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 agen