"Here we report the results of a collaboration involving 20 groups from the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany and China to produce a draft sequence of the human genome. The sequence was produced over a relatively short period, with coverage rising from about 10% to more than 90% over roughly fifteen months. "
In its lead article the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium makes the prediction that the sequencing of the full genome will be only a matter of time, involving routine labor without requiring the development of any new technologies:
" Already about one billion bases are in final form and the task of bringing the vast majority of the sequences to this standard is straightforward and should proceed rapidly ."
The Human Genome Project was completed in April 2003.
Fortunately or otherwise, depending on one's scientific/political orientation, this scientific milestone has come in the wake of a number of other events of historical importance : the assumption of power of the Bush/Cheney regime in January, 2001 ; the tragedy of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001; the Iraq War; and the creation of a gigantic Biodefense infrastructure.
"The threats of genetic bioterrorism could not have emerged at a worse or better time from the perspective of scientific knowledge. A little more than a year before the [ September 11th ] attacks , in June 2000, President Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair jointly announced in a White House ceremony that the rough draft of the human genome had been sequenced." ( Eric M. Meslin , from In The Wake of Terror: Medicine and Morality in a Time of Crisis ; MIT Press, 2003, pg. 201 )
Fueled by the fabulous sums that would soon be disbursed in the name of Biodefense, and under the camouflage of a shrill chorus intoning, with mounting hysteria, the urgency of protecting the nation from bioterrorism, we have been witnessing an exponential expansion, at all levels, of the traditional corruption connecting the Federal government, research agencies such as the NIH, NIAID and FDA, the pharmaceutical industry, the military, the universities and the ever-pious scientific establishment endlessly whining for its megabucks.
Not that there is anything happening at the present time that was not already going on in the Clinton era, or in all previous administrations going back to World War II. What's different today is the crudeness of the new-fangled rhetoric, the unique opportunities that have opened up for invoking the presence of a dire external threat, and the sheer amount of money involved.
In setting out to research the biotech universe, I'd had no idea of how quickly I would uncover such criminality of such magnitude. A tiny publication like Ferment can not hope to do justice to this subject. Ferment's editor hasn't got the background, contacts or resources to do a fully professional job as an investigative reporter. Nor does Ferment have the staff or funding of The LA Times, Mother Jones, The Nation, 60 Minutes, the Waxman Committee or the Union of Concerned Scientists, which have been doing exemplary work in this area.
We will consider ourselves lucky if we manages to delineate the broad outlines of biotech's ghoulish goulash. This may not consist of more than passing along indications as to where to look for more extensive revelations.
All funding to agencies involved in conservation, tracking of environmental pollution or renewable energy alternatives was savagely curtailed: 7% off the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, 8% from the US Geological Survey, ( dooming the important work being done by the Toxic Substances Hydrology and National Water-Quality Assessment Programs ) . The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was cut by 4%. Renewable energy research was slashed a staggering 36%. Several of these agencies were able to recoup some of their funding through earmarked amendments to Congressional bills, but most of the losses were unrecoverable and keenly felt. With its fondness for grand and meaningless gestures, Bush/Cheney promised to give the NSF $200 million a year for improving math and physics education, money that never arrived.
It would be unfair to assert that Bush/ Cheney (a Siamese twin with two faces and one brain between them.) was interested only in rewarding its allies in the pharmaceutical industry through providing billions for NIH-funded research of which they are the principal beneficiaries. In a speech delivered to the National Defense University (see previous article Shock and Awe in May, the President revealed that the Reagan-Teller Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or "Star Wars ") wet dream had not evaporated in a sperm-laden cloud, but was alive and well in the shared Bush/Cheney cranium. Anticipating the abrogation of the 1972 ABM (Anti-Ballistic Missile) Treaty, Bush gave his enthusiastic endorsement to a new generation of nuclear missiles, boost phase intercept rockets that shoot down enemy missiles in their initial ascent phase, when their flaming jet exhausts make them visible against the background of a dark sky. Useless against missiles launched from the sizable interiors of countries like Russia or China, their only feasible deployment would be against "rogue states" like North Korea, Iran , Syria, Cuba and others ominous threats to America's security.
