BMA says scientists should take part in bioterrorism debate
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《英国医生杂志》
The danger that some of the science in the rapidly expanding field of biotechnology may be misused to develop lethal weapons is one of the biggest threats to international security, warned Professor Malcolm Dando, head of peace studies at Bradford University, at the launch of the BMA's latest report on biotechnology and weapons.
The report also says that scientists need to be at the fore-front of the debate on how they police their own communities to reduce the risk of scientific information being misused.
It outlines what it describes as the "alarming gap between the quickening pace of scientific discoveries that could be misused and the desperately slow development of international arms control." It updates an earlier report from the BMA five years ago, published before the attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001.
Professor Dando said that the 1997 convention on chemical weapons had ensured tighter controls in that sector and that the science behind nuclear weapons was "decades old." But the failure to strike an effective agreement on biotechnology—resulting in part from the unwillingness of the United States to sign up to an international treaty in 2001—had left scientific advances wide open to misuse for harm rather than good.
"If you are going to say where is our biggest concern, it is clearly in biotechnology," he said. "The biggest threat remains that we will see the development of state level biological weapons programmes."
He said the US decision meant that rather than having an effective method for monitoring states we now have only a series of annual meetings on set topics. The next, to be held in Geneva in June 2006, will be looking at codes of conduct. It was vitally important that scientists were aware of this discussion and contributed to it, he said.
However, although the United States had pulled out of the international agreement, since 2001 it had introduced various measures to monitor scientific experiments more closely for possible threats to security.(Lynn Eaton)
The report also says that scientists need to be at the fore-front of the debate on how they police their own communities to reduce the risk of scientific information being misused.
It outlines what it describes as the "alarming gap between the quickening pace of scientific discoveries that could be misused and the desperately slow development of international arms control." It updates an earlier report from the BMA five years ago, published before the attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001.
Professor Dando said that the 1997 convention on chemical weapons had ensured tighter controls in that sector and that the science behind nuclear weapons was "decades old." But the failure to strike an effective agreement on biotechnology—resulting in part from the unwillingness of the United States to sign up to an international treaty in 2001—had left scientific advances wide open to misuse for harm rather than good.
"If you are going to say where is our biggest concern, it is clearly in biotechnology," he said. "The biggest threat remains that we will see the development of state level biological weapons programmes."
He said the US decision meant that rather than having an effective method for monitoring states we now have only a series of annual meetings on set topics. The next, to be held in Geneva in June 2006, will be looking at codes of conduct. It was vitally important that scientists were aware of this discussion and contributed to it, he said.
However, although the United States had pulled out of the international agreement, since 2001 it had introduced various measures to monitor scientific experiments more closely for possible threats to security.(Lynn Eaton)