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  About Prof. Malcolm Dando

Malcolm Dando is Professor of International Security in the Department of Peace Studies at Bradford University, UK. Professor Dando trained originally as a biologist and after a period in Operational Research joined the Department of Peace Studies in 1979. In Bradford he has worked on issues of arms control, first concentrating on nuclear arms control and then, since 1991, increasingly on biological arms control. Professor Dando is currently spending half of the year as the International Institute for Strategic Studies Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Security Research in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. His recent publications include The New Biological Weapons (Lynne Rienner, 2001) and Preventing Biological Warfare (Palgrave, 2002).

Statement by Prof. Malcolm Dando

Biotechnology and the Potential for Abuse

In the latter part of the nineteenth century the revolution in bacteriology resolved controversies over pathogenesis and led to powerful new means of dealing with many infectious diseases. Unfortunately, the same knowledge was soon applied in warfare, in anti-animal biological warfare during World War I. Throughout the twentieth century, there was a series of offensive biological weapons programmes, in major states such as Japan, the UK, the US and the former Soviet Union. These offensive programmes used the growing knowledge of biology, for example in aerobiology, production microbiology and genetic engineering as these capabilities became available. Today, it appears probable that 'tailoring' of classical agents such as anthrax - for example to increase antibiotic resistance - is possible through the use of genetic engineering.

It is argued that biological warfare presents a complex problem for policy-makers since the potential targets, scale of attack and agents can all vary. Furthermore, the ongoing merging of chemistry with biology in the genomics/proteomics revolution significantly expands the potential threat spectrum that has to be considered. It is suggested that unless States Parties to the BTWC and CWC move beyond recognition of the problem to doing something serious about it, Professor Matthew Meselson's hypothesis will come true. Then we shall increasingly see modern biology applied in major ways to terrorism and warfare - and all manner of life processes will be at risk as our scientific understanding of them increases.

Other documents in this section: Focus > Biotechnology and weapons