Given that his proposals did not entail the retirement of any of the weapons programs already in the works, the preliminary cost estimates were in the hundred of billions of dollars, an expenditure defended as more than justified by the "urgent threat" of missile attacks from the Axis of Evil.
George Bush is no Demosthenes, although he may wish to compare his fear-mongering rant with the stirring appeal made by Demosthenes to the Athenian polis to resist the encroachments of Macedonian imperialism. These promises to the NDU would re-appear in a key section of his State of the Union message of Sept 2, 2002 (See See State of the Bunion"
" Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass
destruction. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons. Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. .....
..... States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil. We will develop and deploy effective missile defenses to protect America and our allies from sudden attack. Time is not on our side. The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons.
My budget supports three great goals for America: We will win this war. We'll protect our homeland. We will revive our economy. "
The strange mix of ignorance, hypocrisy, belligerence and dishonesty that pervades this speech has been faithfully translated into the unrelenting Bush/Cheney assault on the sciences, an assault in which many of the scientists themselves have shown themselves more than willing to be complicit.
Despite its comical rant in public about the threat posed by bioterrorism, Mr. Bush/Cheney let the world know, well before September 11th, that it would be subject to no-one's jurisdiction in the matter of germ warfare. In 1992, the signatories of the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention (BWC) , ( which include Russia and the United States) had pledged to dismantle their arsenals of biotoxic weapons. The BWC however has no enforcement or inspection mechanisms. Since 1998, a Protocol designed to remedy this defect has been developed through the initiative of Tibor Toth, chairman of the Ac Hoc Group of the States Parties to the BWC. A final version of the Protocol was worked out an international meeting in Geneva on July 23rd. However:
" During negotiations in November, 2001, the US announced that it would not permit a binding verification agreement to move forward." (Council for Responsible Genetics (CRG) FAQ: Biodefense Research)
The attitude of the Bush administration was summed up in Science as follows:
" Driven by the concerns of the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, the Bush Administration is worried about the inadvertent leakage of trade secrets- vaccines in development for example. The Administration also fears that visits to government labs could compromise national security. " (Science , March 16, 2001)
Within a week of the tragedy prominent figures in the science establishment were shrieking for inflating the budgets of research programs for combating the threat of bioterrorism. The hue-and-cry amplified in October with the series of deadly anthrax mailings . (These are now suspected to be the work of Steve Hatfill, former virologist with the NIH. Strong evidence in confirmation of this opinion is available in "The Message in the Anthrax" , by Don Foster, Vanity Fair, October 2003, page 180 ) . So conveniently have these events fit the agenda of Bush/Cheney that one could imagine that they, and the predictable response to them, have been programmed.
In any case, in the twinkling of an eye Bioterrorism would quickly become the only biomedical research game in town. In his editorial in Science of September 28, 2001, Christopher F. Chyba, co-director of Stanford's Center for Internal Security and Development, writes:
" The horrifying events of 11 September 2001 serve notice that civilization will confront severe challenges in the 21st century..... Biological security provides a powerful example. It must address both the challenge of biological weapons and that of infectious disease. The right approach should benefit public health even if major acts of biological terrorism never occur "
Note the final sentence. Predictably this has become one of the perennial tocsins (sick!) of the Biodefense lobby : even if X-trillions of dollars are wasted on biodefense research, the medical spin-off will make the investment worthwhile. Collateral benefit to mankind is the first refuge of a swindler.
In his proposed budget announcement of November 2001, Bush asked Congress to increase the $1.4 billion already allocated for Biodefense for 2002, to $4.5 billion by 2003. The actual amount spent in 2003 would grow to $6.5 billion. The biodefense budget for 2004 is $6 billion ; this is certain to be exceeded before the year is out.
