The Department of Defense is also requesting an enormous slice of the biodefense pie, but bottom-line numbers are impossible to assess. Unlike DHS or NIH, DOD can hide biodefense funding within a maze of classified projects that makes Chris Carter's vast X-Files conspiracy look like a game of kick-the-can.

Even a cursory analysis of the DOD budget shows an enormous amount of biotech funding buried under a bewildering array of acronyms like COWATAA and DTRA or embedded in mega-technology initiatives like DARPA's Bio/Micro/Info Sciences Program -- which could just as well be called the DARPA's EVERYTHING Program.

Under the heading "Combating Terrorism" the president's budget request allocates $7.3 billion for DOD efforts to combat terrorism, including biowarfare. Highlights include $578 million in R&D funding for advanced individual-protection programs, and for equipment to detect and decontaminate chemical-biological agents. Additional biowarfare countermeasures are buried in the $378 million Cost of War Against Terrorism Authorization Act (COWATAA), as well as $452 million for something called the "Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)." In just those few appropriations we find almost $1.5 billion dollars.

Don't feel safe quite yet? There's the "Homeland Security Biological Defense Test Bed." Sorry, no acronym and no explicit price tag -- but if you have to ask, you can't afford it. In this modest little program, DOD will create an "integrated capability for protection of urban areas, high value assets, and special events, and detect and respond to biological incidents." In FY 2003 we start on the "establishment of fully equipped test beds on selected military installations, an enhanced biological monitoring system in the National Capital Region, and an initial biological monitoring capability in two additional urban areas." Welcome to Tomorrowland in the paranoid magic kingdom of bioterror.

One can only guess at what an "integrated capability to protect, detect, and respond to biological incidents" in urban areas might include, but this project has the potential to make Star Wars be the last nickel bargain on the planet. One is assaulted by visions of ubiquitous bioweapons sensors hanging like smoke detectors and air fresheners. Mood rings replaced by miniature DNA sequencers that constantly sample the genomes of microorganisms as they fall on our skin. Office buildings equipped with windowpanes that change color when a chemical or biological agent settles on its surface.

Finally we come to DARPA's Biowarfare Defense Technology (BDT) program. For FY 2003, DARPA proposed to dedicate 50 percent of its entire $150 million budget to a project called "Bio/Info/Micro Sciences." This project will "explore and develop potential technological breakthroughs that exist at the intersection of biology, information technology and micro/physical systems." That's the same as saying that this project will explore and develop the fusion of biotechnology, computer technology and nanotechnology -- essentially the entire future of high technology! This 50 percent allocation becomes even more amazing when compared to the historical DARPA funding requests, which show that Bio/Info/Micro Sciences was budgeted for zero dollars in FY 2001.

It is essential to recognize that very little of DOD's research will occur in-house, which means that just like the DHS, DOD will be a major player in science policy through its vast capability to fund university and industry laboratories. As our military and security commanders draft more of America's biotechnology infrastructure to support a war on terror that has already cost hundreds of billions of dollars, it is crucial to remember that NIH, the premier federal source of all basic healthcare research, will receive only about $28 billion in FY 2004. This budget includes everything from public health initiatives to basic genome research. If the current trend continues, federal biotechnology funding for defense and security will easily rival funding for basic biomedical research within a generation.

But will this current trend continue? Industrial biology is coming of age in a government-proclaimed age of terrorism, and that will be hazardous to your health... though the reason may not be obvious. Before we spend these uncounted and uncountable billions for biodefense, we must ask whether we have the real enemy in our sights.

What if the true danger is not some fanatic attempting to slip across an international border? Do we dare consider that, fueled by a xenophobia that is out of all proportion to reality, we are in pursuit of a specious alien "other"? Is the greatest threat to our security really the possibility that a group of fanatics enabled by satellite phones and e-mail will get their hands on a doomsday vial? These questions take on monumental significance when we recognize the true cost of the war on terror, when we understand too late that these valuable resources could have been used to target and destroy a much more dangerous enemy that is already here. It's in our true heartland, it's in someone we love: a mother, a husband, a child.

This enemy doesn't have to cross an ocean in disguise or procure forged documents. This alien has already gained entry into our homes. We must seriously reconsider a policy that deflects attention from an enemy that is here, known and extremely deadly. No WMDs have been found in Iraq, but it is an irrefutable fact that there are WMDs in our living rooms. No conceivable enemy of the American people has the might and capability to destroy, ravage and inflict damage the way real cellular terrorists do. Maybe we should be outraged that, even as we stand on the threshold of annihilating the enemy within, our resources are being summarily redirected by acts of subterfuge and deceit camouflaged to make us think, with the old American sense of isolationism, that we are safe only when the enemy is kept far across the ocean.

We will all die eventually, of course. But it is a terrifying fact of life that, in the year 2000, cancer and heart disease alone prematurely took the lives of more than 1.2 million Americans and, since Sept. 11, 2001, these diseases have killed more than 2,500,000 of us while the total number of lives lost to terrorism must stand well below 4,000.

This staggering reality does not even begin to count the terror suffered by survivors of these and other major diseases or, of course, their families. To date, the war on terrorism has cost hundreds of billion of dollars, enough to accelerate discoveries in the basic life sciences by a decade or more. It is beyond irony that just as we stand on the brink of turning an abstract struggle against our own metabolism into a plausible stand-up fight with recognizable victories, we should be ambushed and paralyzed by the fear of vague, implausible scenarios. By remaining at this level of fear, we sentence millions of Americans to a premature death.

The war on terror is very real, and America needs to fight its suicidal, homicidal enemies with all appropriate vigor. But if we let these people distort the greatest scientific enterprise our democracy has ever created, they will have achieved a victory out of all proportion to their true capabilities. For all its horror, the World Trade Center disaster was a preventable anomaly. But cancer, heart disease and their allies are the true inevitability that must be fought with every weapon in our arsenal.

The post-9/11 militarization of our federal biotechnology research infrastructure represents the most dangerously misguided government science initiative in history. Al-Qaida and the new Department of Homeland Security have coauthored a national performance-art piece wherein the American people join a cargo cult dedicated to the construction of multibillion-dollar totems with the magical power to make our borders impermeable to all vials, ampuls, and other canisters of contagion ... including the ones that don't exist. As executive producer of our new national reality show, "Survival of the In-vial-ate," Osama bin Laden will kill millions of Americans without losing a single minion. We will die. Not from terrorist cells, but from the cellular terrorists whose molecular weapons of mass destruction -- cancerous mutations, arterial plaques and cryptic retroviruses -- are already embedded in our bodies.

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