Honorable senator joe lieberman, who were thrilled to get back on campus, and dr. William roper. So, over to you guys. Thank you, frank. [applause] good morning earning. I thought maybe we would we would do before we dive into the topic itself is to connect each of you with a topic area in your areas of interest and focus. Charles, youre a bioscientist at the cia. What else can you tell us about what you do daily . Well, im a scientist who explains Scientific Concepts and technology to nonscientists. Dont actually practice science in a lab anymore but i use my skills and background to write and communicate to poll so policymakerred be the implication. Whiff a focus on National Security my area is biological weapons and my background is in microbiology. Senator lieberman we know you from your many incarnations, campaigns, but you had throughout your career a very serious focus on National Security, and now well talk about this youre also focused on biological crimes and terrorism. Tell us more about that. Thank you. Im thinking, charles said he was teaching science to nonscientist. When i went to college there was still a science requirement but they had a special trek of science for nonscience majors. I did one of those, too. Called Something Like physics for the intimidated. Yeah. I took a course, half the year was astronomy, have geology and we called it rockses and stars or stars and rocks. Anyway, so, for the last three years, ive been privileged to cochair with former Homeland Security secretary tom ridge, a blue ribbon study panel, bipartisan, on biodefense. This was not created by the executive or congressional branches of our government. It sprang up because of concerned individuals, particular lay think tank called the hudson institute, and i asked tom and me to chair it, and while i was happy to do it because ive been involved in national and Homeland Security, i always have worried about the threat of both bioterrorist attacks but also the very related and some senses similar risk of Infectious Disease pandemics. So for the last three years with hey done a series of reports and unfortunately the conclusion is that the threat of both bioterrorist attack and Infectious Disease epidemics is real and growing, and our government is not organized to protect us adequately from it. Well talk about that. I was trying to find the most interesting profile of you, and i think i did. From fox news, not too long ago. It is ropers resume reeds a like a character back story from the big bang theory. Graduated summa cum laude from georgia tech with received a president ial commendation for founding and directing a tutoring program that served 400 schools and is a published poet and essayist, Second Degree in black belt, taekwondo and performed in a chamber choir. An interesting today that secretary of defense tells the world what you do because for a long time, the job that i do in the Defense Department was not something we could talk about publicly. So id be very interested to discuss that with you today, especially as it applies to biology. Its very interesting, when you brought out from behind the door and there is no paper trail about you online and you get a news article chat puts together your 18yearold college self because there is a description with your 38yearold modern self so very much a frankensteining of the two worlds. My job in the pentagon is very simple. To get the Department Ready for the next war. Been a lot of special efforts of the past decade to deal with terrorism and thats not going away, but we havent done a lot of thinking about how to get a military that has been relatively predictable but unstoppable of the last 25 years, how to get it ready to deal with modern competition, modern warfare, and biocomes into that very strongly because it is a new kid on the block. It is not something that has been at this level of maturity with this level of investment from private sector, for medical research, that could create new Strategic Effects for Foreign Governments, foreign countries, that dont have the same ethic standards we have. So, my fear in bio well be playing defense and the rest of the world may choose to play offense, and defense is always harder. Well have to start earlier. Lets dive in. The issue of the bio threat really reflects a twosided coin. In many cases it is a direct result of the opportunities, the breakthroughs that come from biotechnology and bio discovery. I just very quickly like to ask eachoff you, when you think about Bio Technology, where do you see the greatest breakthroughs . Before we go to perils im interested in what you see as the opportunities. I think speaking broadly, if we look at the news, we see the headlines, those approaches enable the creation of a lot of animal models to study diseases and pathogenis in ways we wouldnt do because because we had inadequate model systems. Thaw need models to test hypotheses and make discoveries. Those model are looking. Now weapon the genome ed digit tool wes have the editing toll wes have the able to make the models and make the model steps faster, and that will enable the experimentation to occur to build that pyramid of knowledge in science that can be misused but can also be used for great things. Senator. Let me say word about the twosides of the coin first. This is obviously not new in human history. We have long track record of people taking advances that improve the way they live and then using them for warfare or some other adverse you can go back to the creation of fire, which enabled people to do a lot they couldnt do before and also enabled them to hurt each other in different ways and you can take it right through to todays headlines with the extraordinary growth of information technology, social