The biological threat is capable of causing global panic and paralysis, said speakers at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday. US Senate Majority Leader: An effort like the Manhattan Project is needed to combat this threat
The world needs an effort similar to that which produced the construction of the first atomic bomb in order to deal with the threat posed by biological warfare. This is what the leader of the Republican majority in the US Senate, Bill Priest, said today.
"We have to do something that dwarfs even the Manhattan Project," Priest said at the World Economic Conference, which is being held in Davos, Switzerland. The Manhattan Project was the code name for the American effort to produce an atomic bomb during World War II. "The most serious existential threat facing the world today is biological. Why? Because unlike any other threat, it has the power to cause panic and paralysis on a global scale," Priest said.
The American senator predicted that the world would experience another biological attack within a decade, following the limited impact of the anthrax envelopes sent in the US mail in 2001.
John Deutsch, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that next time the blood price could be much higher. According to him, an attack by the smallpox virus is the greatest danger. This disease was officially eradicated already thirty years ago, but Deutsch said that it is possible that there are those who have samples from Soviet stockpiles, or that small amounts can be extracted even from graves. "Every country is vulnerable here," he said.
Proposal: Classification of certain biological information
In an attempt to protect its citizens, the US government ordered millions of smallpox vaccine doses as part of security preparedness following the attacks of September 11, 2001. Other governments are also taking similar steps.
However, experts warn that other paths are also open to biological terrorism, including options such as Davar and Ebola. The even more worrying possibility is that sophisticated organizations will use genetic engineering to produce artificial microbes against which there is no protection.
Francis Collins, head of the US National Institute for Human Genome Research, said that such developments raise the question of whether it is inappropriate to impose restrictions on the sharing of information between scientists in certain fields of biology. Physicists are already limited in sharing information regarding nuclear weapons research.
Collins said that openness is the best practice, but suggested that in the future some information regarding recipes for the production of dangerous superviruses would be classified, and no longer for free distribution.
