Agents and bioinnovation. Addressing these issues requires focus not only from the intelligence can community but also development of national and international strategies, consensus on laws, standards, and authorities. Weve got an Awesome Group to shed some light on these issues moderated by my good friend frank sesno, George Washington university, dr. Charles, the honorable senator joe leiberman, who were thrilled to get back on campus and dr. Roper. So over to you guys. Thank you, frank. [ applause ] well, good morning, everyone. We are delighted i think were delighted to be hereafter we had the conversation that was such a delight. I think it will be. Its one i think were all looking forward to. I thought what we would do before we actually dive into the topic itself is to connect each of you with the topic area and your areas of interest and focus. Charles, your a bioscientist with the cia. What else can you tell us about what you do on a daily basis . Well, im a scientist who explains Scientific Concepts and technology to nonscientists. So i dont actually practice science in a lab anymore. But i use my skills and background to write and communicate to the policy makers we need to provide warning to about the implication of those technologies. With a focus on. My focus is in biology and microbiology. Senator leiberman, we all know you from your campaigns. But youve had throughout your career a very serious focus on National Security. And in fact now well talk about this, youre also focused on biological crimes and terrorism. Tell us a little more about that. Good. Charles said he was teaching scientists to nonscientists. When i went to college there was still a science requirement, but they had a special track for science for nonscience majors. I did one of those, too. It was called Something Like physics for the intimidated. Yeah. So i took a course. Have the year was astronomy, half geology. Anyways, so for the last three years ive been privileged to coach here with former security of technology on biodefense. This was not created by an executive or congressional branches of our government. It sprang up because of concerned individuals, particularly senator, called the institute. Ive been involved of national and homeland security. Ive always worried about the threat of both bioterrorist attacks but also very related in some senses similar risks of Infectious Disease pandemics, which we probably wont talk about much today. So for the last three years weve done a series of reports. And unfortunately the conclusion was both the threat of bioterrorist attack and Infectious Disease epidemics is real and growing, and our government is not organized to protect us adequately from it. And we will talk about all that. Will roper, i was trying to find the most interesting profile of you. And i think i did. From fox news not too long ago. Ropers resume reads like a character back story from the big bang theory. Graduated from georgia tech with a masters degree, a road scholar, truman scholar, received a president ial kmenidation and served at georgia schools. Second degree black belt in tikwando. Ill be very interested to discuss that with you today especially as applies to biology. Its very interesting when youre brought out from behind the door and there is no paper trail with your 38yearold modern self. My job in the pentagon is very simple. Its to get the Department Ready for the next war. We havent done a lot of thinking about how to get a military that has been relatively predictable but unstoppable over the last 25 years, how to get it ready to deal with modern competition, modern warfare. And bio comes into that very strongly because it is a new kid on the block. It has not been something at this level of maturity from the private sector with medical research that could provide new effects that dont have the same methods we have. Were going to be playing defense while the rest of the world is playing offense, and defense is always harder. So well have the start earlier. So lets dive in. The issue of the bio threat really reflects a twosided coin. In many cases its a direct result of the opportunities, break throughs that come from biotechnology and biodiscovery. Id just very quickly like to ask each of you when you think about biotechnology, where do you see the greatest break throughs. Before we go to the perils, im just interested in what you see as the opportunity. I think speaking broadly when we look at the news and see the headlines and whatnot, those approaches and potentially allow the creation of animal models to discover diseases and math genesis in ways we couldnt do before because we had inadequate model systems. And those models, scientists need to test hypotheses and make new discoveries. Those models have been lacking. They were few and not as good. But now with these new editing tools we have the potential to really improve models and make the models faster. And that will allow experimentation to occur to build that period of knowledge and science that can be misused but can also be used for great things. Senator. Let me say a word about two sides of the continue first. This is obviously not new in human history. Right. Weve got a long track record of people taking advances that improve the way they live and then using them for warfare or other efforts. So you can go back to creation of fire, which enabled people to do a lot they couldnt do before but also enabled them to hurt each other in different ways. And you could take it right through to todays headlines with the extraordinary growth of Information Technology, social media. Now we find that a hostile country has used facebook, twitter, et cetera to try to control our elections. Pretty amazing and unnerving. So were dealing here with a problem that the human race has faced before. As answers have suggested biotechnology revolution is moving not only to different areas but rapidly. Incredibly rapidly. Also beginning to use Information Technology service based. So what