media, now we find that hostile country has used facebook, twitter, et cetera to try to control our election. Amazing. And unnerving. Were dealing here with a problem that the human race has faced before, but as answers have suggested, Bio Technology revolution is moving not only to different areas but rapidly, incredibly rapidly, also beginning to use information technology, cyber space. So what are the really great potentials . Great potentials this in some ways you could say this is going to be the century of Bio Technology. Positively speaking. Things will happen as a result of Bio Technology that will cure diseases that are shortening our lives, that will enable us to live better. A quick example of the ineffect shoes disease pandemic fear. You can next year is the 100th anniversary of the influenza epidemic in 1918. Between 50 million and 100 Million People died nat epidemic, pandemic, and we werent anywhere near as globalized. So now Bio Technology offers a promise, just as was said through genomic, sequencing, et cetera, you can step in quickly to try to figure out a medical countermeasure. Thats the bright side of all this and its quite bright. Well, what excites me is that anytime you have two fields that have not overlapped before, that is exciting. Thats just exciting as a reformed scientist that now has to be a government bureaucrat. Id love to be be sir section of biology and Computer Science ask is id live to be the ability to image molecules at the submolecule level, atomic level. That would be exciting to be a researcher and youll have people working together that havent worked together. Biologists who dont understand computer scientists and computer scientists who dont understand biology. It will accelerate research, greater leaps ahead on the scientific front. The scary side is we approximately be producing data, new results, new technology, new findings, at rate that policy and governmented wont be able to keep up with. If were primarily playing defense on this and the u. S. Will be have to be better, faster, stronger, than any Foreign Government that may be tempted to make modern u biological weapons the next type of strategic weapon. I worry the u. S. Got is not good at recognizing a longterm trend, slowticking clocks that will go off and making sound investments to get ahead of them. So if we think about the Bio Technology breakthroughs they have led to vaccines, hundreds of them, that have the been developed or in development through the digitization of tech no talked about a food biologist talking bat gene from a camel and putting into it rice so it needs less water. A little humpy rice. But these same technologies and breakthroughs are more available to more people as all the effort is going on. I want to ask you, as we turn to threatside of this, would the proliferation of technology and access to data and information around them, how much more vulnerable are we and to what . I can address one element of that question in the sense that, while technology is becoming more democratized or available, what you have to marry up 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, and scientist have the ability to troubleshoot problems in biology that arent just something you find on the internet. Theres certain level of empirical tacit knowledge that comes with being a scientist that tempers what you say. As the knowledge and approaches proliferate, discoveries made in medicine could be picked up by a bioweaponeer in a small corner. To do what . To do anything limited by the creativity of the individual who is applying to some end. Whats a scenario. I worry bat variety of things to worry about. Thats why its tough are nows to pull the trigger, whats the top priority. Could imagine bad actors in the future saying i would like to edit your genome. Not in a way that will do anything today but going to let me coerce you into acting the way i want. So basically a long ticking clock, a long fuse of tnt that i know is going to go off, going to be a huge psychological impact and that would be a strategic class of weapon in my opinion. I worry about artificial biology. I worry about taking biological mechanisms involved for billions ofyearold that are welladapted to live in the world around us and giving them features that would likely never happen unless we get in and influence them and not being able to contain a potential leak or contamination. The whole idea how to do research will change when you start mixing the artificial and real. And biological machines are interesting. Machines. Thats where a lot of recent research is going in trying to be able to see the basic mechanical mechanisms that make molecules work. Thats what the recent nobel prizes were given about. So, were really where our stone age counterparts were. Were trying to find a wheel and levers and pull questions put not at the scone level. Were trying to find them at the mow electricar or atomic level and once were able to engineer with those, maybe future militaries have huge components you cant see. Offense is better than defense and if thats possibility in the future, it needs some strategic investment. Before we go on, your job is to imagine the future wars. Right . So when youre thinking about that, what does that future war that youre thinking about look like . I think let me play what a foreign country, not the u. S. , could do. I might decide as opposed to going into Nuclear Weapons which i may decide are too difficult to make or could costly or dont have the technical reach sat inhouse, might decide to go down the biological path. It may be cheaper, faster, and i could always couch it under the auspices of medical research. One step airplane from fixing yourself, one step away from hurting yourself. Worry