Vogel, Kathleen M. "Framing Biosecurity: An Alternative to the Biotech Revolution Model?". Science and Public Policy, Vol.35, No.1 (2008): 45-54.

Vogel, Kathleen M. "Framing Biosecurity: An Alternative to the Biotech Revolution Model?". Science and Public Policy, Vol.35, No.1 (2008): 45-54.

• In 2002, a team of scientists led by Eckard Wimmer managed to produce a synthetic poliovirus in a lab. This success was reproduced by another team of virologists in 2003, who managed to create a synthetic virus in only two weeks. These developments sparked massive fears of dangerous viruses being designed and released into the general population by terrorists (45).
• The dominant way of understanding security issues relating to biological substances and biotechnology focus on the rapid advance of technology. This expansion of scientific knowledge and technology is seen as creating new possibilities for a greater number of people to engineer biological threats (46-47).
• This perspective has led to increased security around biotechnology, with the 2001 Patriot Act and the 2002 Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act leading to better security at labs working on dangerous pathogens and restrictions on access to certain biotechnologies, like DNA sequencers (47).
• It is still very difficult to create a functional virus in a lab. The 2002 polio experiment confirmed this, as Dr. Wimmer and others talked about the difficulty they encountered growing the HeLa cells necessary for virus replication (48). The 2003 experiment also took an enormous amount of work, as the two-week viral growth process was the result of 7 years of experimentation and many failed attempts (48-49).
• These innovations in pathogen engineering were not the result of fancy new technologies, but instead based upon standard laboratory experimentation and years of effort. This challenges the 'biotech revolution' model of looking at biological threats (49).
• The 2002 and 2003 experiments suggest that bioengineering remains extremely difficult, costly, and time-consuming and that the bottlenecks around production of usable pathogens will remain in place despite technological advances (50).
• The author suggests that emerging biotechnologies will not be easily converted to use by terrorists because their use is dependent upon larger laboratory practices and the organization of research. The skills and practices necessary to make these technologies function cannot be easily stolen or weaponized by rogue actors (50-51).
• The lack of these field-specific laboratory techniques and practices, as well as limits on funding and time needed to implement new biotechnology, explains why even competent and knowledgable terrorist groups, like Aum Shinrikyo, were unable to create a usable biological weapon (51).
• The author suspects that technology plays such a major role in intelligence agency assessments of terrorist threat because intelligence agencies aren't generally very good at finding terrorists or knowing things about them. To compensate, they tend to focus on known factors, like technologies that could potentially be weaponized (51).