Distracted by so many of the threats from Nuclear North Korea to iran, shipping and together in the pacific to political divisions and this country and others, economic disruption around the world that the threats posed by terror are seeing more and more as lone wolf driving cars through open spaces in europe and in the United States and other places. And many seem to forget that the potential of even a lone wolf getting his hands on something very frightening in the biological realm is still quite possible and, in fact, some would say likely and certain sometime in our future. So as we address all of the many things that are frightening as an terrorizing us, and we must deal with around the world, we want through the the Potomac Institute, take a moment and see if we cant refocus on the issue of biological terrorism. We are releasing today a couple new works by the Potomac Institute that summarize an awful lot of the activities that have gone on here at the institute on biological terrorism in the last 20 years. Its been a key focus of our center here at the Potomac Institute run by professor alexander looks at all issues of terrorism and other countries around the world can develop tools for dealing with terrorism, focusing on terrorism that users technology of the modern age as weapons has always been a key focus at the Potomac Institute and at our terrorism center. Biological terrorism we think is one of the most frightening. So once again as mark r20 years of studying this issue we want to highlight the fact that the problems getting harder, the solutions are not getting easier and we need as much focus net as weve ever had around the world in our political and or Scientific Community on the issue of potential use of biological tools to terrorize and, in fact, probably kill vast amounts of our population. We have assembled a day a number of people who associate with the Potomac Institute, im quite proud to say that of this great and very illustrious gathering of experts here at the table, almost all of them are associate with us in one way or another which makes me very proud of the institute has had such imminent people to advise us and, in fact, to help us advise the politicians and the policymakers around washington, d. C. I think you have a Great Program ahead of you here today, in the will be time at the end i hope to hear your thoughts and your input and questionandanswer time, and i highly encourage that. Its the engagement of the people in this room, in the communities around the country and, in fact, around the world which will help us i hope to find new ways and new tools for dealing with threats like bioterrorism. With that id like to introduce professor Yonah Alexander who i know all of you know, but for the record, he has written and published over 100 books on all aspects of terrorism. He is studied it for decades and he is probably the foremost expert in the world for the academic study of all aspects of terrorism, and he will lead the program today, introducer speakers and give you a bit of the framework for what were talking about today. Professor . [applause] thank you very much, mike, for your very generous introduction. And its i think the credit doesnt belong to me. It belongs i think to all our colleagues for many decades were concerned about the threats of terrorism, the different dimensions. And we gather today to discuss specifically the biological terrorism threat and what are the responses that are needed to address the potential threats in the future. As the moderator let me just take two minutes to welcome everyone here, particularly our distinguished panel. And i would like to do this first before we welcome some of the other participants here to assist us in developing a dialogue to provide more clarity on the problem. So our first speaker is doctor rita colwell. She really needs no introduction as you know, as a veteran in this field. I will mention of course that she is currently distinguished University Professor at the university of maryland, college park, at the Johns HopkinsUniversity School of Public Health. And we are very proud that she is becoming senior fellow at the Potomac Institute. We do have the bios of the speakers, very distinguished, we have distributed them so you can really look through, because if we have to deal with the contributions of each one, we need not only two hours, but full semester. So let me move on to our next speaker, doctor sandler is currently professor at department of pathology and medicine, Georgetown University. And hes the medical director Transfusion Service at Georgetown University. And i recall some years ago that we met in jerusalem when he directed the blood bank at the medical school and hospital. So welcome again to our panel. And then doctor, or professor rashid who is currently Professor University of nebraska, the Medical Center there. Also senior fellow at the Potomac Institute. And last but not least is doctor currently consultant on counter bio and formally as many of you know is director of the Intelligence Community counter biological weapons program. And we welcome him to our panel. And, of course, last but not least general gray. As we always say, great american, former, dad of the u. S. Marine corps and senior fellow and chairman of the board of regents of the Potomac Institute. So take information about the speakers with you, and we would like to of course welcome also the members of the u. S. Government who are participating today as well, some members from congress and academics, science, and also represented of more than a dozen countries who are concerned about the threats of terrorism. Now, if i may just one footnote before we move on, and basically i think we have to make sure that we place a bio threat within the broader perspective of the terrorist threat, and particularly i think we have to look at different expressions of manifestations, one, primitive such as the lone wolf, the mass casualties of threats. And then the disruptive of threats as mike indicated all along here. And then of course the weapons of mass destruction. If i may, on the broader perspective, i must relate to you in case we forgot that 21 years ago on august 23, 1996, bin laden issued the first declaration of war against the United States and the west. And he tried to incite and to encourage others of americans and members of the International Community to rise up and to strike us with whatever means they can have. As we know, they tried also to obtain some sort of weapon of mass destruction. And again, i must mention that in 1998, this is the 19th anniversary, two years after that declaration, that al qaeda operative and many of you will recall that they attacked the United States embassies in kenya and as we know. Then a few days later, the United States decided, im talking about the anniversary in august, and this was in 1998, the United States cruise missiles, they attacked some of the terrorists locations, alqaeda, in afghanistan in retaliation for the attacks on the embassies. So we must remember this anniversary, an and not to forg. So again, if we look around the world in terms of the threat of terrorism, the mass casualties, the mass destruction and so forth, in the United States, there is a very long list of attacks from the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, oklahoma city, orlando, san bernardino, and, of course, the most recent attacks in the u. S. And yesterday, the day before yesterday, Brandeis University had to close actually the university and the campus because of email threats and so on. So if we have to close the universities and her educational institutions, but what is actually the prediction about the future . And, of course, this around the world, would remember very vividly the effects in nice and paris and brussels, also london, et cetera, et cetera, and barcelona. One important element sometimes its ignored or misunderstood, that the terrorists specifically, they target the target of choice is to attack the medical facilities, the operations and the personnel throughout the world. And, of course, the patience as well, and particularly children. So it would look at the record and we keep a record of all the attacks on the world, we remember very vividly all these incidents such as 17 years ago in afghanistan, ten medical aid workers were murdered by the taliban, and still we are concerned about afghanistan. So again, the question is, are we going to remember, and not only express our sympathy and condolences to the victims and their families, but also to develop a comprehensive strategy to deal with terrorism in general, and particularly to look at weapons of mass destruction and the bio here so we have to also recognize the many contributions of the Law Enforcement and governments living with the problem. So what are we trying to do today, hopefully . I think we are approaching, as all of you know, the 100 Year Anniversary of the 1918 influenza endemic that killed an estimated, i think, 50100 Million People as you know. So, therefore, it is important i think for us to assess the potential dangers of Mother Natures diseases as well as the dangers of biological terrorism, both nationally and globally. We urgently need to address these and other related potential emergencies and develop as i mentioned a comprehensive bio security