about that. Its the kind of development that would be hard to put your finger on and say that is purely for malpurposes. There would always be the flip side, as the senator teed up. I worry about that kind of future. I worry about a future where there is significant Human Performance enhancement, which, again, well have lots of ethical barriers in the u. S. , but other countries wont. And how do we have our operators, as awesome that they are a great privilege of this job is getting to work with operators and why guy to work every day, despite all of the things to worry about. But i dont like the idea of them going against the deck that is continually stacked against them because of enhancements. I think those are the first areas youll see people think are appealing. The artificial biology and the biological machines will be a step beyond. That doesnt mean we shouldnt worry about them and invest to deal with the consequences. Senator. Just to right now we have a pretty good reason to believe that our countries that dont wish us well have biological warfare capacity. You could name the russians, iranians, north koreans, syrians. So, the short run danger here that we have talked about in our own investigations is that and nonstate actors who have been very clear terrorists. Terrorists been very clear theyre working on biological warfare capacity. Probably at a level that is relatively primitive compared to what we have 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 of those as i was listening to my colleagues, spent a fair amount on Cyber Security when i was in the that and what is clear to me is that theres no surprise to anybody in this room we were way ahead in our offensive cyber capacity. Way behind in our defensive capacities and i think thats where we are now in terms of the misuse of biology biotechnology. We invest more in biotechnology than any country, a lot of it in the private sector but a lot assisted by the government. We dont invest hardly anything in the coordinated defense to the misuse of biotechnology and other countries, including china, both for commercial and potentially bell ledge bill lidge rant uses. When the director of national intelligence, james clapper, testified a year ago, little more than a year ago, about general genetic ed sitting, he sent shock waifs through the National SecurityBiotechnology Community with his assertion of his worldwide threat assessment testimony in the Senate Armed Services economy use. That jean know editing had become a global danger went to far as to include not the reports of weapons of malls destruction section. Said that since the dover of double helix, biotechnology has made progress exceeding that of arguably any other technology in human history. Bio tech 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 weapons. The way when Nuclear Weapons were made, we realized thats are different from a conventional bomb. What itself different and what will we airto think about laws to govern thank you do this is a strategic weapon you could reverse the effect of but you could pull the trigger and then unpull the trigger, and i think that means that there are strategic weapons that will have more appeal or more likelihood of use. What are you talking about. If you can edit a genome to put in thing that are harmful for the person or people who are targeted, no theory you can undo those. You have the poison and the ant dote in the way a Nuclear Weapon has no ante dote. You have to deal with the consequences and theyre dire. So the scalability. The tailor ability, the reversibility of the strategic effect that will be difficult and challenging for us because it will feel like it has the effect of weapons that you cant take back but it will have that take back ability and that means well need to think hard what that means for warfare, and we are, but to think hard you have to keep up with the science, and to the point earlier, a lot of the Defense Department is welltrained in things we built in the past century. So how radars work and sensors and stealth and submarines but not pushing people in hard in biology or Computer Science. You can detect these things. It will be much more difficult, right to dedetect genome editing that can create a highly virulent pathogen. Could be essentially invisible. Im using a laymans term here, to some extent its just the next step. Not really related but will be with the unconventional threats were facing in our time. Were most fearful in many ways not of traditional attacks by planes and battleships, et cetera, but by enemies that sort of walk up to people at a train station and knife them or fly plains into the world trade center, et cetera. This will be terrifying because it will be essentially invisible and we have some programs now one called bio watch. Our panels conclusion is 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, just looking at history, thinking about the enormous potential for biotechnology use for bad purposes, its not hard to imagine the not too distant future a, for want 0 of of a better term i call a Bio Technology arms race, and were not really ready for it yet. Charles, as a scientist, one of the perennial issues that comes up is regulation of science, and surveillance of breakthrough. And there have been discussions about conventions and various ways to do that. Theres been a huge pushback from the Scientific Community. How do we make sense of this . And what do we need from the perspective of your watch in National Security . I think balance is important. What does that mean . The balance between the concern of accidents, if youre doing experiments that are perhaps on the edge while youre studying disease processes or Infectious Disease in particular, the new res