As if to drive home the point that no good thing can come out of a rotten apple, Bush/Cheney followed up its bonanza to biodefense research when, in December of 2002, the US government obstructed an international agreement being worked out by the World Trade Organization to allow the world's poorest countries to buy prescription drugs at bargain-basement prices in the event of an epidemic. After defaulting on its contributions to the UN Global Fund to Fight Aids, it then broke its own Global Aids Initiative promise of $3 billion in AIDS relief to Africa.
" Controversies in biodefense research stem from both the secrecy with which it is associated and the difficulty in distinguishing between offensive and defensive applications. Federally-funded research on biological weapons is marred by a history of secrecy and misinformation, most strikingly in the hidden offensive bio-warfare program carried out by the U.S, military from the beginning of the Cold War through the early 1970s. Over much of the last thirty years, the Department of Defense has provided an annual report to Congress explaining the nature and extent of its biological research program. After this disclosure policy was discontinued in the early 1990s, there has been growing concern about the potential for offensive research in U.S. laboratories ."
This danger is not as far-fetched as one might imagine, given that the very establishment of this nation was based on germ warfare against both Indians and the British.The latter accusation may be stretching the point: the great North American smallpox epidemic of the 18th century killed far more people, on all sides, that the sum total killed in all conflicts of that period. The deliberate military use of smallpox was initiated by Lord Jeffrey Amherst in 1763 , when he distributed smallpox saturated blankets to the Delaware Indians during the defense of Fort Pitt during the French & Indian War.Although Lord Jeffrey's contribution to American poetry by the founding of Amherst, Massachusetts is beyond measurement on any scale, it must be rated on a par with Chyba's invocation of innumerable side-benefits to medical research through the creation of biotoxins.
" As a result of this meeting ... a research agenda was developed and widely distributed to the scientific community ".NIAID Agenda
These developments appear to be dominated by 4 objectives :
One is led to speculate about the relative priorities assigned to each of these objectives. With respect to (1), the production of vaccines, little progress seems to have been made. In Jan, 2002, Mother Jones carried an article by Bill Hogan in which he expresses considerable skepticism with respect to the abilities of government and industry to do the job:
" On October 2001 .... the Bush administration unveiled its plans to build up, in a big way, the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile ... the drugs, vaccines, chemical antitoxins, and other medical supplies that are kept at the ready to respond to large-scale bioterrorist attack...
The White House asked Congress for more than $1.1 billion in emergency funds ... some lawmakers were soon talking of increasing that amount to as much as $10 billion ... On the civilian side, the vaccine stock-piling effort is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, which contracts with pharmaceutical companies ...
Some critics warn that the industry supply may not be able to fill national security needs. In recent years, manufacturing problems at some companies and unexpected withdrawals from the market have led to a shortage of vaccines for influenza, tetanus, pneumonia and childhood meningitis.."
8 months later, on September 30, 2003, the program of Biodefense Regional Centers of Excellence was launched. NIAID grants have been given to two major centers for infectious disease research and 9 smaller "National Biocontainment Labs". The two major centers are the Boston University Medical Center ($128 million) and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston ( $110 million). These maximal security BSL -4 facilities are being added to the 4 already in existence: the CDC in Atlanta; USAMRIID at Fort Dietrick , Maryland; the Southwest Institute in San Antonio; and one at the University of Georgia in Athens.
The other laboratories, all in universities, have been granted sums ranging from $7 million to $21 million : Colorado State U. , Fort Collins; Duke, North Carolina ; Tulane , New Orleans ; U. Alabama; the University of Medicine and Chemistry in Newark New Jersey; U. Missouri at Columbia; U. Pittsburgh; U. Tennessee at Memphis. The University of California at Davis applied for a grant, then withdrew its proposal under the pressure of enormous community opposition.
Apart from these institutions, dozens of universities, colleges and medical research centers have applied for and received grants to do research on virulent pathogens associated with bioterrorism. These micro-organisms are not even remotely connected to those of the major diseases that now devastate the human race with a renewed violence not seen since the smallpox epidemics of the 18th century: HIV/AIDS , tuberculosis, malaria, cholera, typhus, influenza.