strategies. Hopefully, the panel will help us to address some of these issues and hopefully the participants here, they will provide their own insights and recommendations, what can and should be done so we reduce the risk. Rita, its all yours. Thank you. Thank you very much, yonah, for the very stirring com, very important, very relevant introduction. Can we put that back to the beginning . Im going to discuss today some actual positive developments in understanding biothreats and how to identify them. Going back to 9 11, shortly thereafter there was the anthrax incident. And i was chair of an Interagency Committee that advised the fbi and the cia as we attempted to track down the perpetrator of the anthrax events, which i think we all in this room will remember when at least eight or nine people died and some were sickened as well, from the anthrax that was sent out in letters around the Washington Area and in new england area, starting out with a reporter being killed by the anthrax in florida in those initial incidents. Now, since it then, we were able to track down the perpetrator at least the source using molecular biology. And since then i have spent all this time in the greater time, 15 plus years, focused on how we can rapidly identify microorganisms, bacteria, viruses, fungus and parasites. To do this in a way that is actionable, accurate, rapid. And so let me describe what weve been involved in your first of all, we have been focused on the microorganisms associated with the human body. All of us in this room are really more microorganisms that we are human cells. We are about 90 bacteria viruses, et cetera. But they are mostly good, those produce vitamins that we cant produce ourselves, and they regulate our immune system. They protect us against invading microorganisms. So they are important. And they are very specific as to which part of the body youll find microorganisms, like ones in the gut are active. The one on our skin protect us with waxy coats that they have and they prevent slo slowgrowig but they are there as a kind of first line of defense. And then we also have in saliva and in long mucus protective microorganisms. Lung. There are also those microorganisms where writing thabetter associate with the disease. Its amazing, the range of diseases that are associated with microbial either [inaudible] or at least relationship. This is everything from simple acne all the way to Court Research on parkinsons disease and colitis and so forth. This really is a history that begins in the 1960s when we were tempting to use computers to identify microorganisms. And at that time i was a student, and i think i can claim to have written the First Computer Program in the United States to identify bacteria phenotypically using the ibm 360. 360. Those of you know anything about computers know that you have more computational capability in your watch that we had in 1960 with the ibm 360. But in any case, it allowed us to develop a crude system for identification. We have gone through all of the techniques to the present where we have nextgeneration sequencing in meta genomics. Now, within Infectious Diseases and as we were dealing with in the anthrax episode in, just post 9 11, 15, 16 years ago, the techniques were tedious. Microscopy, steaming the organism in a laboratory, using antibodies and serum test and so forth, and without were doing pretty well by adopting that are still yet to grow the microorganisms and a lot of these pathogens just dont grow. And today we have a terrible threat globally, and that is antibiotic resistance. We are running out of antibiotics that will be active against the common infectious agent, and become increasingly resistant to even most powerful of the antibiotics. So the misuse of antibiotics has left us in a condition where a multiply resistant heavyduty resistant microorganism introduced into a population could create many deaths, especially of children and the elderly, also healthy humans as well. In fact, antibiotic resistors is more of a causative agent ban, and causing deaths come something in the order of 10 million by 2050, whereas cholera which i worked on all of my career, and i thought it was a serious epidemic but its only 100,000120,000 deaths, so you can see the magnitude of what this problem provides. Now, what i did after finishing my term as director of the National Science foundation was to establish a company, entity that simply because to obtain the money, the funding needed was much easier than attempting to get 10 million grant from the nih, even if i published a lot of papers and had done many grants. And so i focused intensely on how we could identify bacteria viruses, within minutes. Now, the approach taken was a bio informatics one. You see, to identify the anthrax organism took us two or three months i could identify it back right after the 9 11, that affects episode. And it took us six years to actually picking late all of the data to determine the source and the perpetrator, though the perpetrator committed suicide the day the fbi was to arrest him. So we will never know if he worked alone. But it seems that he did. In any case thats six years. We dont have six years. And so we need to understand how to detect pathogens with a bio threat in the food chain, infectious agents for us as humans, and also our food animals. And then water needs to be treated in a way that we can be sure that its safe from any agent being introduced. So this is the workflow conventionally. It takes days to weeks of isolating the organism, testing it and check it for different profiling. And even if you use sequencing, at best, weeks. If you isolate the organism and you can identify it probably in one or two days, but the technique that we now have developed, and ill describe it in some of its applications, is to actually take any example, extracted dna and the rna, sequence it. Thats a long time. It takes from the sampling to the actual sequencing, we can do it now and about six hours, but once we had that sequenced we now with informatics we develop our able to identify within ten minutes down to species and strain the bacteria, viruses, the fungus and the parasites all at once. This i think is an extremely important development. There are other people working as well doing great work. An individual demonstrated so dramatically for a young boy about 12 years of age who went off on a vacation with his parents and went into a swimming pool, came back with an illness that could be diagnosed. He was in and out of hospital for a year. They resenthey were sent a blooy very bright in turn at the hospital in new york, and he did the sequence and found out that it was alexis virus, an unusual sparky that is usually found in mouse urine, and this young boy probably picked it up in a swimming pool. And with penicillin he was treated. Still took another month or two of rehabilitation, but theres a year because of the inability using standard techniques. To be able to identify the organism. There are other companies that have been developed, so fortunately this is moving faster let me give you some examples we are doing a study with calcutta. Its an Infectious Disease hospital. We focus on colorado and enteric diseases, and im an honorary member of the team there and weve been working together. What we did was very intense study where they did the standard technique for about 50 or 60 patients coming in with cultural approach looking for parasites and virus. Took them about a month to do all the tests, but as the patients came in with a stool sample, they extract the dna sent it to us blind and then we analyzed it by our sequencing technique. Now, they also provide a couple of 20 samples from controls. These are indian relatives of the patients in the hospital, or members of the community. So the samples they sent us, they knew, they could culture and identify the pathogen. 26 of the the samples, 28, even by all those tests we cannot identify what was the causative agent. And then for comparison on the western side we downloaded from nih the micro biome from the human micro biome work being done, about 20 samples. Very interesting results. Let me explain to you what these mean. We were able to identify all of the bacteria. Now, in the known etiology, that is, where they could identify the bacteria, yes, we picked up the real cholera. But to their surprise, but not ours, we found that it was never a single pathogen. So this technique i think gives us an entirely new information that these severe infections, they get you into the hospital, rarely are a single pathogen. But because we can do this, survey of the entire dna and, of course, they had done all the tedious task as well, we find that mixed infections are really critical. Thats another thing to think about in terms of biothreats. They may not come in today as they did in the 15, 20, 50 musical as a single agent. They may come in as a mixture. Now, its very interesting that the pink area are the pathogens can we were able to identify them even though they couldnt pick turned out mostly and make sure of in a pathogenic e. Coli. E. Coli is what we all have in our gut but sometimes they can be bad pathogens. They pick up genes that make them pathogenic. But the healthy controls in india carry pathogens that in a number that would make us pretty ill. And this is thats