India-United States Cooperation on Science and Technology for Countering Terrorism: Summary of a Workshop by Rita Guenther

Author:Rita Guenther
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The National Academies Press
Published: 2015-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

DISCUSSION

The discussion began with a question regarding how to deal with a combination of open information and rogue labs. Franz stated that because this is difficult, scientists must work together. Further, it is more likely that there would be a rogue individual than there would be a rogue lab because labs are hard to isolate internationally.

Norman Augustine then asked a question of Bansal about whether medical workers who are likely to come in contact with diseases during an epidemic should be required to be vaccinated in advance against known threats, for example, smallpox. Or is the risk of vaccination on such a large scale greater than the benefit to be gained? Bansal replied that in India officials try to vaccinate some groups of first responders, for example, the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and the Delhi police, but one has to weigh the benefits against the risks. There are considerably high risks associated with the anthrax vaccine, but fewer risks are associated with the polio vaccine, which is also less likely to be a bio-terror agent. Clearly, one has to weigh the costs and benefits, even for the vaccinations against H1N1.

A workshop participant asked Franz about the screening of scientists and ethical issues: For scientists working in critical labs, what concrete steps should be taken to avoid an incident such as the anthrax attacks, where a scientist may do something mischievous?

Franz began first by stating that he cannot promise that any actions will work. He could not guarantee that there would not be an insider threat in his laboratory. However, one can reduce the likelihood through the leadership and cultural approaches he discussed. If the director of a laboratory and everyone in that lab, no matter their rank, knows they can walk in and talk to the director if they want to, that culture of openness will likely help. The director may reinforce that there may be situations in which he or she needs to use the chain of command, but there might be times when someone is so troubled that the person does not want to talk to someone in that chain. These sound like fairly soft and squishy solutions, and they are very hard to scale. If we have 10 army labs in the United States and we wanted to do this in every lab, it would probably be impossible. But openness, transparency, focus on quality, support, and the people at the bench are more important. Seemingly small actions by the director, like asking his assistant to block out time every week for him to just go walk around the labs and talk to people, are critical. Scientists love to share their results. By listening and responding, Franz believes a healthier culture is built, and there is a greater chance of finding an outlier and dealing with that outlier. Franz added that when he was at the lab, background checks were not performed, but after the anthrax letters, FBI background checks have been conducted on everyone. The participant followed up by asking if there are objective methods that can be developed for background checks.

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