Bioterror Brain Drain Revisited

Two days ago more than 750 scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners, signed a petition to NIH protesting the priorities of the nation’s war on bioterrorism. They decried the fact that grants for research on anthrax and five other potential bioterror agents have increased fifteenfold since 2001 despite the fact that almost no one gets sick from these diseases. Meanwhile, grants to study feared pathogens like drug resistant tuberculosis and malaria, which kill millions around the globe every year, have decreased 27 percent from their already inadequate levels.

I wrote about this issue in October 2003 in The American Prospect (see “Bioterror Brain Drain”). So I immediately emailed Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University microbiologist who helped organize the petition, to congratulate him. He wrote back saying he had read my article and agreed with it.

Throughout the 20th century, scientists played a key role in building opposition to the misuse of science and technology. One need only recall that many leading physicists turned against the Cold War nuclear arms race. It’s good to see this tradition reasserting itself in the 21st century in fields like global warming and infectious disease research.