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Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 2011. Life Sciences and Related Fields: Trends Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13130.
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Life Sciences and
Related Fields

Trends Relevant to the
Biological Weapons Convention

Committee on Trends in Science and Technology
Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention:
An International Workshop

Board on Life Sciences
Division on Earth and Life Studies

NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL
OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES

In cooperation with

Chinese Academy of Sciences
IAP—the Global Network of Science Academies
International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
International Union of Microbiological Societies

THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS
Washington, D.C.
www.nap.edu

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 2011. Life Sciences and Related Fields: Trends Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13130.
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THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS 500 Fifth Street, N.W. Washington, DC 20001

NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the councils of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. The members of the committee responsible for the report were chosen for their special competences and with regard for appropriate balance.

This project was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation under Award 2009-12-14, Chinese Academy of Sciences, IAP—the Global Network of Science Academies, U.K. Global Partnership Programme under Award 2010072600092647, U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency through TASC under Award 7500080708, U.S. Department of State under Award SAQMMA10M2776, U.S. National Institutes of Health under Award N01-OD-4-2139 (Task Order 236), and U.S. National Academies. The views expressed herein are those of the authors, and the content of this publication does not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the organizations or agencies that provided support for the project, nor does mention of trade names, commercial products, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. government.

International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-309-21071-3
International Standard Book Number-10: 0-309-21071-2

Additional copies of this report are available from the National Academies Press, 500 Fifth Street, N.W., Lockbox 285, Washington, DC 20055, (800) 624-6242 or (202) 334-3313 (in the Washington metropolitan area); Internet, http://www.nap.edu.

Copyright 2011 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 2011. Life Sciences and Related Fields: Trends Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13130.
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THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES

Advisers to the Nation on Science, Engineering and Medicine

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit, self-perpetuating society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare. Upon the authority of the charter granted to it by the Congress in 1863, the Academy has a mandate that requires it to advise the federal government on scientific and technical matters. Dr. Ralph J. Cicerone is president of the National Academy of Sciences.

The National Academy of Engineering was established in 1964, under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences, as a parallel organization of outstanding engineers. It is autonomous in its administration and in the selection of its members, sharing with the National Academy of Sciences the responsibility for advising the federal government. The National Academy of Engineering also sponsors engineering programs aimed at meeting national needs, encourages education and research, and recognizes the superior achievements of engineers. Dr. Charles M. Vest is president of the National Academy of Engineering.

The Institute of Medicine was established in 1970 by the National Academy of Sciences to secure the services of eminent members of appropriate professions in the examination of policy matters pertaining to the health of the public. The Institute acts under the responsibility given to the National Academy of Sciences by its congressional charter to be an adviser to the federal government and, upon its own initiative, to identify issues of medical care, research, and education. Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg is president of the Institute of Medicine.

The National Research Council was organized by the National Academy of Sciences in 1916 to associate the broad community of science and technology with the Academy’s purposes of furthering knowledge and advising the federal government. Functioning in accordance with general policies determined by the Academy, the Council has become the principal operating agency of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering in providing services to the government, the public, and the scientific and engineering communities. The Council is administered jointly by both Academies and the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Ralph J. Cicerone and Dr. Charles M. Vest are chair and vice chair, respectively, of the National Research Council.

www.national-academies.org

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 2011. Life Sciences and Related Fields: Trends Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13130.
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Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 2011. Life Sciences and Related Fields: Trends Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13130.
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COMMITTEE ON TRENDS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY RELEVANT TO THE BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS CONVENTION: AN INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP

RODERICK J. FLOWER (Chair), Professor of Biochemical Pharmacology, William Harvey Research Institute, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom

HERNAN CHAIMOVICH, Superintendent General, Butantan Foundation; Professor of Biochemistry, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil

NANCY D. CONNELL, Professor of Infectious Disease, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, Newark, NJ, USA

ANDRZEJ GORSKI, Professor of Medicine and Immunology, The Medical University of Warsaw; Vice President, Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland

Li HUANG, Director-General, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

MAXWELL OTIM ONAPA, Deputy Executive Secretary, Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, Kampala, Uganda

MOHAMED IQBAL PARKER, Professor in Medical Biochemistry, University of Cape Town; Director, International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, Cape Town, South Africa

ANDREW PITT, Chair of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Chemical Biology, School of Health and Life Sciences, Ashton University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

RALF TRAPP, Consultant, CBW Arms Control and Disarmament, France

LLOYD WHITMAN, Deputy Director, Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology, U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, USA

Staff

KATHERINE BOWMAN, Study Director and Senior Program Officer, Board on Life Sciences

