We have an Awesome Group to shed light on these issues. At georgeby my friend washington university. Dr. Charles, the honorable Joe Lieberman and dr. William roper. Thank you. [applause] good morning, everyone. We are delighted to be here. It is one that we are all looking forward to. I thought what we would do before we actually dive into the topic is to connect each of you with the topic area. Charles, you are a scientist. What can you tell us about what you do on a daily basis . I am a site explains scientist who science and technology to nonscientists. Background to keen minute kate communicate. My area is in biological weapons. My background is in for all edgy and microbiology. And microbiology. Throughout your career, you have had a focus on National Security. Focused on biological crimes and terrorism. Tell us a little more about that. Teaching science to nonscientists, when i went to college, there was no science requirement. There was science for nonscience majors. One was called physics for the intimidated. Astronomy,ar was have to knowledge he half geology. Years, i havehree been privileged to coach with secretary tom ridge a study panel on bio defense. Bys was not created executive or congressional branches of our government. Because ofp concerned individuals. I asked tom to chair it. Do it because ive been involved in homeland security. The threat of bioterror attacks. Ofre is a similar risk pandemic disease. We have done a series of reports. Unfortunately, the conclusion is that the threat of higher terrorist attack and infectious is real andemics growing. Our government is not organized to protect us adequately from it. We will talk about all that. I was trying to find the most interesting profile of you, and i think i did from fox news. Character back story from big bang theory. A president ial commendation for founding a tutoring program. He is a published poet and essayist. He is a third degree black belt. Interesting. The secretary of defense tells what you do. The job i did in the Defense Department was not something we could talk about publicly. I would be very interested to discuss that with you as it applies to biology. You are brought out behind the door and there is no paper trail about you online and you get a news article that pieces. Ogether your college stuff very much a frankenstein of the two worlds. My job is very simple. It is to get the Department Ready for the next war. A lot of the efforts over the past decade to deal with terrorism is not going away. We have done a lot of thinking about how to get the military ready to deal with modern competition and modern warfare. Block. New kid on the it is not something that has been at this level of maturity with this level of investment from the private sector for medical research that could create new Strategic Effects for Foreign Government, Foreign Countries that do not have the same ethics standards that we do. My fear is that we will be playing defense while the rest of the world may choose to play offense. Defense is always harder. The issue of the bio threat is a twosided coin. It is a direct result of the opportunities and breakthroughs that come from biotechnology and bio discovery. I would like to quickly ask each of you, when you think about biotechnology, where you see the greatest risk . What do you see as the opportunity . Speaking broadly, when you look at the news and see the headlines, those approaches potentially enable animal models to study diseases in ways we could not do before because we had inadequate model systems. , we need models to test hypotheses and make new discoveries. They have been lacking. They were few, but they were not as good. Now we have the potential to really improve our ability to make the model systems faster. That will enable the experimentation to occur to build the pyramid of knowledge and science that can be misused or used for great things. Worried about the two sides of the coin, it is not new in human history. We have a long track record of advantage and using them for warfare. You can go back to the creation of fire. It has enabled people to do a lot that they were not able to do before. Through toe it right todays headlines with the extraordinary wealth of information. Social media now we find that half the country has used facebook, twitter, etc. To try to control our elections. It is unnerving. We are dealing with a problem that the human race has faced before. Suggested,have biotechnology revolution is moving to different areas and rapidly come incredibly rapidly. To useeginning information technology, cyberspace. Potential . Great 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, they will enable us to live better in many ways. Diseasenfectious theories, imagine a case. Next year is the hundreds anniversary of the influenza epidemic of 1918. Between 50 and 100 Million People died in that pandemic. We were not nearly as globalized. You can step in quickly and figure out a medical countermeasure. It is quite brilliant. What excites me is that anytime you have two fields that have not overlapped before, that is exciting. It now has the government your cats i would love to be at the intersection of biology and computer technology. I would love to be at the intersection of biology and the design base. Molecules at image the seven molecule level. That would be exciting to be a researcher. You will have people working together that have not worked together before. Who do notientists understand biology. That is exciting. Accelerate. Wait research. The scary side, it will be producing new data, new findings at a rate that policy and governments will not be able to keep up with. If we are playing primarily defense on this, defense means we will have to be better, faster, stronger than any Foreign Government that might be tempted to make modern the nextl weapons class of strategic weapon. I worry. I find the u. S. Government is not good about recognizing the longterm trend of these slow ticking clocks that will eventually go off and making sound investments to get ahead of them. We know that they have led to vaccines that have been in development. I was talking to an expert the other day talking about taking a and putting itel into a so it leads needs less water. What i want to ask you, will the proliferation of these technologies and access to the data and information around them how much more vulnerable are we and to what . I can address that question in the sense that while technology is becoming more democratized, what you have to marry off with that is the Knowledge Base and skill set to use the technology in a way that you want