Michael Callahan's Testimony: "Engineering Bio-Terror Agents: Lessons from the Offensive U.S. and Russian Biological Weapons Programs," 2005.

Although it is clear that a “novel coronavirus” has never spread around the world via human-to-human transmission, and that the bulk of the deaths blamed on the alleged SARS2 virus during “COVID-19” were actually caused by hospital countermeasures and vaccines, the possibility that chemical/biological weapons hybrids, such as synthetic spike proteins developed by Peter Daszak, were deployed in various locations, cannot be dismissed.

The possibility that a person might intentionally use a synthetic chemical/biological weapons as a source of terror was discussed at length in 2005, not long after the 2001-2002 Anthrax attacks.

Here I present the entire testimony of Michael Callahan to the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security titled “Engineering Bio-Terror Agents: Lessons from the Offensive U.S. and Russian Biological Weapons Programs.”

Callahan’s testimony is one of many sources of information that I intend to include in a letter of opposition to Robert Malone’s proposal to use artificial intelligence to monitor the Biological Weapons Convention treaty.

The background of Robert Malone should be considered by those who are considering his proposal. Robert Malone, Michael Callahan, and others involved in current and former chemical/biological weapons programs in the United States are not trustworthy individuals, in my opinion.

Robert Malone spoke by phone with Michael Callahan in China in early January 2020 about the sequence of the alleged “Wuhan Seafood Market Virus.” Callahan was present in the Wuhan Central Hospital when patients allegedly fell sick from the mystery virus.

In my opinion, if a chemical and/or biological agent was deployed in Wuhan then Michael Callahan is the #1 suspect in the world.

Here, I’m just asking that you familiarize yourself with Callahan’s testimony.

I will list a few points that I find most interesting.

1. The tactics of a hypothetical bio-terrorist. “…if we model HVAC systems for indoor air attack and HVAC systems such as serving this room, allow for remote delivery of an agent, allowing chances for folks to get away.” … “So indoor air attack is absolutely critical.”

2. Ventilators. Like SARS2, SARS1 was a ventilator death event, although the death protocols didn’t spread as far. “By the time we returned to Hong Kong, there were 470 people on ventilators, and we were flying ventilators all around in Southeast Asia to try to shore up their health care capability, which, by the way, is a Western standard.”

3. Lab leaks. “These former (Russian) weapons scientists… call upon us across international cell lines to tell us that there has been a laboratory accident.”

4. Anthrax. Callahan was an expert on Anthrax and worked closely with the Russian scientists who weaponized it. I recall reading that the FBI excluded one federal government agency from their analysis of the source of the Anthrax used in the 2001-2002 Anthrax attacks in the United States. (Source needed).

In all the investigations of Congress on “the origins of COVID,” the involvement of Michael Callahan and Robert Malone has never been presented to the public.

With that I present the entire testimony of Michael Callahan to Congress in 2005.

https://irp.fas.org/congress/2005_hr/bioterror.pdf

STATEMENT OF DR. MICHAEL V. CALLAHAN, DIRECTOR, BIODEFENSE & 
        MASS CASUALTY CARE, CIMIT/MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL

    Dr. Callahan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, committee members.
    Like my predecessors, I can forego much of the testimony 
with regard to the gravity of the threat, and focus with more 
precision on some of the evolutions of the convening of 
technology intent in the nooks and crannies of the planet where 
these features and these factors co-exist.
    I will speak specifically with regard to three 
applications. My first is, as a clinical infectious disease 
doctor who works in the developing countries of the world in 
management of the diseases caused by these agents, specifically 
lassa fever, hemorrhoragic fever, Marlburg, Ebola, epidemics 
from the past, cutaneous anthrax in northern Nigeria and other 
places. These are listed in the testimony.
    My second contribution will shore up a lot of what
Dr. Alibek has said. I work extensively in the former 
Soviet Union; I spend 30 percent of my time there. I spend that 
exclusively at the bench top with former weapon scientists in 
14 institutes tempering priorities to the Department of State’s 
biological bioindustry initiative.
    A key point here that I would like to stress is that this 
program, unlike any of the others, has used the biodefense 
market and the biotechnology market of western nations to 
create a market pull, to bring these former weapon scientists 
to participate in part of the solution. And for this reason we 
have had excellent access to these institutes. These former 
weapons scientists, many of them aging, and many of them with 
their children here in the United States receiving higher 
education, call upon us across international cell lines to tell 
us that there has been a laboratory accident, to tell us they 
have a sick loved one in a Russian or former Soviet Union 
hospital. So as a physician, we attend to them.
    As advocates and collaborators, we try to help them in 
their education. And our statistics are quite good. Out of 177 
currently engaged programs spanning 14 institutes, I will tell 
you that the timeline for radical medical countermeasures to 
the agents of bioterrorism number 11 percent. 11 percent of our 
total portfolio in the Harvard system, and using the best of 
our academic and biotechnology resources here in the United 
States, has new answers coming out of the former Soviet Union 
program. It is that which they prepared, they also mitigated 
against. They had to consider blow back. They will perceive 
that there was an offensive use capability by other nations 
that were targeting them as well.
    So they have been thinking about unknown threat agents 
being lodged at them for some time, and this is a paradigm 
shift in the way they have developed their own science.
    The third and last application, which I will minimize for 
the purposes of this testimony, is that the Department of 
Homeland Security is embarking on a huge effort to bring 
subject matter expertise and intelligence community members 
together to chart a path. We are having great difficulties with 
this because of arbitration and because of some of the 
conflicts, and the fact that, quite frankly, our expertise is 
not read in.
    I would like to contrast, as we go along the remaining 
time, with the sharp distinctions with nuclear weapons. The 
chairman and several others have already talked about these, 
but I would like to crystallize these for you because it is 
quite policy relevant.
    First and foremost, you need to understand that there are 
seven critical ingredients to the manufacture of biological 
weapons. I would like to go through them with just a couple 
comments in each and try to help to develop good questioning 
off of those.
    The first of these ingredients is access to agents. There 
is a lot of attention being spent at the locks or freezers in 
the former Soviet Union, this is important. It is what the 
Defense Threat Reduction Agency’s priority goal is, and BII and 
Department of State is doing that as well; it is not necessary, 
though. I work in all of these countries and see these diseases 
as a routine evolution of human ecology, and I have several of 
the supporting materials that are in your folder that will talk 
about that in some detail.
    We have over 200 laboratories in Subsaharan Africa from 
where we have documented anthrax and plague from humans. And 
these are laboratories which have the capability to isolate, to 
purify and to amplify to these agents from all the background 
infectious organisms. I will also note that many of these labs 
are occurring in fundamental Islamic communities or are far 
outside the scrutiny of western nations. They are, quite 
literally, at the end of the path.
    Number two is that, in addition to the agents which are 
easy to get and found in every country of concern to the United 
States, is that there is a critical choke point, an actionable 
choke point with regard to the reagents. There are several 
reagents that are very helpful at amplifying these agents from 
their background. Several reagents. It might be an antibody, it 
might be a plasma that could be used for the construct of a 
genetic organism, or with the advent evolving technologies, it 
might be a small scale fermenter, an ager roller bottle system, 
or an agent which helps to produce a high, dry powder which has 
high loft efficiency. Reagents is a critical actionable place 
to focus on.
    Expertise. Here I return our attention back to the former 
Soviet Union program because it epitomizes this to some degree. 
Expertise migrates much better than the technologies do. And 
the experts from all the programs, and quite frankly, in ill-
intentioned, nefarious-minded, moderately-trained 
microbiologists out of the European program cold return to 
these western nations and reconvene all the necessary 
ingredients of this technology and infrastructure to do covert 
manufacture. I will note also that the reason why this is so 
holoendemic in developing countries in the world is because the 
veterinary communities produce their own pharmaceuticals 
locally. They need anthrax to make an anthrax vaccine that is 
used in northern Nigeria to treat the local economy, which is 
on the hoof. So there is an economic force driving the 
technologies of these developing and small-scale weapons as 
well.
    Technology also contributes in a meaningful way to the 
reconvening--remodeling really--of old-style, traditional 
biological weapons, such as those that were found in the U.S. 
program prior to its dissolution in the early 1970s. You can 
take an old agent, an anthrax spore preparation, and you can 
modernize it, and this increases its magnitude and its ponderal 
impact, its impact upon the human populations. This is depicted 
in my third handout, which talks about, at one magnitude, 
reduction in the number of spores that you need based on the 
incorporation of modern immunologic principles and the use of a 
single new technology which became available in 2002.
    Beyond expertise and technology, I will end quickly with 
some of the small points. One is budget. In our laboratory 
modeling exercises of small-scale biological weapons, we can 
produce 14 million lethal doses of anthrax as a model agent for 
a reagent cost of 36 pounds British Sterling. That is the 
reagent cost, that is not salaries. And this is done. It is not 
a theoretical laboratory modeling exercise, it has been done 
with the surrogates. It was mapped very carefully. It has an 
Excel spreadsheet that goes with it, and a list of reagents and 
inventories.
    It is also important to note that the people who 
participated in that exercise used all open source information, 
they used the U.S. Patent Office and they used out of print 
microbiology textbooks. It is a scary incredible thing, and it 
is not just theoretical, it has already been capitalized both 
in laboratory modeling and in actual experience. I refer you 
back to the intelligence community’s information on the 
American anthrax attack in 2001, which we won’t discuss here.
    So after the budget, finishing up, production capability. I 
will just remind you--and this reflects the first point about 
the holoendemic nature of these laboratories is that you need a 
covert production capability. With the modern technologies, 
these laboratories are downsized. The laboratory model that was 
used to produce that anthrax biological weapon was 200 square 
feet, had a capital infrastructure cost of about $220,000, and 
the graduate students were not salaried, so there were some 
cost benefits in there as well.
    What is so often overlooked in our homeland security threat 
analysis programs is that skilled research capital, even 
terrorist capital, needs to be preserved. So another choke 
point is to focus critically on the protection of terrorists 
while they are producing these agents. While biological 
containment, the laboratory equipment that you have that 
protects your workers from being infected can be improvised not 
at the highest level that is needed for aerosolized agents that 
are highly dangerous pathogens.
    So here we look for the hypervaccined individual, and we 
look for things such as consistent antibiotic immuno 
suppression, which has been used in other programs as well.
    My summation is short because it is made easy by colleagues 
here. The traditional weapons exist; they are very possible, 
they are very plausible, they have been modelled extensively by 
our European partners. The agents, the technologies are all 
preexisting. And one of the tragic benefits is that as we 
develop benefits in modern health care and modern technology, 
which serve us well, they have a dark side, they have a down 
side. And it is these same technologies which have dramatically 
increased the efficacy and the efficiency of killing of these 
threat agents.
    I will stop there, and I look forward to your questions.
    [The statement of Dr. Callahan follows:]