KATHRYN HUGHES, Program Officer, Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology

JO L. HUSBANDS, Scholar/Senior Project Director, Board on Life Sciences

SAYYEDA AYESHA AHMED, Senior Program Assistant, Board on Life Sciences

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 2011. Life Sciences and Related Fields: Trends Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13130.
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BOARD ON LIFE SCIENCES

KEITH R. YAMAMOTO (Chair), University of California, San Francisco, California

BONNIE L. BASSLER, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

VICKI L. CHANDLER, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Palo Alto, California

SEAN EDDY, HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus, Ashburn, Virginia

MARK D. FITZSIMMONS, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, Illinois

DAVID R. FRANZ, Midwest Research Institute, Frederick, Maryland

LOUIS J. GROSS, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee

RICHARD A. JOHNSON, Arnold and Porter, Washington, DC

CATO T. LAURENCIN, University of Connecticut Health Center, Farmington, Connecticut

BERNARD LO, University of California, San Francisco, California

ROBERT M. NEREM, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia

CAMILLE PARMESAN, University of Texas, Austin, Texas

MURIEL E. POSTON, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York

ALISON G. POWER, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York

MARGARET RILEY, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts

BRUCE W. STILLMAN, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York

CYNTHIA WOLBERGER, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland

MARY WOOLLEY, Research!America, Alexandria, Virginia

Staff

FRANCES E. SHARPLES, Director

JO L. HUSBANDS, Scholar/Senior Project Director

JAY B. LABOV, Senior Scientist/Program Director for Biology Education

KATHERINE BOWMAN, Senior Program Officer

MARILEE K. SHELTON-DAVENPORT, Senior Program Officer

INDIA HOOK-BARNARD, Program Officer

KEEGAN SAWYER, Associate Program Officer

ANNA FARRAR, Financial Associate

CARL-GUSTAV ANDERSON, Program Associate

SAYYEDA AYESHA AHMED, Senior Program Assistant

ORIN LUKE, Senior Program Assistant

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 2011. Life Sciences and Related Fields: Trends Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13130.
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Preface

In 2006 the Royal Society, in cooperation with the International Council for Science, the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues (now IAP—the Global Network of Science Academies), and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, organized a workshop that surveyed trends in science and technology (S&T). The objective was to provide an independent contribution from the international scientific community to the Sixth Review Conference of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) that was held in December of that year.

At the time I was serving as chair of the Royal Society standing Committee on Scientific Aspects of International Security and so became chair of the S&T trends workshop. Among the lessons we learned from that workshop were that:

•   Inviting researchers to describe the “state of the science” in their fields was a useful and productive strategy. Subsequent discussions drew out the potential implications of these advances and remaining challenges for the BWC.

•   Input by technical experts from government and the policy community who engaged with the research scientists at the workshop was extremely valuable.

•   The provision of adequate time for small-group discussion was important to enable participants to explore topics in greater depth and detail than was possible in plenary sessions.

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Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 2011. Life Sciences and Related Fields: Trends Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13130.
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•   International scientific organizations can make a genuine contribution by assisting the BWC States Parties to gain a greater appreciation of the advances taking place in the life sciences and related fields, including the increasingly global nature of the research enterprise.

We applied the experience we garnered from this meeting when we embarked on organizing the second international workshop held in Beijing in November 2010. Again, this took the form of a partnership between several international scientific organizations and national academies.

The three main themes that emerged from this meeting resonate strongly with my own experience as an active researcher. Take the convergence of disciplines, for example; the major therapeutic advances in my own area (the pharmacology of inflammation) have come from the application of biotechnology, and in particular protein engineering, to the design of anti-inflammatory drugs. The “biologics,” as these agents are known, have provided relief to countless sufferers from arthritis and other debilitating diseases. In fact, the very title of my own department—Biochemical Pharmacology—was originally chosen to indicate the growing conjunction of two life sciences.

Scientific research has always had a strongly international nature. My own group collaborates with laboratories around the world to take advantage of complementary skills and training facilities that other laboratories can offer. While such endeavors were once dependent upon personal visits or postal exchanges, the advances in communications technologies now enable us to share data and discuss our work in virtual as much as in actual laboratory settings. The many similar international efforts described in the Beijing workshop therefore rang true to me as capturing the reality of a genuinely global scientific enterprise.

I am very pleased to have had the opportunity to serve as the chair of the international committee that organized the second workshop and produced the subsequent report presented here. Planning and mounting such a conference as this is a daunting undertaking, and there are many people I would like to thank.