to use it to achieve some outcome. Not just to have the ability to troubleshoot problems that are not just something you can find on the internet. It tempers what you are saying a little bit. Approachesthat as it discoveries could be picked bioengineer. Really by the creativity of the individual applying. Variety of things to worry about. Priority . E top that actorsmagine saying i would like to edit your genome in a way that will let acting theyou into way that i want. Me colors you into acting the way that i want. You into acting the way that i want. Features that would likely never happen unless we get in and influence them. Not being able to contain the potential for contamination. The way to do research will change when you start mixing the artificial and real. Biological machines are interesting. It is where a lot of recent research is going. He basic mechanical mechanism aware. Really we are trying to find the wheel and levers and pulleys, but not at the stone level. We are trying to find them at the molecular and atomic level. They had huge components that you cannot even see. Wille back to office always be easier than defense. If that is a possibility in the not too far future, then we need strategic investment so we are not caught off guard. Your job is to imagine future wars. When you are thinking about that, what does that future war that you are thinking about look like . Let me play what a foreign country i might decide, as going into Nuclear Weapons, which are too difficult or too costly, that i do not have that Technical Research and house. I might decide to go down the biological path. It might be cheaper and faster. You are one step away. By fixing yourself, youre one step away from hurting yourself. That a kind of development is hard to put your finger on it and say that is purely for mal purposes. I worry about that kind of future. I worry about the future where there is significant Human Performance enhancement. We will have lots of ethical barriers. How to we have our operators, as i go to work today i do not like the idea deckem going against a that is continually stacked against them because of enhancements. Biologythe artificial and the biological machines will be a step beyond. But does not mean we should not be worrying about them. Now, we have a good reason to believe there are countries that do not wish us they have biological warfare capacities. The russians, iranians, syrians. The shortterm danger we talked investigations, have beente actors very clear that they are working on biological warfare capacity. Probably at a level that is relatively primitive, compared to what we have been talking about. Still capable of doing a lot of while for usking a to detect. Beyond that, i was thinking about those this name. I spent a fair amount of time on Cyber Security the last five years i was in the senate. What was clear to me, we were offensive cyber capacity. We were way behind in our defensive capacities. Where we are now in terms of the misuse of biotechnology, we still invest more in biotechnology than any other country. A lot of it is in the private sector. Anything invest hardly in the coordinated defense for the misuse of biotechnology. China is investing a lot of money in biotechnology. Let me ask you about something that was quite controversial at the time. This is a piece from the bolton. Bulletin. He testified a little more than about genetic editing. It became a National Security threat. James clapper sent shockwaves to the National Security Biotechnology Community with his worldwide threat assessment. The genome editing had become a global danger. He went as far as to include it in the mast district weapons of mass destruction segment. Biotech is in weapon a weapon of mass disruption. Future biological weapons could become the next strategic class of weapons. We Nuclear Weapons were made, we realized these are different than a conventional bomb. What is different about them and will be scary to think about policies and laws in government, is that this is a strategic weaponry could reverse the effect. You could pull the trigger and l theon pool unpul trigger. Genome told edit the ,ut in things that are harmful then in theory, you could undo those. In a way that a Nuclear Weapon does not have an antidote, those consequences are dire. It is the reversibility that will be very difficult and challenging for us. It will feel like it has the effect of weapons that you cannot take back, but it will have that take back ability. We will have to think hard about what that means for warfare. You have to keep up the science. With the science. I do not think we are pushing people hard in biology. Youre not pushing people hard in computer science. These can take detect things. It will be easier to detect. It would be virtually invisible. It is the next step. The unconventional threats that we are facing in our time. We are focused on enemies that walk up the people at a train. Tation and knife them becausel be terrifying it will be essentially invisible. We have some programs. It is way beneath what we need. It is a creative system where we can accurately detect and attack as it is going on. To what you said, it is looking at history and thinking about the enormous potential for biotechnology and if it is for bad purposes. It is not hard to imagine the. Ot too distant future i call it a biotechnology arms race. We are not really ready for it yet. One of the perennial issues that comes up is regulation of science. Breakthrough. F there have been discussions about ways to do that. There has been huge pushback from the scientific community. How do we make sense of this and what we need from the perspective of National Security . Between the concern of actions, if you are doing experiments that are on the edge while studying infectious disease. Flu research was done a few years ago with the avian influenza. It kicked off a lot of dualssions about the research. That has flooded through the scientific community. There are real concerns there. There are some that you might have to do that are a little risky. What makes this virus . How can we create a better prevention against that . It is a challenge. I would not claim i haveit is ty carefully. Pro to make the problem overly dire. There will be a huge emphasis on making new biotech the next medicine at the gene level. I see a lot of hope if the government starts encouraging and working in this business to work on gene monitoring, which can be done inexpensively by people at home. Of the technology is a strength, if we have a National Strategy for how to interweave medical research to make sure