are the great potentials . Great potentials, this in some ways you could say this is going to be the century of biotechnology, positively speaking. Things will happen as a result of biotechnology that will cure diseases that are shortening our lives, that will enable us to live better in many ways, a user encrypted sample of the Infectious Disease of pandemic fear. You can imagine a case look, next year is the 100th anniversary of the epidemic. About 1,500 people died from that pandemic. With genetic sequences, jinetic developments you can step in quickly. So thats the bright side. What excites me is anytime youve got two fields that have not over lapped before, thats exciting. Thats as exciting as a reformed scientist that now has the government bureaucrat. I would love to be at the intersection of biology and Computer Science, which is what gene editing represents. To be able to image molecules at the subatomic model, that would be exciting to be a researcher. Biologists that dont understand computer stiens and scientists that dont understand computer biology. There will be greater leaps ahead on the scientific front. Were going to be producing new data, new finds at a rate that policies and findings wont be able to keep up with. If were playing defense on this, defense means were going to have to be better, faster, stronger than any Foreign Government that my be tempted to make future biological weapons the next class of future weapon. I find the governments not good about recognizing a longterm trend of these slow ticking clocks that are eventually going to go off and making sound investments ahead of time to get ahead of them. We know theyve led to vaccines, hundreds of them have been developed or in Development Much more rapidly through the digitization of biology. I was talking to a food expert the other day who was talk about taking rice and it needing less water. With the proliferation of these technologies and access to the data and informational round, how much more vulnerable are we and to what the. I can address one element of that question in the sense that technology is becoming more d democeratized and available. Scientists have the ability to troubleshoot problems in biology that arent just something you find on the internet. You know, theres a certain level of imperical and tas utknowledge that comes with being a scientist. It does temper what youre saying a little bit. On the flip side it is true as these knowledge proliferate that these discoveries made in medicine could be picked up by a bioweapon here in some dark corner to do what of . To really increase the creativity of some individual to some end. I think thats why its tough for us to figure out, whats the top priority . I could imagine bad actors saying i would like to edit your genome nal way thats going to let me coerce you into acting the way that i want. So basically a long ticking clock or a long fuse, bit of tnt, that i know thats going to go to go off thats going to be a strategic impacter. I worry about artificial biology. I worry about taking biological mechanisms that have been evolving for billions of years and being around us and giving us features that will likely never happen unless we get in and influence them and not being able to contain the potential like a leak. When you start mixing the artificial and the real, and i think bilogical machines are working. The. Biological machines. Thats where a lot of research is going into being able to see the basic mechanical mechanisms that make it work. Thats what the nobel prize recently were given about. Were really where our stone age counter parts were. Were trying to find wheels and pulleys but not at the stone level. Were trying to find them at molecular atomic level. Maybe our future engineers have huge components you cant even see. So were back to offense is always going to be easier than defense. So if thats a possibility in the not too far future, it needs some strategic investments. Before we go on, your job is to imagine future wars, right . So when youre thinking about that what does that future war that youre thinking about look like . I may decide not to go into future weapons that i decide too costly or dont have that Technical Research inhouse. I might decide to go down this biological path that may be cheaper, faster. I think youre one step away fixing yourself youre one step away from hufrting yourself. So i worry about that because its a kind of development that would be kind of hard to put your finger on it. I worry about that kind of future. I worry about a future where theres significant human performance, enhancement. Which, again, we will have lots of ethical barriers in the u. S. But other countries wont. And how do you have your operators . One of the great privileges of this job is having our operators. And i go to work every day, but i dont like the idea of them going against the deck thats continuously stacked against them. I think the artificial biology and the biological machines will be a step beyond. But that doesnt mean we shouldnt be worrying about them and investing to deal with the consequences. Senator. Really right now we have a pretty good reason to believe our countries that dont wish us well well syrians we know. So the short run danger here that weve talked about in your own investigations is that nonstate actors who have been very clear terrorists have been very clear they are working on biological warfare capacity probably at a level that is relatively primitive compared to what weve just been talking about, but still capable of doing a lot of damage and taking a while for us to detect. Beyond that i was thinking as i was listening to my colleagues that i spent a fair amount of time on cybersecurity the last four or five years i was in the senate. And what was clear to me thats no surprise to anyone in this room, we were well ahead of our cyberdefensi cyb cyberoffensive capabilities. We were behind in our cyber defensive. A lot of it is cysted by government. Obviously