             Prepared Statement of Dr. Michael V. Callahan

    Mr. Chairman, distinguished Members, it is an honor to appear 
before you to present information on the threat of traditional and 
next-generation biological weapons. My perspective is derived from 
experiences as a tropical medicine physician who studies and treats the 
diseases caused by these agents, from experiences working with former 
biological weapon scientists in Russia, and threat assessment 
activities on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security’s National 
Bioterrorism Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC).
    I am a staff physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at 
Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and the 
Director of Biological Threat Defense at the Center for Integration of 
Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT). CIMIT is a multi-
institution, non-profit research organization funded by the U.S. 
Government to identify near-term solutions for critical military and 
civilian medical problems. Since January 2002, I have also worked with 
the U.S. Department of State, in particular with the Bio-Industry 
Initiative (BII), a program which uses the U.S. biotechnology market 
and academic collaborations to redirect former Soviet biological 
weapons scientists to peaceful, sustainable medical research. Prior to 
this position I was on faculty at the Center for International Health 
at Boston University where I served as clinical investigator for 
tropical medicine research projects in sub-Saharan Africa. I currently 
maintain tropical disease research activities in five developing 
countries, which is pertinent to the discussion below. Since the 
October 2001 anthrax attack, I have worked with biological terrorism 
working groups from the National Academy of Science, the Department of 
Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security. My focus areas are 
risk analysis of small scale biological weapon production, and 
consequence management following mass-casualty infections and 
poisonings.
    This subcommittee has asked that I provide some perspective on the 
threat of engineered biological weapons. As there is considerable 
debate about several aspects of biological weapons, I have attempted to 
support this testimony with photographs from the field and from 
laboratory modeling activities. I will emphasize here that I am not an 
expert on the former U.S. biological weapons program that was disbanded 
in 1971. I also understand that Dr. Alibek will provide testimony on 
the Soviet biological weapons program under Biopreparat. My reference 
to the FSU (Former Soviet Union) program will therefore, be restricted 
to information gained from ongoing research collaborations with ex-
biological weapons scientists from 10 Russian institutes. It should be 
emphasized that my experiences helping BII to develop drug and vaccine 
commercialization opportunities for former weapons scientists have 
resulted in access to several institutions previously closed to 
westerners (Figure 1). Further transparency is gained, perhaps 
ironically, by relationships forged from my medical care of former 
weapons scientists and their family members, and on occasion, emergency 
medical consultation to infections resulting from laboratory accidents. 
Finally, it is probably relevant that my experiences conducting 
clinical research in remote African and Asian locales have sensitized 
me to some of the challenges a terrorist lab would encounter when 
attempting to make a biological weapon in an austere environment 
(Figure 2).