we are not blind on the things we will need for National Security applications. Eventually, this biotech is cheap enough that you are doing it at home on a routine basis. That is why there is hope for being able to detect these kinds of attacks in the future. Perfect setup. The blueribbon study panel that you anticipated and had a gathering yesterday. Here was a document having these surveillance models is a good thing. It is like using social media. What does your study panel it is part of our ongoing work. Have pretty good reason to believe a bioterrorist attack has occurred. It is important for the government to be able to figure out. E want to treat people out to the best of your ability to did it who did it. What else they are planning to do. One of the members of our panel is a former prosecutor and approached this from a criminal standpoint. How will you deter it from happening again . Questions willnt be, in the case of a bioterrorist attack, can you gather enough information to tell the National Command authority who did this and enable the president to decide how to respond . Are we prepared for this . No. We have a certain capacity. It is not only the intelligence community. Cia part sponsored in a way. This is a world of science. Honestly, once again, we will herea lot of intelligence that will be critical. Without it, we will not be able to rapidly it will not be be intot we need to hostile parties labs come the businesses. We have to be gathering information so that we know who has taken the turn from good biotechnology to bed. Bad. We had some evidence analyzed that might be microbiological and nature. The way you analyze that to contribute to an attribution might be fraught with scientific challenges that have not been answered yet because people have not thought about that particular problem said. Grants are biology focused. That is one element. Onlyld caution it is not the analysis of microbiology that would give you attribution. It is a larger picture of other pieces with information that you can think of a traditional who done it kind of problem. Other intelligence sources you can rely on. You have the analysis of the physical evidence. All those things contribute to that puzzle. In the area of scientific challenges, there are a lot of questions unanswered. What does comparison of viral sequences by you buy you . Can you make comparisons that are meaningful that lead to a trail back to a potential perpetrator . I totally agree, which is why i ended up talking about the importance of intelligence, which is a way to have an Early Warning or some base of information in the case of an attack where you can look at potential sources. I am going to come to your question and a couple minutes. The key is, what do we incentivize in the government . This research will have rod funding from venture capitalists because there will be huge payback in medicine. It will continue to have it. It will be global. It will be done by corporations. Money being spent is not government money. It is to create lanes and channels were outside money flows faster and gets results earlier. My opinion is we should be going all in on early detection. For gene editing, artificial biology, and biological machines. We will not be able to build a wall to keep it out. That is probably a deadend before you begin. We saw the trend happened in the last century when castor cancer with a death sentence. Now it is survivable. Ofshifted our capability early detection. We need to incentivize the investments in the industry. We need cultural awareness for what this means. That means a government that is on the signsarter and implications of what we have been talking about. This is a big priority for me this year. Every year i take on something t is new and allows us this is an area where i am excited when i think about personal application in terms of living longer and better. I worry. You are, inaying real time, raising this as a priority at the department of defense. My goal is to get department , not necessarily getting the details of the science, but telling them what the implication is. We need to make investments, which is significant. It is about 70 billion per year. Resources. Shift you mentioned this. Oft are the actual realities reallife xmen . These augmented, generically altered genetically altered super soldiers . Is that something that you think about . Is that real . I had to think about it because someone in the audience humanif we were making a i could swim as fast as a sharp shark. Shark onace a real shark week. That is hard for me to see. Ot in my timeframe thinking about the next war. I can think about modifications that can make people more alert, to have better Attention Spans to deal with more data that avoid the need for rest immediately, to give People Better stamina. , to go out approved in the battlefield for the u. S. , there is a mountain of law and policy makers that have to be approved. ,f you want to change the mre that is harder than changing a major weapons system. Againstill do that countries that do not have this downy, it might be pulling red tape, it scares me the most because i do not like when the slope of development is very different between us and the rest of the world. It probably will be in biology for the foreseeable future. If you look at where we are now, we are at the level of pharmaceutical intervention. That is enabled by our understanding of processes. The genome editing tools to study various things and animals that we cannot ethically do experiments like that on human, we will learn more. The actual, genetically engineered individual is farfetched. If you look at the xmen characters i was a comic book nerd. Like storm, who control the weather, there is not a biological corollary for that. Something like wolverine, adamantine clause aside, he has fast food healing. The root healing process is biological. Healing process is biological. Understanding that process will enable better advances to promote wound healing, maybe in severe burn cases. More than the superpowered super soldier. I see a question over here. Go ahead. We will get as many as we can. Appreciate the corollaries to government the fantasies and information technology. A study of 10 years looking at the impediments, we seem to have not been able to overcome these impediments and bureaucracy, the red tape. If we do not fix that, will the same problems impede our progress in commercial innovations in biotechnology . It will, for sure. One of the things that we found in our study of the current state of by a defense in the isrican government it disorganized. The government