MB Civic

By Ralph Kaplan and Harvey Silvergate | Saturday, February 24, 2007 | The Boston Globe

It has been 62 years since the first atomic bomb was used in combat, and the authors argue that our counter-terrorism efforts need to stop focusing exclusively on nuclear threats. Much more concerning, and more accessible to terrorists with simple tools, would be the use of modern molecular genetic techniques to craft a biological weapon, such as a synthetic copy of the 1918 Spanish Flu, which could manufacture massive numbers of copies of itself. Too little attention, too few resources, too little planning is being devoted to such threats, which the authors think are much more likely to be used in an attack than nukes. As a card-carrying molecular biologist and Infectious Diseases physician, I could not agree more strongly…BS

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/02/24/the_next_generation_of_threats/