us in this room. We carry a few pathogens, but notice that the blue area, these are good bacteria, the kind you get from eating yogurt, drinking buttermilk and so forth. If you travel in india do know that yogurt is present in every meal. What i want to point out is that this is consistent. This is a mechanism for determining whether an individual, in fact, has arrived in the u. S. And claims, he lived here for a decade, all you need to do is analyze the gut and its very different from the western gut. So its a forensic tool to analyze the bacteria by this technique dna analysis to determine geographic origin. Ill have a bit more to say about that in, at the end of my talk. We can identify all of these pathogens. You can see clearly us, the healthy u. S. , and these are all kinds of pathogens that are present in the note and the unknown and we can identify them down to species and strain, in addition by this elegant technique of sequencing we now can determine the presence of antibiotic resistant genes and pathogenicity genes, and even the metabolic genes for carbohydrate metabolism i dont have time to go into all that but its really quite fascinating because we can also determine that has a lot more carbohydrate genes numerically and in different types then we westerners, but if you again live in india you know every meal, rice is served. So this is a very interesting way of determining characterizing human beings. And as i said in the organisms that pathogens, they could not identify, mostly e. Coli, a whole lot of them, each one is horizontally described and we can determine all a lot of genes. The other thing we were able to do is the antibiotic resistance, and again thats another interesting phenomenon because amongst the indian population, lots of antibiotic resistant genes. Why is that . Its because you dont need a prescription in india. You can buy antibiotics from street peddlers. They had been laid out on the carpet in the street and you can buy them directly without prescription from the shop work the ones who are, having no infection, they have resistance, tetracycline and all of the common antibiotics as well as the healthy controls. So this is another phenomenon that i think is of great interest. The carbohydrate metabolism i mentioned that, but let me go on. Let me tell you how important this approach is that we spent the last ten years working on and developing. Just a couple of years ago a young woman in texas built herself a zip line, and the zip line broke. She was a 16yearold girl. Broke, she felt and water, gashed her head and ended up with it turned out that at first they look at streptococcus because as a usual thing, but they wasted that time using standard techniques and into isolating the causative agent and it turned out to be for strains of a, and water bacterium. Three of the strains for what we call genetically identical, 98 of the genes in sequence with the same but another one that was different, so we did some experiments to find out why this organism had gone to the liver and pancreas. The story of young women is that it went systemic. She ended up having both legs amputated to the knee, both arms amputated to the elbow, and eventually succumbed because it had gone systemic. This is what happened. When we did our experiment by using mice, we injected all four into the muscle of mice, mouse one, mass number two, this is got strange one, strained over two, make sure this one strain number four. When we look at the liver and the spleen, only one of those strains, the blue one, went to the liver and spleen. That was very strange. And then when we individually injected them, none of them went to the liver and spleen. And it turns out that this is such an unusual experiment and result that without ever going to get this published, or if were going to be of any help in the future, we need to do a more common type of experiment. So we engineered that one strain to be luminescent and can resist and sure enough repeated the experiment and just one strain went through. To make a long story short, the three strains that were otherwise nonpathogenic produced a toxin. And the one strain by itself that was not pathogenic but in the presence of the other strains, because they broke and the tissue and about it to go through the muscle barrier, it went to the liver and spleen. So the importance here is that strains matter. Not just the feces. The strains interact. And in this case cause the infection because one produced a toxin and the others migrated through. Im going to move on quickly. We have studied endocarditis, and what weve done is work with Cleveland Clinic and with the institute in sweden and with the hospital in amsterdam and others. Looking at heart tissue, valve tissue, endocarditis which cannot be identified i standard techniques, culture. These are the various kinds of bacteria that can cause endocarditis. But we were able, working with the doctors, to confirm from some samples that they provided us that they could identify, we could pick them up and identify them. But when they could not, we were still able to because we can identify by this technique of sequencing the top to grow, the ones that are fastidious and so forth. So this is a very, very powerful approach. As i point out here, we were able to get bacteria that they were not able to isolate by standard culture techniques. So this is an approach i think that its really very, very important. Let me close by coming back to the bio forensics approach. We have taken all the data that have been published or in gut bacteria and combined them from around the world. And these are data from ten countries and a composite of 600 samples. So if you want to, you say this might be the global average or typical gut floor. But if you look at each of the different countries, you find that indeed bio forensically this is quite fascinating. Because whether youre from tanzania or rural india japan, based on diet, culture or genetics, you had this characteristic pattern of microorganisms. So this is the bio forensic value, and you can actually even identify the species mix in these populations, these countries. So this can be medically useful because if you, for example, look at tanzania, we find when you look at the parasites, very high incidence. These are just the parasites it because we can identify everything, bacteria, viruses, fungus and parasites. Its a medical tool that can be very valuable. But let me close by the following conclusions. First of all, we now have a hugely valuable bioforensic tool. At least my team and i and others have not wasted the last ten years since the anthrax episode i think we can identify it rapidly, accurately within minutes. The sequencing time is getting shorter and shorter. In fact, england has a device thats the size of a thumb drive and within an hour, and weve tied our bio informatics to that device and theoretical think we can make and a dedication within an hour. But let me close the caveat that we need to have this capacity at the ready, but we also need to understand that the next bio threat may not be what i see symbol, you may chuckle at, anthrax wasnt so simple, it took us six years, but the next bio threat may be whole lot more confiscated than that last one. We need to be vigilant and we need to have a program that is to the moment and understands new developments and tools like crisper and others to be at the ready to protect our population and the innocent throughout the world. Thank you. [applause] professor Alexander Crichton pointed out that medical institutions are the target of bioterrorism to a certain extent, so to protect us at Georgetown UniversityMedical Center, a lot of the things are encrypted. That apparently is the slides that i brought today. They are encrypted and no amount of work on the experts here can seem to get my slides, which probably is a good thing for you. I will bring it from my notes here weenie. The title that i would take from what im going to say is what can the global blood transfusion experience contribute to the subject . A subtitle might be why is blood transfusion on the agenda here today rex and i think there are three reasons that i can rationalize to justify. One, there is an International Network of what we call bio vigilance. That is, monitoring infectious complications of blood transfusion. So that is one topic that may have got professor alexander and his colleagues, may have caught her the other is that every day in the United States but sinners test about 35,000 tubes of blood, 35 blood donors donors, for seven infectious agents. So thats quite a network, and that goes to the cdc on a daily basis. So we have quite a National Network of Infectious Disease. Probably the third reason is more relevant, and that is that there are about 300 Medical Centers including mine at georgetown that have cvn 137 blood radiators. If you transplant bone marrow or organs, you are required to immunosuppressed, not down the immune system to a point where if any of the donors lymphocytes, over time you can get what technically recall disease. That is, the immune system of that donor gets into the person, and goes after that person as foreign. And the only way that you can prevent that is to irradiate the lymphocytes that are coming over with a gambit, radiator. So those are three topics that might be