itself cannot tell you how much we are spending every year on by a defense. There is no unified budget. We had to go to the university of pittsburgh to give us an estimate. Part of what distinguishes us is valuesto play rules and apply rules and values to development. We will have the biological capability not to produce xmen or women, but the move in that direction. It is inevitable. Betweenridging the gaps organic and inorganic material. Inevitably, some country will do it. The other side of a rulebased society like ours, we get in the way of each other and get in the way of achieving our goals. We saw that in the olympics. We see the collision of rules. Another question from the floor. My question has to do with the food change is very sensitive aspect for the daily lives in any country. Fdaet, i do not see the doing more rigorous control, particularly with water and vegetables, which are being imported by china. Know what kind of fertilizer they use. Couldk this biohazard come easily in the food change. That is interesting. If we cannot make the fundamental sensing unit of biological change, whether modification or artificial featuring. If we cannot make it cheap enough to make an attachment to your smartphone, we will be vulnerable. This is something that will hit all of us. That sameate thing is cheapness is what the community wants. They want you to be able to consume this new science. What is really needed is National Strategy to basically make that Consumer Investment improved our lives but not leave us with gaps in National Security. The government has not done nearly enough. We are not very good at this kind of strategy. Grand not good at strategies. This technology will force us to have one. To make sure you do not get any sleep tonight. This is another area that we have looked at. Bioterrorist attacks on our food supply. We are looking at the introduction of pathogens, synthetic pathogens into poultry in america. That often crosses over into and into the agricultural industry. You start to get into raising Safety Standards on food coming and water area and screaming. Bout globalization it is a real concern. I must say i am both surprised and grateful that we have not byfered a biological attack terrorists. When you think about it, it is not easy, but it is relatively less daunting than other kinds of attacks they could carry out. I worry about things like defending the food supply. More about attacking the genome of corn or things that, without withinere is no economy any country. These are the things that can be attacked. I think it was alluded to before. Science,nd computer there then becomes the possibility of hacking into the biology. Distorting it to our great harm. You can think about a lot of ways that could happen personally and more broadly, in terms of good supply. One of the chief means we use is sequencing technology. The commercial drivers have pushed that for faster, better, and cheaper. You have an attachment on your smart phone that can perform those kinds of activities, if the drivers continue, that technology would become more diffuse and available to agriculture inspectors who can screen things, looking for things out of your the ordinary. Another question over here. The microphone is on its way. As someone who is not really a scientist, my question is more on the strategy part. Continue toers invest in biotechnology and it becomes part of the arsenal of most major powers, have you see it being used strategically . Do you see it being used as Nuclear Weapons, as a deterrent . Or will it be used covertly . Or do you see major powers using this technology openly to harm other people . I can address that a little bit and how you might want to think about it. There are a set of questions you might want to ask. If an adversary wants to pursue biological weapons to add to their military toolbox come what might they want to do with it . Something that would provide an advantage in a scenario. That is one way to approach it area if you do that, you start to narrow your field of the possible. Bio threats are potential eliminated limited by the creativity. It is predicting based on where the science is going. I predict there will be a class of biological weapon or capability in the future that will designate the strategic nature. We will work on policies and strategies to deter it so that they are never used. How to draw that line will be the difficult thing. It is easy to draw for Nuclear Weapons. It is hard to drive draw for cyber and it will be hard to draw for biological. It will be in the conventional class that will be defined as being ok. We are almost out of time. A fascinating and scary conversation. I would like to ask you to leave us with a look ahead. What do you feel most needs to be happening within the Intelligence Committee and the government . If we are going to see ourselves prepare for these frightening eventualities. It, how doe look at you stay current on these technologies . Part of that involves our ability as scientists to interact with academic scientist on the cutting edge of these things. They have things that concern them. We might not have thought about that. Heidi make those connections happen how do you make those connections happen . We need cheap, scalable the tension that can be pushed out to individuals. Word created last word. I would say we need to get our act organized. Anybodyt think of better. It could create a position at the National Security council to organize created intelligence in this area, to continue to create a positive climate for private Sector Investment in biotechnology. The other thing i say at the strategic level is that there is now a biological weapons convention. People argue that it has not worked very well, but it sets a standard. It has worked for some. The question is, does the cover biotechnology weapons . To me, it is a biological weapon. I think it would be a constructive move if the u. S. Would open discussion about more specifically the threat of biotechnology weaponization through the bio Weapon Convention and put it on the screen for civilized society. I think policies are always behind the times. We need to start having policies that we are updated more theyently, because when are made 50 years earlier, Technology Allows capabilities that could not be imagined in decades before. That is not just true in biology, but other fields of science. What we experienced among other things was a failure of imagination. This is an area where we must not have a failure of imagination. Thank you very much for the conversation. 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