there are other countries including china particularly both commercial and potentially belligerent uses, theyre investing a lot of money in biotechnology. Let me ask you about something that was quite controversial and notable at the time. And this is a piece from the bulletin of the atomic scientists that i pulled this from. When the national of science intelligence James Clapper testified a little more than a year ago about jinetic editing, how jinetic editing became a security threat. National security James Clapper sent shock waves with his assertion and his worldwide threat assessment test from the Senate Armed Services committee. The genome editing had become a global danger. He went so far to include in his reports, weapons of mass destruction section. Said since the discovery of double all the rest. Exceeding that of any other technology in human history. Biotech is a weapon of mass destruction . I think the statement is leaning towards biological weapons or future biological weapons could become the next strategic class of weapon. The way that when Nuclear Weapons were first made, we realized these are very different than a traditional bomb. And whats different about them, is ha ththat this is a tragic w that in many cases you could reverse the effect of. You could pull the trigger and then unpull the trigger. That means there are strategy eck weapons that will have more appeal or likelihood of use. What are you talking about exactly . So if you could edit the genome to put in things that are harmful for the people or person targeted then you can undo those. O youve got the poison and an antidote in a way that a Nuclear Weapon has no antidote. Once you pull the trigger, you have to deal with the consequences and the consequences are dire. Its the reversibility of the strategy eck effe strategic effect that i think will be very challenging for us. Because it will feel like it has the effect of weapons that you cant take back, but it will have that takeback ability. You have to keep up with the science. And to the point earlier, a lot of the Defense Department is welltrained in things that we built in the past century. So how radars work and sensors work and fighters work. But were not pushing people hard in biology or Computer Science. It will be important to detect genome editing. In would be essentially invisible. Im using a laymans term here. To some extent, its the next step, its not really related, but it will be. With the unconventional threats were paci were facing in our time. Were most fearful in many ways not of traditional attacks by planes and battleships, et cetera. But by, you know, enemies that sort of walk up to people at a train station in marseille and knife them or fly planes into the world trade center. It will be essentially invisible. And we have programs now, one called biowatch, our panels conclusion of this, its way beneath what we need to create a system in which we can accurately detect an attack as its going on. Honestly, frank, to go back to what you said, looking at history, thinking about the enormous potential for biotechnology used for bad purposes, its not hard to imagine in the not too distant future for want of a better term, i call a biotechnology arms race, and were not really ready for it yet. Charles as a scientist and one of the perennial issues that comes up is regulation of science and surveillance of breakthrough. There have been discussions about conventions and various ways to do that, theres been huge pushback from the Scientific Community. How do we make sense of this, and what do we need from the perspective of youre watching National Security . I think balance is important. What does that mean . Balance between the concern of accidents, if youre doing experiments that are perhaps, you know, on the edge, while youre studying disease processes or Infectious Diseases. The new Research Done a few years ago with the Avian Influenza really kicked off a lot of these discussions in this regard, called dual research and concern issue. And thats something thats keenkind of flooded through the Scientific Community as a buzz phrase. But there are some things that you might need to do that are an a little risky, but they would enable you to better understand, what makes this virus technically transmissable . How can we develop a better defense against that. I wouldnt claim that i have an answer to that. But, its something that needs to be thought out pretty carefully. Because you dont want to hinder your own defense in the process. Not to make the problem overly dire. The solution to these ills, weve already mentioned, that theres going to be a huge emphasis on making new biotech the next medicine at a gene level and at a small nano level. So i see a lot of hope if the government starts encouraging startups trying to work in this business to work on things like gene monitoring that can be done inexpen selfly by people at home, especially if that same monitoring has a lot of medical applications. So the dual use of the technology is a strength if we have a National Strategy for how to interweave medical research and make sure were not blind on the things were going to need for National Security applications. But the division for most companies in this research is that eventually, this biotech is cheap enough that youre doing it at home on a routine basis. Thats why theres hope to try to detect these kinds of attacks in the future, as long as were projecting it faster than its ill uses. This is a perfect setup to the Blue Ribbon Study Panel that you participated in that had a gathering just yesterday. Yes. And the document, u. S. Not prepared to identify perpetrators of biological crimes, proliferation and warfare. Aside from that, mrs. Lincoln, enjoy the show. Right. So what, you know, having these surveillance models to be able to bring this home, thats a good thing, it thats like using social media to make us safer. We also know theres a flip side to that. So yesterdays session, just part