pertinent. With regard to the International Network, there is collaboration with the health and human services, the American Association of blood banks, International Society of blood transfusion, world health organization. Theres this whole network that monitors for infectious agents. The issue is what are the infectious agents that we are interested in . And in contrast to what a terrorist would be looking for are the agents that we are looking at. What we look at, syphilis, the agent hepatitis b, agent of hepatitis c, hiv, west nile virus, the agent of shock or. These are all infectious agents of very low community ability. You have to get a bag of 500 milliliters of blood that you have to have sex with an infected person. You have to get bit by a mosquito. That is not something thats going to spread the way a terrace wants to. Agents as we just heard that are suitable for bioterrorism are highly communicable. They dont wait for a blood transfusion. So we have a network, but our network is welldeveloped in the western industrialized countries, and the action is down in latin america, in the heart of africa, and other places where new agents that are been historically in the Animal Kingdom are coming into the human species, aids is one, and there are many others, dengue, ebola, you can name them. They are the ones were more interested in. So our network is in the wrong place if you want to be monitoring for new emerging agents or agents that will be highly communicable, and our Testing Systems and experience are within effective agents are very low to make ability. And dont give us skills and background for dealing with the categories of agents that we should be most interested in. So what about these the radiators with ccm . With about 300 of these in the United States . They had in it about 20006000 curies of ccm 137, halflife of 30. 2 years, so if the wrong person got a hold of what i have in my Transfusion Services at georgetown and blew it around downtown washington, we could close the town of the rest of our lives because it wouldnt be suitable. Fortunately, and it wouldnt be discussing at if the corrective action was not already well in place, were all converting to nonnuclear radiators. We need about 25 gray of gamma irradiation to do to the lymphocytes what we have got to get done. It would take about 20 minutes for the standard linear et cetera that would irradiate a person with cancer if we took a bag down to that Linear Accelerator where the irradiate people, take us about 20 minutes. Thats not suitable for the turnaround time for a blood transfusion. So with the support of homeland security, department of energy and particularly Nuclear Regulatory commission, industry has done what industry can do. It has miniaturized those accelerators so we can get the equivalent of 25 great in about 25 minutes which is acceptable for turnaround time. So thats happening. The department of energy has put up funding so that the core can be disposed of safely. Dont want to have two to 6000 ci of of cesium 137 flushed down the toilet or thrown out in the waste. So it is highly supervised. You cant dispose of it without federal Agency Oversight and department of energy will take hours and put it in suitable disposal. So i didnt bring this topic in without realizing its closing down. We will have nonnuclear the radiators are very soon. Low back lot right now with the manufacturer, but that issue is not an issue for the future. Thank you. [applause] so good afternoon. Thank you, professor yonah, mike, alexander, and everybody else for having me here today. Just to let you know, today is my fifth anniversary of joining the Potomac Institute, so ive enjoyed it tremendously to be part of this organization and work that this organization does, so thank you so much, all three of you. Today the topic that i will be discussing is not a sophisticated as professor colwell and professor sandler. Both of them have done remarkable work. Professor colwell, i think what you are doing is going to revolutionize Infectious Diseases, specifically in your estates when it comes to travel medicine. So it is just a remarkable, remarkable effort on your part for the last ten years, and we should all acknowledge that. And for faster sandler, moving away from the Current Technology to nonnuclear is the way to go. It is safe. It is better and it is better for the nations security. So both of you have done tremendous work. My talk is specifically focused on a few things, and i at heart and an Infectious Disease epidemiologist pics of what i believe in is prepare what is being done by these, the speakers before me, being proactively seeking answers to problems, openly innovating things, and doing things very quickly, as quickly as possible. We must address the unpredictable future, and the future that we are seeing today and weve been seein saying sin1 or even before that has been rather unpredictable. We are seeing Different Things at different times, different challenges and we have to be ready and prepared to deal with them. This particular slide talks about how the global population has changed from 20502020. Im going to be presented different slide and at the end of the discussion i will put all been together so there they will be for the obit. What you can see is that since 2050 when publish was 2. 5 billion, in 2030, we will be, 2020 we lump about 8. 5 billion people on this earth. So theres a huge increase in the number of people that are going to be living with us and sharing the earth with us. That is a very critical question to take a look at, how the earth is going to do with it, and what other problems that are associated with this population increase. Hear what i wanted to talk about for emerging threats and trends would be clearly have seen in this world that, and as we progress, the state with poor governance, ethnic, cultural, weak economies can become prime breeding ground for terrorism. Information technology as much as his help for us has caused a lot of problems and will continue to do that. Some of the states that actively sponsor terrorism today may decrease or even sees support as a result of regime change currently approach may not neighbors were the conclusion that terrorism has been there for them. Also towards creating de facto support to terrorist organizations. To me now and 2030, terrorist tactics will become increasingly sophisticated as we have seen science develop, it will also get sophisticated. Most terrorism is now the based on received ethnic, religious or cultural. Terrorist groups will continue to find ways to attack u. S. Allies, military and diplomatic facilities abroad. These attacks are likely to expand to include u. S. Companies which could have been on american citizens in other countries. Middle east, africa, southeast asia, and organizations will most likely be the big aggressors. You can see a map over here that most people might have seen. Its not very clear, but for example, mali, africa and others, and and i will talk a little bit later on. This is what is referred to as the arc of instability in africa. We have to pay particular attention to the stations. Terrorism between 202,013, the numbers of people who have died from Terrorism Activity has increased fivefold and as you can see, there are multiple lines over here come the first one, the red when you see is a global total and you can see it has gone up. You can see the majority of the activities have happened and you can see iraq, afghanistan, and pakistan and the rest of the world at the bottom over here has gone up, but its not as much. What you have also what you can see is isis captured large part this theory and some of these activities have increased now. Some of that is going away in a couple years i am hoping this trend with all the activities we are doing is going to cool down. The next chart you see shows the transit terrorism and antiideology. Why do people do what they do . What is terrorism about . What is the ideology behind it . Is it national separatist movements, political . They clearly demonstrate the biggest problem when it comes to terrorism is religious terrorism. I am not going to go through this in any detail. We dont know what the definition of bioterrorism is. The most important thing for bioterrorism is to cause havoc, whether its one case or a thousand casualties. It doesnt matter because what happens if you have even one case per 10 cases, the entire population is affected. We can see that after the abstract how much money was allocated, how many resources were put into effect, what types of security procedures we have to go through. All of that is a tremendous amount of money. So in all honesty, they unfortunately were unsuccessful in taking a tremendous amount of life, but they were successful because we are still paying the price for it and continued to pay the price for it. Some recent historical event in 1925 geneva protocol is issued and 43 the bio program was launched. In response to the program from the soviet union and 53 u. S. Defensive programs established. With all the things the president did over here, one of the great things i think he accomplished was he dismantled an entire bio offensive program of the United States of america and started the bio defensive program. So any of the bio weapons we used to have would be completely destroyed