't more deaths, I think, is a testament to for example, the fact that we could quickly mobilize things like Cipro. You could have very aggressive forms of medical treatment, for example, for people who were infected.
So the fact that now, after September 11, you've had a lot more emphasis on the stockpile program, and so having antibiotics and other sort of countermeasures available in the event of an attack, I think that that's been beefed up. So from my perspective, I actually feel good. And that's not to say that there isn't work to be done and that we don't still need to invest and do more, but I think that we do have a very good system in place.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: Bring us down a notch, Rocco, would you?
ROCCO CASAGRANDE: Well, I'd agree we've come a long way. I think there's a lot of work to do. And in that, if you look at a lot of how planning is done, we tend to simplify the problem. We tend to assume that an attack stops at a city's borders, that we don't have to deal with suburbs and rural areas that may also be affected. We tend to assume that business as usual will occur in the city, and so we can rely on all other functions of a city when we're doing a response. So we need to work on incorporating a lot of these realities about how a very large attack may affect a community and its surrounding area, to really understand how well we are prepared.
FREDRIK LOGEVALL: I have a slightly different take on the origins of this thing than Kathleen does. Suffice it to say that I think the other party that was very keen to do something like this was, in fact, the Einaudi Center. And one of the things that we really had wanted to do for a long time is to gather a group of people like this, and experts like this, in a forum like this, outside Ithaca, and have a chance to get together like this, as Cornell people, as Cornellians. And I just must say that, at least from my perspective-- all of us who are involved, I think, would say this-- this was precisely the event that I wanted.
I want to finish by just thanking everybody involved. The Cornell Club of Washington was instrumental, Nicole DelToro, Linda Johnson, Cornell in Washington. I want to thank Kelly Speiser for everything she did, Cornell on the Road, in making this happen; Heike Michelson, who is a key player in everything we do at the Einaudi Center, who's over here. Now, I think we can--
[APPLAUSE]
--thank everybody involved. And I want to thank all of you for coming, and I want to then ask you to join me in one more round of applause in thanking our three panelists.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
NICOLE DELTORO: Don't get up just yet. Hi, I am Nicole DelToro. I'm class of '91, and I have the privilege of serving as the President of the Cornell Club of Washington, which is an amazing group of volunteers and alumni. And Fred stole my thank-yous, because in addition to wanting to thank the panel, I did want to thank the people who made this event possible, and this event has been about six months in planning. So thank you, Linda. Thank you, Kelly. Thank you, Heike, very much.
We do have some materials out on in the front reception area with upcoming events. We have a wide variety of events coming up. You can always go to CornellClubDC.org for those, but I just want to very briefly mention some of the big ones, and forgive me if I don't mention all of them. Saturday, April 21, we have an Earth Day cleanup at the Anacostia watershed. There will be probably over a hundred volunteers there, Cornellians, families, friends. We have a Cornell hockey game watch going on this weekend. You can find that on our website and on the Cornell Club of Washington Facebook page.
We have the annual dinner coming up May 15. We have another Cornell in Washington professor, David Silbey, speaking on April-- I'm sorry, May 8. It's a luncheon at the DACOR Bacon House. And we also have a number of Cornell events out at the Washington Nationals this spring. So I hope you join us, and please, I'll be around. I don't know that anyone is beating it out the door right now, so if you'd like to continue the conversation, please feel free. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Hosted by Cornell's Einaudi Center for International Studies, three experts discussed U.S. national security priorities, what the U.S. government is currently doing to address potential threats, and the feasibility of a mass-death scenario, March 22, 2012 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
Einaudi Center director Fredrik Logevall moderated the discussion featuring panelists Kathleen Vogel, Cornell associate professor of science and technology studies, and author of the forthcoming book "Biothreats and Policy Logics"; Rocco Casagrande, former U.N. bioweapons inspector and Managing Director of Gryphon Scientific; and Amanda Ripley, TIME Magazine contributor, investigative journalist and author of "The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes -- and Why."
The event was co-sponsored by the Cornell on the Road Program and the Cornell Club of Washington.
