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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Before the federal government spent a dime, the Manhattan project had been rigorously vetted by some of the greatest minds of the 20th century. Today, with a minimum of consideration for scientific feasibility, the executive branch is moving inexorably toward the establishment of a multibillion-dollar program whose goal is to use America's leadership in biotechnology to make us invulnerable to bioweapons. Budgets are announced and billions of dollars become available with little discussion of how a gold rush in biodefense spending might rock the world of peer-reviewed scientific research.
The agents of death derived from life, bioweapons, are the most terrifying exactly because they operate far beyond the twilight zone of our collective imagination. Even the experts don't know what can be created, what the symptoms will be, how deadly, how painful. Even the experts don't know how it will spread or who is at risk. Theoretical next-generation bioweapons invoke a surreal level of terror because, in truth, we have no idea where this technology can go.
We are talking about the potential for a deadly marketplace of metabolism where "genetic or protein engineering" and "directed evolution" are standard tools of the trade. And it is precisely because no one can tell us what could happen that American biotechnology, the undisputed world heavyweight champion, appears ready to go down and take that induction physical. The plan is to multitask this crown jewel of our economic future to drive America's other great technology business: weapons. But how far should the cutting edge of biotechnology research be deflected toward national defense? How much of the federal budget for life sciences R&D should go toward defense and security applications -- and who decides?
This question is crucial because the federal government supports almost all the basic research from which next-generation biotechnology products evolve. This in no way minimizes the creativity of America's biotechnology industry, which invests an enormous amount of money and intellectual capital to bring these basic discoveries to the marketplace. But the current pipeline is almost entirely filled with blockbuster products that originated in long-term fundamental research sponsored by NIH and NSF. What happens when the basic research mission of these agencies is short-circuited by the delusional lurches of homeland security?
Fueled by the enormous budgetary clout of the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS), biodefense mission creep is already reaching inward to federal labs and outward to the universities and private industry. The American Association for the Advancement of Science reported that for the fiscal year 2004 there would be an increase in federal R&D of $7.9 billion, nearly all of which would go to just three agencies: DHS, DOD and NIH. Nowhere is the golden rule more relevant than in the brutally expensive world of technology research. Whoever has the gold rules, which now makes DHS a major player in American science policy.
The newly hatched DHS has a baby of its own: "Project BioShield." While still in its infancy, this government venture in biodefense has been budgeted for $6 billion, twice the amount spent on the entire Human Genome Project. Originally announced in the president's State of the Union address, Project BioShield is billed as a comprehensive effort to develop and make available modern, effective drugs and vaccines to protect against attack by biological and chemical weapons or other dangerous pathogens. Project BioShield is a putative collaboration between DHS and NIH, but many in the research community doubt that this shotgun wedding can work.
Because Project BioShield is designed to protect a civilian population, $1.75 billion will be subcontracted by DHS to NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). We are supposed to be reassured that biomedical research will be handled by the professionals. But DHS still writes the checks for a project that is supposed to reach warp speed in a single year. Informed sources estimate that a staggering 10 percent of NIH's funding is now directly or indirectly related to biodefense R&D. In coming years, the "expedited" authority provided by Project BioShield will route additional hundreds of millions into biotech research that does not follow the normal protocols of peer review.
This is a very risky proposition. NASA brought us Tang and DARPA may have created the Internet, but for every executive branch R&D success there have been spectacular failures. Billions of dollars disappeared into the ill-fated Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly known as "Star Wars") venture. Billions more are still required to decontaminate the residue of a nuclear arms race that represents the last time the federal government took one of our great scientific assets to war. In the final analysis, our national defense infrastructure is simply not designed to foster the environment essential for pushing back the frontiers of basic science.
