The importance of biosecurity today

The discoveries that emerge from the scientific community for the benefit of human health can and do bring out the best in people. However, the same discoveries, tools and technology can also attract the worst of people, those with an agenda that is in complete contrast to our ideas of democracy and what is for the good of mankind.

In today’s volatile political landscape, vigilance and mistrust has become a natural response to the threat of malicious action posed by both probable and less probable non-state actors. Therefore, however important openness and sharing might be for continued scientific progress, it does present problems.

Scientists have a great responsibility to both themselves, their co-workers and to society itself to ensure that what they do and discover, does not put others in danger. Scientists need extensive knowledge of and access to biological materials and techniques that in the wrong hands may suddenly pose a grave danger. However, it is very important that biosecurity does not in the slightest impede scientific progress, and it is therefore equally important that measures of biosecurity are developed in cooperation with those that will have to implement them.

Scientists should not be walled away behind ‘guns, guards and gates’. Biosecurity can be achieved through close coordination and cooperation between the scientists working at the laboratories and competent officers charged with security. Simple but effective routines together with other solutions can ensure the safe and secure conduct of science. The implications that the malicious use of legitimate science could have are endless, and it is essential and warranted that such routines are developed and that biosecurity becomes as natural to scientists as general laboratory safety.

To these ends, SIPRI is currently carrying out a project, financed by the Swedish Emergency Management Agency (Krisberedskapsmyndigheten) to engage the scientific community, in the first instance in Stockholm, studying microbial pathogens, immune responses, and/or infectious diseases. The project will develop tools to be used at Swedish laboratory institutions for establishing and maintaining a good level of biosecurity.

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Any reproduction of text and data is authorized only by permission, SIPRI April 2007.