A short list of institutions which have built research centers in the BSL-3 or 4 range, are in the process of building them, or have received substantial grants, ( $6.1 million to Penn, $20.5 million to Harvard Medical , etc.) to do research in such facilities includes:
Duke University;
Harvard Medical School;
University of Chicago;
SUNY Albany;
Yale Pharmaceutical Research Institute;
University of Maryland;
University of Texas;
Columbia University;
University of Washington;
Washington University at St. Louis;
University of Missouri at Columbia;
Emory University;
Stanford University;
University of Massachusetts at Worcester;
Boston University Medical Center;
Colorado State University at Fort Collins;
Tulane University, New Orleans;
University of Alabama;
University of Pittsburgh;
University of Tennessee at Memphis;
University of Pennsylvania;
Johns Hopkins University, Maryland;
George Mason University, Virginia ......................
The surreal universe of Oryx and Crake is already with us. Be prepared for a world that has ever chance of being as horrible as the one depicted in Margaret Atwood's engrossing novel (Doubleday, 2003 ) . Universities have traditionally been a rich source of material for works of fiction ridiculing the weird intellectual viruses infecting their ambient noosphere - behaviorism, psycho-analysis, New Criticism, eugenics, deconstructionism, political correctness, academic 12-tone music , psycho-linguistics , structural linguistics, string theory, applied victimhood and others. ( The reader is encouraged to draw up his own list, which may differ significantly from mine.)
The exposure of fatuousness is out of date; the time has come to direct one's imaginative energies on the lurid concoctions of somatic viruses that are destined to hover indefinitely , like Los Angeles smog, over the fabled market-places of ideas.
In the college guides so carefully studied these days by parents looking for the universities best suited to direct the aspirations of their children to a better life , one should anticipate the appearance of paragraphs along the following lines:
" Less than a mile from the main campus of Acropolis U. sits a state-of-the-art BSL-4 bioterrorism research laboratory, staffed by a dozen senior scientists pre-eminent in the field, coordinating research on Ebola, Glanders, Lassa, Machugo, botulism, anthrax, smallpox, tularemia, encephalitis, pulmonary histoplasmosis, Q fever, Hanta virus, Dengue fever, plague and anthrax. Students learn to apply the data available from the sequencing of the human genome to the creation of targetted gene-specific viruses of potential value in the waging of future wars.
There is nothing to fear from the presence of such an installation so close to the university. In the 12 years in which the laboratory has been functioning, there has not been one documented outbreak on Ebola in any of its facilities "
Project Bioshield and the NIAID university grants are only the combined tip of the iceberg. A more comprehensive vision for Biodefense America was revealed a month later in the opening address of John Marburger III, ( Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and science advisor to the President ) at the Biosecurity Conference 2003 held on October 20, 2003 at Harvard's Medical School . The introductory portion of his speech deserves to be quoted at length:
"Thanks to consistent and, I should add, persistent , efforts by President Bush and key members of Congress, funding for bioterrorism research supported through the National Institutes of Health increased by nearly an order of magnitude over two years, from $180 million to more than $1.6 billion ( the final figure is a Presidential request). Within the Department of Homeland Security, an additional $305 million had been appropriated for biological countermeasures. Altogether in fiscal year 2004, approximately $920 million are dedicated to science and technology in DHS, to fund a variety of programs, including:
Community groups in Greater Boston's impoverished, predominantly Afro-American district of Roxbury ( Ferment Vol.X #9 January 6,1997 ) learned in June of 2003 of Boston University's participation in the RFP process of the NIAID . That September it was announced that BU had received the largest single allocation - $128 million for the first year, with anticipated inputs from all sources of funding to a total of $1.6 billion over 7 years - for Project Biospace Phase II, an extension of the BU Medical Center in Roxbury's vicinity.
Opposition to the proposal has come from the Alternatives for Community and Environment (ACE) , a grassroots organization in Roxbury, from the Council for Responsible Genetics (CRG) directed by Sujatha Byravan and Sheldon Krimsky at Tufts University , and many other organizations and individuals , including ASFSCME local 1489 (Boston Medical Center Employees) ; Boston Mobilization; the BU Germ-Bioterror Lab Opposition Coalition (BUGBLOC); Dorchester People for Peace ; City Councilors Felix Arroyo and Chuck Turner; State Representative Gloria Fox; and scientists and faculty around the Boston area.