all of them. 72 biological weapons, and there is still some countries have not signed the convention and 75 the Geneva Convention was ratified. This is in Historical Perspective that agents are listed on the website. But in all honesty, the intentions can cause panic, disease and death. Biological attacks can cause mass casualties or involve a limited number of people and the cost the nation has to there is tremendous. These are the recent attacks that have been documented in the big one we talked about in 2001 and the casualties and all the Different Things that were involved are listed over here in all of you are familiar with it. Lately we havent had a major crisis in terms of the kind of attacks of what we receive between 78 and 2001. But they have seen attempts to intelligence work, et cetera and im sure the speaker after me is going to relate to him. There have been other instances. Moving on from the Human Element that makes the problem and these are the emerging and reemerging Infectious Diseases. The one you see in the red or the newly emerging and black is is and that is the one you see over here and here. You can see there are lots of diseases, including what we talked about last year with zeke and how it came in the United States in the numbers are substantial not in the United States, but in territories. So far since january 2001 through january 2015, to date, they have close to 5500 cases. About 5000 of them and locally transmitted within the United States. It was also documented. They were transmitted, 47 actually transmitted, one was black transmitted in one persontoperson transmission, which was interesting. We dont know how exactly that happen. These are diseases coming to our doorsteps. The u. S. Territories, interestingly today, 37,000 cases have happened in most of them were local transmissions. So think of the treaty with the amount of time for people her age, but some people are young over here, because it results in defects, and they are horrendous. And the cost to do it that are astronomical. They are facing constantly and will continue until there are more people who are going to be doing the research they are doing to make sure we can identify appropriately by strain and treat them affect only and stop this influx of antibiotic resistance we are facing. Just for your pleasure, small example of what happens. Now, there is a hotel in hong kong. One person was fair from china. The disease spreads all across the world from that one patient. Not a lot of cases, but what an interesting way of taking a look at things how diseases transmit and cause havoc from even a huge problem in united dates, canada was a huge problem and went all the way to europe. So, diseases will spread. The impact of 2009 pandemic influenza initially was 214 and died because of that, the cdc in 2012 revised the numbers to about 284,000 people and thats a huge number. It was 15 times more than what was it initially. These do cause a tremendous amount of problem. When you look at the total number. Look at that number. It is huge. They do cause problems and will continue to cause problems. I showed you for young men, earlier, what i called cholera and meningitis as the civil war escalates with the country has had a total collapse. War, Infectious Diseases combining together are unfortunately incredible. 18 Million People in need of humanitarian aid. Tens of thousands and prices have gone them drastically increase. In previous conflicts, the populations are particularly prone to cholera. Since april to august 2017, 443,000 suspected cases have been reported and approximately 2000 deaths of cholera in yemen right now. On top of that, this is a problem that is going on causing huge issues. It has emerged and causes a tremendous amount of debt. A total of 2146 suspect they cases have been reported. For the entire last year, talking about in two months, over 2000 cases being reported by 649 cases. If you can appreciate the fact that we can create bio thread weapons and dispersed them to a tremendous amount of debt we can also inflict diseases by destroying the infrastructure of the nation and that is whats happening right now. They had destroyed virtually all the infrastructure including hospitals and displaced people in sanitary unsanitary conditions. Chlorine and other humanitarian access if this continues, we will have a lot more cases of cholera, a lot more cases of meningitis in that region. Again, coming to the point that not only can we create these weapons, we can create situations for diseases that cause all these problems. In conclusion, they are making this up as we go and we have to be more comfortable of countries with poor governments, Health Systems in a few Health Infrastructure is in place cannot come from the changing climate, bioterrorism or terrorism, including a high level of readiness to go in tandem with his surveyors and not supporting places critical for all the nations around the world. As all by itself is sufficient for more powerful than anything else should Work Together seamlessly so that we can control problems. One weakness will cause the entire system to fail. Community engagement is one factor that underlies the success of all of their controlled measures that means that we have to not only work with governments of different nations. We have to work with people to make sure they are also understanding and appreciating what is going on. We have to have behavioral change in terms of diet, antibiotics and complex ethical changes related to the use of untested interventions because we have not tested a lot of these interventions, so it will be a problem such as special care and other issues based upon the countries in the indigenous way of thinking or behavior. I will end with that. I thank you very much. [applause] good afternoon. Thank you further the opportunity to participate. I had an amazing set of slides prepared for this. Not the best that i ever did, but im not going to show them. I dont have any slides. Im just going to give you some remarks here. Most of the u. S. Government resources that had been devoted to countering bioterrorism or threats in general had been focused on response after the fact that the preponderance of resources generally go. That has been the case for as long as im aware of this. Im going to talk to you today is the left side of the equation, the prevention side, how might one prevent an incidence of bioterrorism. I am going to narrow it down and limit my remarks not to state sponsored activities, but to what is commonly called lone wolf small group. Going to read a quote from noble laureate josh warburg, 1998. There is no solution to biological warfare. It needs an affable, human and moral solution if its going to happen at all. With an ethical or moral solution appealed to the sociopaths. I would submit that the answer is probably no end i would submit that the answer is also probably no when it comes to bioterrorism. If someone is going to do this, that person is not going to be swayed by ethical or moral suasion. So, how does one have a shot at preventing this . I would like to call deputizing the good guys. Im going to use a phrase by standard. Im going to do fine bystanders as a person or individual who is aware on perpetrating bioterrorism event. I will get an example or two. November 2012, polish professor at agriculture university. November 2012, he is arrested and authorities at his home found detonators, and can and what his plan was was to get a truck, loaded to four times, but that was his plan to loaded up with Ammonium Nitrate and guided into the parliament to take up the polish parliament. But never have been. He was arrested. Put under surveillance by authorities. Why did they put him under surveillance . It gets more interesting on that note. His wife turned him in because of the following. Shes a biologist by training. He had been questioning her about what could one do with packaging . What kind of harm could one cause with infectious agents and pathogens . She became concerned. She alerted authorities, turned them in. So she thought he was on vw turns out he wasnt, but thats an example of a trained individual who was a bystander and made the decision to blow the whistle on someone in this case you happen to be or has been. They had planned to use to kill lots of people appeared he wanted to make a bigger that killed 77 people a number of years earlier. So that is an example of a bystander. I will give one more example. October, 2014, canadian by the name of true below runs down with his car and kills one person, injures another. They were both Canadian Armed forces personnel, specifically targeting armed forces. One person died, one person was injured. 18 months before that event he had converted to islam. Personality changed, stop wearing jeans, started wearing roads, started going to mosque frequently, decided he wanted to travel to syria. In june 2013, a couple months after his conversion, his father becomes concerned and notifies it already that his son might pose a threat. He has been time traveling to turkey. He cant go. And then come in the system tries to intervene, so besides his family intervened with the individual, picky mom the imam intervened and had a number of discussions trying to dissuade him and get them on the path you assign. Just a couple days before october 20, 2014 when he took his car and ran down those two armed forces individuals, he had the meeting and he was able to convince them he was no longer a threat. The authorities ill intervened but again, the power of bystanders to prevent something. I worked on this issue a long time, for over a dozen years in my previous capacity. And when it comes to law not yours, i havent found anything other than bystanders that gives you a halfway decent shot at the prevention side of the problem. So what kinds of recommendations do i have . For lone outdoor smallgroup bioterrorism, i think that needs to be the development of ethics based programs for biologists and students in prep missionaries, kind of like the molecular improvement of the hippocratic oath and that needs to be done worldwide. Obviously not talking domestically with worldwide activities are not passed to include the ethical responsibility to report someone who is conducting themselves in a suspicious manner. Suspicious manner can be defined in lots of different ways. Basically anomalous behavior. It might not even be behavior, but something is not right here and its making me nervous. The bystander system itself needs to be something thats got to be safe to report, so its a symptom im talking about. A whole bunch of steps written about in various publications. Not just me pointing the finger at you and everything happens and its great. All number is that questioning george or georges questioning me. George is a collie, one of my best friends. What is the potential for promotion . So he a allows me and i dont get promoted, good for george. So it has to be thought of in a very methodical manner and there are many, many steps between first reporting what happened to the individual report, who is the individual report to is a matter of reporting so that i dont feel that i am going to be fired or repercussions taken against me. It needs to be accessible, safe and good. You have to think of this as a system from the initial report all the way to the end state, which is actually stopping someone from doing something. There are many questions and there have been publications and the one thing i havent seen i actually havent seen anything really is the cultural aspect. In this country do have is to to shins that a personal reliability systems in place. And that includes responsibility to flag the gippers items, for example, responsibility to flag someone off the reservation. But if a transplant that system to south america, to southeast asia, africa, does it play out the same way or not . What are the cultural aspects of the bystander system so that what is infected hopefully sheered it someplace else and you can make the assumption that it can be transplanted. There may be cultural aspects of this in the cultural aspects were symptoms. My final recommendation for these bystander type systems worldwide. This is relatively cheap in billions and billions of dollars in the response side of the past decade or more. Many buildings have gone into pennies on the dollar here and an ounce of prevention. So i will stimulate some discussion. Thank you. Thank you berry match for your contributions and insights. Obviously, we need to deal with all these issues, but let me begin to ask a question personally of the panel. You have a very interesting and practical recommendation. The bottom line [inaudible] at the risk of being flipping, the obvious answer is all of the above. Theres a role for government to play. Government has its own mods in this country and around the world. Academic institutions have their role to play. A lot of interesting Buyers Research is conducted in the bias factor. In this country, it is going to direct out. They have a role in fostering an attitude of personnel responsibility. To me it is a cultural activity that starts at the very top, where the individuals who are in charge or lets say a molecular Bio Department at the university or director of research at the Pharmaceutical Company make it a point of developing, instituting an preaching this kind of ethical responsibility. The School Systems themselves are you concerned start at the college level, but a couple decades ago might have gotten you in mind for a price. The lower down you can start, the better off you are. To me there is a responsibility at the lower top and College Academic levels as well. It clearly has to be all of the above. The systems may differ where government will have a greater role or not. That gets to the cultural aspect of what we will sell here will not necessarily so in the same form overseas. With that aspect of the families and to begin the dialogue on the cultural level in the moral level, that is the issue anyway, if someone else on the panel would like to if not, since you spoke about the unpredictable future one can argue about what about technology but technology moves rapidly as we know and nothing is new under the sun except. [inaudible] and in regards to the measuring biotechnologies some people are looking at the Artificial Intelligence and know that we should be worried about that. A very interesting question. Technology cannot stop and things will continue to evolve whether i tell my kids not to use i he will still use it and he uses desperate my seven yearold boy uses the iphone better than i can and this will not stop. Technology will grow whether its biotechnology or other means of technology but one has to appreciate the fact that we have to develop measures and we are all educated and we are all asking the same question so why dont we safeguard so that these technologies do not come back and harm us. That is something that still needs to be looked at and a lot of scientists are talking about it. When we talk about Artificial Intelligence i was just listening to a 12 yearold boy be interviewed by bbc who is a protege, an incredibly brilliant guy and written about four books already and hes talking about tell Artificial Intelligence and he said why are you so afraid of Artificial Intelligence. Artificial intelligence is not supposed to replace the human mind but help us, use it as a tool. So, if technology is used as a tool then we can essentially be saved but if technology is used to replace the mind completely then, i believe, we have a problem. As far as Infectious Diseases are concerned when i was at hopkins we worked at a particular program where we look at how viruses mutate on the computer and how viruses mutate in the human genome and we found tremendous similarities in terms of how mutation and what we were able to do with our work at hopkins is to take influenza and use the computer model to see how it would propagate and hiv, essentially, and to see how it would permit date in change itself. The same thing we can do with other viruses like influenza, a lot of Research Needs to be done in that area and again this Technology Needs to be used as a tool to enhance health, in my opinion, because my company that particular ground but those technologies do not have to be harmful for human beings. One more question that will open up for discussion with the audience. What is your assessment in terms of the response of strategies of us governments, other governments, International Organizations and nato and american states or the applicant states or whatever, do you think the networks that you are talking about were adequate for both Mother Nature threats as well as. [inaudible] i think their heads are in the fan. I find it frustrating because every time ive been on committees or panels and talk to the officials we always turn to the nucleus and yes, the Nuclear Threat is a serious one for the bio threat is always there and always under the current and i dont think theres been mobilization. Some communities do have an effective program, san diego, i think, has had some Community Trials of what to do in a major emergency of a given epidemic but for the most part i think its catch and catch, if you can. I will respond by going back to doctor normans comment that the most effective way is right down at the grassroots and that from way up there you are not going to be able to spot and deal with that way down there and your point is the one i would use to answer professor alexanders question. I dont think that the most effective way is going to be National Agencies and i think what was suggested by professor con is that we have to work way down with their operative is and its more effective and i support the viewpoint that he presented. Okay. [inaudible] you describe the many wonderful technologies that microbiologists are now using and recently i read a description by you of the recent sequencing of anthrax genome from 2001 and immediately he went right to fort dietrich and it was a great achievement of yours. So, the other day i read an article which perhaps many of you have seen about the anthrax strain in ivory coast that kills chimpanzees but doesnt affect human beings. What is the role of the genome acting technology that terrorist groups might take on themselves to take on the genome themselves and modify it and release it upon the world its advertised is so easy to use and therefore attractive to terrorist groups so, what can we expect and what kind of concerns are being expressed about that . Thats a good question. The first part is that you mentioned the strain of anthrax and that was quite different that was precisely my point that its not good enough to use the simple techniques to give you General Information and you have to get down to the strain. We are to the point now where we can pick up variations within the gene, mutations and indifferences. You asked some of the newer techniques how they can be used. If you modify the strain yes, you anticipated my next point which is the approach is much more elegant and much more precise and is simpler to use. Its simply the investigating agency we figured out how viruses were inspecting the bacteria because bacteria has viruses as well and how they could protect themselves. So, from that evolved capability of making these precise changes in its novel in the sense of something entirely new and its that you can do it better or precisely in a much more easily way and that puts it in the hands of the terrorists. I think that your question really, to me, is the sum of it and that is we have to be able to identify immediately just what the agent is and whether or not its been engineered and whether or not it will be infectious to humans. We are at that point and we are getting there but i think thats what we have to do. Yeah, hello. Having worked these programs that youre talking about on the Defense Department side and having worked with you youre right that were focused on the effects after the attack in the infection in treatment and determination and what is your advice or suggestion for state sponsored terrorism, in terms of prevention. You talked about the residual but what can we do about intentional state sponsored biological terrorism . Well, interesting question. It is a legitimate concern to look at a state enabling the terrorist groups and so all taken away as in state on state warfare which includes vw which is beyond the purview of this discussion and look at the possibilities of a state enabling a nonstate actor to do vw and further that state own and. My personal opinion is that its unlikely for that to happen for the following reasons. Number one, why would a state trust a terrorist group and its always the potential for that group now that it has the capability to turn it around and use it against the state and secondly i had a Second Thought give me a second. Sure, attribution. Lets say the terrorist group is caught before hand or gets caught in the act or after the fact and fingers the state that provides the capability to that group so now you have a very angry recipient of that vw event who is going to look not to the terrorist group at the state that enabled it. The states are deliberately enable a terrorist group is quite unlikely. A different side of the equation is for an individual who is part of the state program to, by himself or herself, aid a terrorist without the states knowledge and so, for example, when you have the fall of the soviet union the United States and a lot of money into trying to gainfully employed former soviet Union Scientists precisely to prevent them from offering their knowledge whether it was nuclear chemical, or bio to other countries and is a much more likely event where an individual trained by a state program decides by himself or herself to surreptitiously, without consent of the state or knowledge of state, ate a terrorist group and then you have a big problem. Yet the skilled individual potentially a fairly highly skilled individual who is aiding and abetting and actor that is not good news. Thank you very much. I have a question on rapid detection. About 1213 years ago when i was in the state department i was in a meeting with the Public Health service and associate director was talking about the problem of training er doctors to detect the symptoms and you know the symptoms were being massed to appear to be and my question is not too many med students do rotations in tropical medicine and i asked my son what you do if you get something suspicious and he said you call the cdc. You have a feeling if we progressed and to what extent is there better training or er doctors and others to quickly identify the symptoms and pinpoint things. The bullets situation sold that there was lax in identifying diseases. Yes, your question is right to the point. There is the capacity in the sequencing devices and by the way they are now available all over the world not just in the us. There is a lag phase into adoptions. Those of us like myself have been working on handheld devices the size and bedside should be able to do sequencing right away and that the sounds a little ultra hopeful but it is happening. The offered. [inaudible] group does have a device the size and its a matter of the companies that manufacture the devices have invested in todays technology not Tomorrows Technology and today happens to be pcr and which give you identifications of the individual packages. Where im talking about is been able to identify everything that is they are and make your diagnosis. Thats a little more expensive and its being used in extreme cases of chronic infections that can be diagnosed by the simple techniques but its a matter of adoption by the hospitals and their beginning to use it because they now have sequencers in their laboratories that they can do this on site or their contracted to Companies Like lab core and qwest and its amazing to me to see this time lag that such an important capability that could be used right now but its slow adoption and its running out the current stockpile, if you will, of what i call the almost obsolete techniques to get the new technique into the hospital. I would expect that within three or four years we will be using this technique, if not the one that my team has developed but itll be the team that San Francisco or wherever but we, together, are changing microbiology. We are modernizing it and it is happening back ten20 years ago if i had a group of students in the emergency room with some other place and i would ask the group a question and then the student who was down like this i knew hadnt prepared or wasnt uptodate in the information. Today, when the student goes down like that i know theyre picking up their cell phone and their answering with information that i never even thought of. Last night it occurred to me that the story that is going on would be something of interest and i went to the supervisor of our Transfusion Service is said how much cesium do we have here and i dont know they wouldnt let me know because the stock is hushhush. I went to the radiation Safety Officer and said david, al doesnt know how much cesium we have and how much cesium do we have he said i dont thank you want to talk about that. I went to google and i put in the question on google and i asked the question how much cesium is there in a blood radiator and theres a legal document in the first one that comes up there were 300 in the United States that have a cesium 130 and depending upon how fast they want to do it and these are the agencies that provide funding for doing it. To answer your question none of my generation are smart enough to have that Information Online up here and heres how our medical students will be accessing a lot of that information and if it happened ten minutes ago its already going to be here so i think that this is the tool that will replace which would keep me of night preparing for a lecture or preparing for my med students but this is better. Id like to raise a question about the economic dimension of terrorism because terrorism and the threat of terrorism has generated a vast and rapidly growing domestic security industry. For example, the home run Security Department and thousands of guards everywhere. What are the indications for National Economy and what are the National Goal applications for Civil Liberties and employment. Thank you. This is a loaded question and a loaded answer probably. So, yes, one of the things that weve seen and ive talked about it since 911 or before 911 when i was in 1999 i was given a specific task to develop an Early Detection for bioterrorism detection at the Johns Hopkins applied physics lab and investment was being made at that particular point and my career essentially being a clinician moved away from a clinician to working in this field because i saw an opportunity and i enjoyed what i was doing so i did that. Industry did grow and a tremendous amount of money has been poured into this particular effort and it continues to be poured into it. At times it is too much money that goes into certain areas but i personally believe we should not go into but we should go into Infectious Diseases and other common issues like microbiology and how to identify and develop better diagnostic than anything else but no one listens. If you think about it for a second, how does a legislator answer the constituency when they say are we protecting against certain biological threats or Something Like that they will say we will do our best and there is a program thats called National Integrated bio Surveillance System which has been there and has a lot of money been spent on that program and it is not effective but every administration comes and says we have to stop this program and the Program Continues because no one can say we have to stop it because the people who say if you stop this program the bio watch program essentially it will cause the tremendous amount of problems but a bio watch program not been in the industry that is working on those programs and we spend billions of dollars on that particular effort without a serious deal of any kind. We have not reviewed the timeline and in terms of getting the results as quickly as we anticipate because if there was something in the area capturing and predicting biological agents in the air 24 or 48 hours after it was in the air and sometimes its not useful. Those are the kind of things that will continue unfortunately the same thing can be said at Airport Security. Would you allow yourself to say i do not want the Airport Security screening people for bonds or chemicals or something no, its not going to happen. It will continue. This money will be spent unfortunately, as i said, and will continue to be spent meaning that some industries are going to make a very large amount of money. I hope that answers your question somehow. My question is addressing doctor caldwells absolutely dazzling information. I wasnt familiar with this and i know ill be going to google tonight in learning about it but i have this question. The goal, of course, is to get a therapy, something that will treat the organism in the classical method would be to culture and organism and you have the organism and you put penicillin here in supposed foreign on there and you see how it responds and you have the organism with this fantastic new technology you got a piece of paper and a picture and you got a genome and how do you go from that in real time to what youre going to use to kill a bug . You get more than the identification. From this technique you get a listing of the genes and the pathogenic properties, invasion, toxic production et cetera et cetera. What it allows you to do and you me for saying this, it allows you not to create a secondary infection because normally you would counter something and say aha and all treated with. [inaudible] and the secondary organism thats resistant grows up and out you got to treat that secondary organism. Now you can look at all the genes present at the same time and whatever else you need to use and so you are zapping the potential pathogens straightaway with whatever may be presen pre. Thank you. Very informative. I think this has certainly been a superb presentation on the part of all of our panelists and i think that one thing that we have noticed over time about 1718, 20 years ago we had a number of very important competences on this overall topic and we really got into it big time and we heard some of the reasons why today but we were as a nation in terms of leaders and thoughtful people we were addressing this challenge of bioterrorism and all of that means in concert with chemical type terrorism as well as weapons of mass instruction and one thing i would mention is that you want to look at some times of the combination of all these effects like and you have to understand that if you have a cyber out in new england and a chemical weapon used in new york and a biological weapon used in this area you not only would have tremendous technical challenges on your hand but you would also have a psychological challenge the likes of which we dont spend much time thinking about and so i would say that as i said in 2001 about 1617 years ago from the university of virginia on the same topic we need to come up with a Campaign Plan as a nation and as part of a player in the free world in concert with our allies and friends. We ought to talk about how do we want the world to look like ten or 15 years now and what steps should be take over time. Obviously, there is good news here from based on what rita and her other friends have talked about today we can see that there is much more knowledgeable today than we were 1520 years ago and not just on the medical and technical in detection side of the house but across the board. I think, too, that what doctor kohn has told us about the bystander approach and all that is this is worth thinking about in our Campaign Plan because bystanders, friends and other people who enjoy freedoms they are really in some ways they are on the ball in their thinking and if they become a streetwise as i say in that whole topic then they could be a very important asset and weapon as you need to defend against these kinds of threats. If we have those campaign and we look at things and we really get serious about educating the American People and educating the free world as we know it today and what we are dealing with here we can make enormous strides towards having a better future, Global Situation so, education is a big part of that and the academic side of the house has to be deeply involved as well. The moral, ethical, all of that which has been covered, this is crucial to any type of approach. Of course, im the Eternal Optimist in despite of all of this turmoil, gloom and doom and the like i see bright spots ahead and we have to keep charging and i think, as far as the institute is concerned, we will take the initiative here to reawaken everyone on this whole threat. Our people have already been asked to look into this and to think about the agenda and the future and people we can bring in some seminars and think tank type operations that will infuse, if you will again, what we have heard today and increase everybodys knowledge and the like. Above all we ought to learn to play the what if game and we have to wargame these things a little bit and think them through. That is where we are headed at the Potomac Institute and any and all of you we would be pleased if you would think about it and perhaps participate as we go down the trail. Thank you all very much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] and what [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] dd recently visited capital to ask members of congress what they are reading the summer. There are three books on my reading list and the first is the path which is about Chinese Philosophy and history books that look not just at the history of mankind and also the future and thats sapiens and what information did you learn from reading about humanity and how did you apply that to your job . Im still working through the book and its the history of the future. Its a fascinating account of where we have been in the past and how our species became the dominant species on earth and a look at what the future has in store for us particularly with incredible advances in technology. Im very involved in Autonomous Vehicles as a senator for michigan and this is the biggest technological change in autos since the first car came off the Assembly Line and this will transform our society primarily because of the Artificial Intelligence systems to pilot these cars in this book takes a look at what does that mean and what do incredible advances in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence mean for the human species particularly as we integrate these technologies according to the author and into our own bodies in terms of information processing, disease, enhancing strength and enhancing our longevity and enhancing our mental abilities and is very thoughtprovoking. What caught your attention about International Philosophy were looking into . I have a masters degree in philosophy and is one of my passions that i think broadly about some of the big abstract ideas that are important for our species of our culture but im not that familiar with Chinese Philosophy and the author of the path is a renowned teacher at harvard and his class is on Chinese Philosophy and its one of the most attended classes and he guarantees in his class that his class will change peoples lives if you Pay Attention to the words of chinese lobsters and it will change your life in your everyday living so im looking forward as the guy who spent time studying western philosophy to take a deeper dive into Chinese Philosophy. Book tv wants to know what youre reading. Send us your Summer Reading list via twitter or instagram or post it to our hate facebook page. Book tv on cspan2, television for serious readers. This week on cspan, tonight at 8 00 with the budget for congress to handle will get pending proposals for the federal budget and friday a profile interview with agricultural secretary sonny perdue. My political history was i tell people when i was born in 1946 in perry, georgia they stamped democrat on your birth certificate and i made a political decision and i call it truth in advertising in 1998 to change parties and became a republican at that point in time. Followed at 8 30 p. M. With black cat in devcon founder jeff moss. There was no jobs in security for any of us and the only people who were doing security were maybe people in the military or banks and this is a hobby. As the internet grew and there were jobs and people were putting things online and there was money at risk all of a sudden hackers got jobs doing security. Watch on cspan and cspan. Org and listen using the free cspan radio app. Now, how Science CommitteeRanking Member don bier talks about the potential impact of the trump administrations decision to withdraw from the pairs Climate Change agreement. He also touches on the indications that the us will no longer be a leader on this iss issue. Good afternoon. Welcome. Thank you for your attention. Im steve mostly irate the recently elected president of the una and im pleased and tickled brinkley to