My colleagues on the committee made numerous suggestions for topics and speakers, helping ensure the broad representation of fields and countries at the workshop. They then played essential roles as session chairs and in some cases as speakers themselves.

We also benefited greatly from the assistance of the staff of three national academies, in particular:

•   Neil Davison from the Royal Society;

•   Katherine Bowman, Kathryn Hughes, Jo Husbands, and Ben Rusek from the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS); and

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 2011. Life Sciences and Related Fields: Trends Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13130.
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•   Our hosts, Tao Xu, Institute Director, and members of his staff Lei Zhang, Xiaoke Xia, and Wei Yang from the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

In addition to the practical work of the meeting, they served as rapporteurs for the plenary and breakout sessions, and contributed ideas for the final report. They were joined by James Revill of the University of Sussex, who served as an unpaid consultant and provided valuable support both during the workshop and to the NAS and Royal Society staff in the preparation of a subsequent factual summary of the workshop presentations, which was released in time for the Preparatory Committee of the BWC Review Conference in April 2011.

Everyone on the staff made significant contributions, but I do want to offer special thanks to Katherine Bowman. I first met Katie when she was a Christine Mirzayan Fellow at the National Research Council in 2006 and worked with us in organizing the first trends workshop. In addition to her work on the preparations for Beijing, Katie, along with Jo Husbands and Kate Hughes, made invaluable contributions to the drafting of this report. Their initial work made the committee’s task much easier, and I want to express my deep appreciation for their efforts.

Roderick Flower
Chair

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 2011. Life Sciences and Related Fields: Trends Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13130.
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Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 2011. Life Sciences and Related Fields: Trends Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13130.
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Acknowledgments

This report has been reviewed in draft form by individuals chosen for their diverse perspectives and technical expertise, in accordance with procedures approved by the National Academies’ Report Review Committee. The purpose of this independent review is to provide candid and critical comments that will assist the institution in making its published report as sound as possible and to ensure that the report meets institutional standards for objectivity, evidence, and responsiveness to the study charge. The review comments and draft manuscript remain confidential to protect the integrity of the process.

We wish to thank the following individuals for their review of this report:

Robert Butera, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

R. James Cook, Washington State University, USA

Gerald Epstein, American Association for the Advancement of Science, USA

Lewis R. Goldfrank, New York University, USA

Robert J. Mathews, Defence Science and Technology Organisation, Australia

Piers Millet, United Nations, Switzerland

Kathryn Nixdorff, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany

Kaiming Ye, University of Arkansas, USA

Although the reviewers listed above have provided many constructive comments and suggestions, they were not asked to endorse the

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Research Council. 2011. Life Sciences and Related Fields: Trends Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/13130.
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conclusions or recommendations, nor did they see the final draft of the report before its release. The review of this report was overseen by Edwin P. Przybylowicz, Eastman Kodak Company (retired). Appointed by the National Academies, he was responsible for making certain that an independent examination of this report was carried out in accordance with institutional procedures and that all review comments were carefully considered. Responsibility for the final content of this report rests entirely with the authoring committee and the institution.

The Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences served as the host for the workshop in November 2010 and the Director-General, Dr. Tao Xu, welcomed participants to the event. In addition to the able leadership of Dr. Lei Zhang, Director of the International Liaison Office, Mr. Xiaoke Xia and Ms. Wei Yang helped to ensure the smooth and successful operation of the workshop.

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During the last decade, national and international scientific organizations have become increasingly engaged in considering how to respond to the biosecurity implications of developments in the life sciences and in assessing trends in science and technology (S&T) relevant to biological and chemical weapons nonproliferation. The latest example is an international workshop, Trends in Science and Technology Relevant to the Biological Weapons Convention, held October 31 - November 3, 2010 at the Institute of Biophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

Life Sciences and Related Fields summarizes the workshop, plenary, and breakout discussion sessions held during this convention. Given the immense diversity of current research and development, the report is only able to provide an overview of the areas of science and technology the committee believes are potentially relevant to the future of the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention (BWC), although there is an effort to identify areas that seemed particularly ripe for further exploration and analysis. The report offers findings and conclusions organized around three fundamental and frequently cited trends in S&T that affect the scope and operation of the convention:

  • The rapid pace of change in the life sciences and related fields;
  • The increasing diffusion of life sciences research capacity and its applications, both internationally and beyond traditional research institutions; and
  • The extent to which additional scientific and technical disciplines beyond biology are increasingly involved in life sciences research.

The report does not make recommendations about policy options to respond to the implications of the identified trends. The choice of such responses rests with the 164 States Parties to the Convention, who must take into account multiple factors beyond the project's focus on the state of the science.

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