Boston University is unique among all of the recipients of these biodefense grants in its reluctance, even refusal, to inform or consult the local community. It has also covered its intentions with misleading pronouncements which have, in some instances, been deliberate lies.
Among them:
(i ) No resident groups were consulted by BU prior to making the decision to locate the lab in the Roxbury community. Despite this, in its presentations to NIAID it asserted that the community supported the presence of the lab. Roxbury would not have known that BU was going ahead with plans to build a BSL-4 biotoxin lab in its neighborhood had it not been informed by the CRG.
Of great interest is the fact that there is a history of attempts to create such a lab in Cambridge, all of which were blocked. High security Biotech research facilities were proposed for Harvard and MIT in 1976. A citizen's committee, including Cambridge city officials and members of the public, convened hearings at which scientific experts spoke on laboratory safety and accountability issues. Based on these hearings a biosafety committee was formed which ultimately persuaded the City to pass a resolution prohibiting all BSL-4 research in Cambridge.
In the 1980's the Arthur D. Little corporation built a lab in Cambridge for conducting federally sponsored research on toxic chemical warfare. Once again Cambridge was able to pass legislation prohibiting such work. The City's decision was upheld by the Massachusetts Supreme Court.
Alas! Roxbury is not Cambridge, although the #1 bus line which begins at the former and terminates in the latter could become a smoothly functioning conveyor belt for encephalitis, Dengue fever and other biotoxins between the two radically differing communities.
One might even suggest changing the name of Massachusetts Avenue to "Hanta Highway" . (Botulism boulevard?)
There is more. Statutes already exist in Boston's public health regulations that would ban much of the research at the proposed BU lab. Section 3.01 of a regulation on Recombinant DNA Technology passed in 1994 states : " RDNA use requiring containment defined by the Guidelines as 'BL4' shall not be permitted in the City of Boston".
(ii ) Boston University also made the paradoxical claim that the presence of the lab in this neighborhood would make it a safer place to live! Their argument was based on the assumption that terrorists would be infecting Roxbury with just those pathogens for which vaccines had been developed at the lab. In fact there is no equipment for the manufacture of vaccines at the lab, and the terms of the NIAID contract specifically prohibit the creation of an out--patient clinic on its premises .
There is furthermore no guarantee that the lab will not also be engaged in secret research on bioweapons. This is the very issue that galvanized the community opposition that led the University of California at Davis to withdraw its proposal.
(iii ) BU also stated that the lab would be doing research in the major diseases afflicting the human race, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, cancer, malaria, and so on. However the NIAID Biodefense Research Agenda of March 2002 clearly states that biodefense research must be limited only to those diseases likely to be used in germ warfare: smallpox, tularemia, plague, botulism, anthrax, viral hemorragic diseases, etc.
(iv ) It appears, in fact, that Boston University has felt free to say anything to anyone in pursuit of its biodefense grant, without any sense of obligation to keep to its promises once the grant was awarded. Thus, it told the Federal government that it would create 1,300 construction jobs, 50% of which would be reserved for Boston residents.
It then turned around and told the City and State regulators that the entire BioSquare Phase 2 project ( which includes more than just the biodefense lab ) would employ at most 620 construction workers over a period of 7 years, with no more than 75 workers on the site in a single day.
Almost all the jobs at the lab itself would require qualified professionals with higher degrees. A more accurate picture of the true intentions of the university was revealed on January 17, 2004, in the BU student newspaper The Daily Free Press . It quoted Dr. Mark Klemperer, the prime mover behind BU's acquisition of the NIAID grant, as saying that the lab would " provide the South Boston area with maintenance and janitorial jobs. "
Chuck Turner, representative for Roxbury on the Boston City Council, has introduced a resolution that would ban all BSL-4 level biodefense research in Boston. At the present moment Boston University and the community of Roxbury are waiting on the decisions from 3 regulatory processes: