X Annual Swedish Symposium on Biomedicine, Ethics and Society: Seglarhotellet, Sandhamn, 9-10 June 2008:
Dual Uses of Biomedicine: Whose responsibility?
Malcolm Dando, University of Bradford, United Kingdom
Abstract of keynote presentation:
Raising awareness of the dual-use dilemma in academia:Experiences and reflections
The meetings of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) in 2008 will be concerned in part with awareness-raising, education, oversight and codes of conduct. This paper asks what we might best hope to gain from consideration of these topics in regard to preventing the hostile use of the modern life sciences. To that end the paper begins by noting that the threat of disease may be natural, accidental or deliberate and that deliberate misuse may come from states, sub-state groups or individuals. In regard to deliberate misuse, there is very little historical evidence of bioterrorism by sub-state groups but a century-long record of large-scale, offensive, biological weapons programmes (and use) by major states. In these historical programmes the then current cutting-edge science was used to develop biological weapons. The dual-use dilemma, therefore, is essentially this: that the modern life sciences - materials, technology and knowledge - could be misused in the same way.
The topics of the 2008 meetings are correctly analysed against that background. In the Final Declarations of the BTWC Five-Year Review Conferences since 1986, the importance of education about the Convention has been agreed, but the evidence from States Parties and our extensive work in interactive seminars with practising life scientists in 13 countries shows that there is a very low awareness of the Convention and the potential misuse of the life sciences. Clearly, States Parties should make serious efforts to correct this situation and we have suggested, for example, that a Hippocratic-style oath taken on graduation might be a simple and cost-effective initial step forward.
If there are further state-level offensive programmes in this century it is argued that they will be similar to the programme in the former Soviet Union where the military programme was hidden within biodefence, public health and commercial cloaking operations. In order to assess the value of awareness-raising, education, oversight and codes of conduct, therefore, three examples - from the available open literature - of ever deeper involvement of scientists in the illegal Soviet programmes are outlined.
In that context, a brief account is given of the developments related to codes of conduct, oversight and education since the previous BTWC meetings on codes of conduct in 2005. The paper then investigates the extent to which such measures would have assisted the scientists described in the three examples from the Soviet programme. It is concluded that they may have helped in two but certainly not in the third example. To be effective these measures must be integrated within a much wider 'web of prevention' based on a strengthened BTWC. Therefore, it is towards this longer-term aim of having a universal, nationally implemented and internationally verifiable BTWC that the meetings in 2008 have to work and against which they should be judged.
An aware, educated and engaged life sciences community was missing during the decade-long negotiations and eventual failure to agree a legally-binding verification protocol during the 1990s. That situation should no longer be possible or acceptable when States Parties return to this issue - presumably after the 2011 Seventh Review Conference.
