The Corpus Callosum

This is another upsetting bit of news about our government.  The Washington Post is reporting laboratory being built in Ft. Detrick, Maryland.  Known as the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC), the new facility will conduct biological warfare research "within what many arms-control experts say is a legal gray zone, skirting the edges of an international treaty outlawing the production of even small amounts of biological weapons."

I've written about this before.  Persons who are particularly interested in this topic might want to read my earlier posts:

• PNAC Sucks, Part II
• US Biodefense Crossing the Line?

Those are fairly long, so I'll excerpt the most important points here.

The Project For the New American Century (PNAC) is something familiar to many people who are suspicious of the beligerent values that are so evident in our current Administration.  The produced a document entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses (PDF link) that promotes a warmongering stance in international affairs.

What is pertinent here, is their mention of the following:

...And advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool...

It is difficult to imagine anything more reprehensible than genotype-specific biological warfare.  To consider such a thing as "politically useful" is beyond imagination.  Even so, such champions of family values as Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz, all seem to think this is just an ordinary issue in political discourse.  They all signed the document that contains the quote above.  

When we look at the proposed areas of study for the new NBACC, as noted in the article Biodefense Crossing the Line (PDF link), we see the following:

• genetic engineering;
• susceptibility to current therapeutics;
• host-range studies;
• environmental stability;
• aerosol animal-model development;
• aerosol dynamics;
• novel packaging;
• novel delivery of threat;
• bioregulators and immunomodulators; and
• ‘‘Red Teaming,’’ which is to say duplication of
• threat scenarios.

I think it is being charitable to say that this a legal gray area.  If it is gray, it is pretty darn close to black.   At the very least, this should have close congressional oversight.  Furthermore, I would favor modification of US law, and international treaties, to specifically ban research on genotype-specific biological warfare agents.  Although that type of research was not mentioned in any publicly-available information (that I could find) regarding NBACC, we need to be explicit about this point.

 I also think that those of us in medicine and related fields need to pressure our colleagues to disavow any such research.  That would include not only research on potential genotype-specific agents, but anything that could have offensive capability.