    What is our current understanding of engineered biological weapons?
    Most experts agree that biological weapons are the original weapons 
of mass destruction. Throughout history, the overwhelming majority of 
biological weapons were used in a crude form. For example the first 
recorded use of biological agents was in 1346 when the Tartars 
catapulted plague-ridden corpses into the city of Kafka. In more recent 
history, a branch of the Japanese army, Unit 731, reportedly dropped 
plague-infected fleas in ceramic bomblets over cities in China in WWII, 
which likely accounts for unusual changes in the epidemiology of this 
disease in several regions. Prior to the genomic revolution of the last 
two decades, laboratories in several countries worked with variable 
success to stabilize infectious microorganisms and toxins so that they 
could be stored and deployed with greater efficiency and 
predictability. The advent of molecular biology, advances in our 
understanding of infectious diseases and immune regulation, and 
advances in micro-particle engineering and micro-encapsulation have all 
resulted in technologies that can be used to either advance the 
properties of biological weapons or as countermeasures to protect 
against them.
    Past military interest in biological weapons was driven by the 
realization that a comparatively small investment is required to make a 
tactical weapon capable of killing a large number of enemies. In rare 
cases, military weapons programs considered biological weapons as part 
of strategic campaigns. The interest in using biological toxins and 
infectious microorganisms as weapons was also driven by characteristics 
of the agents themselves. For example, in contrast with other munitions 
such as nuclear, chemical and conventional high explosives, only 
biological weapons are self-replicating. Moreover, these agents can be 
scaled-up from seed stock to a full stockpile on short notice and with 
considerably less engineering, manufacturing, capital investment and 
production signature than would be produced by nuclear or chemical 
weapons. A related characteristic is that biological weapons can be 
covertly transported as either minute quantities or in a form that 
leaves no signature, thus allowing the agents to cross international 
borders and be produced behind enemy lines. Military strategists also 
noted that only biological weapons could be successfully deployed 
without detection, a desirable characteristic if attribution is to be 
avoided. By the time clinical symptoms would appear, those that 
deployed the weapon would be many hours or days distant. Most 
ominously, and in stark contrast to chemical and nuclear weapons, 
contagious biological weapons such as killer influenza and smallpox, 
have the unique capacity to cause casualties far beyond the immediate 
impact zone.

    Biological Weapons and Terrorism
    Many of the characteristics that make biological weapons attractive 
to past military programs also make them desirable to the terrorist. 
Fortunately, the convening of biological weapon capability and 
terrorist intent has not as yet resulted in a mass-casualty incident. 
Unfortunately, several disquieting observations of the October 2001 
anthrax attack using the U.S. mail system merit emphasis. First, the 
attack illustrated that advanced expertise had readily been exploited 
by a bioterrorist; the preparation in the Daschle letter contained 
extraordinarily high concentrations of purified endospores. Second, the 
spore preparation was coated with an incipient which helped retard 
electrostatic attraction, thus increasing aerosolization of the agent. 
Third, the choice of the near-ubiquitous Ames strain, combined with the 
absence of forensic details in either the agent or the letters, 
indicate that the terrorist is scientifically informed, wary of 
detection and extremely dangerous.
    I use this well-publicized case to demonstrate that from the 
perspective of the terrorist, biological weapons are likely to be the 
optimal choice for inducing terror. As a practical point, the terrorist 
is likely to be attracted to any means which causes maximal disruption, 
terror and loss of confidence while using the minimal amount of skilled 
personnel, specialized resources and financial investment. For example, 
the skills required for bioweapon manufacture may be derived from 
manufacturing practices that use similar technologies such as the 
fermentative and agricultural sciences, vaccine manufacture, potable 
water treatment and environmental microbiology. In this regard, 
bioweapons offer specific advantages for covert manufacture by the 
terrorist:
        1. The agent may be produced using equipment designed for other 
        peaceful purposes (so called `dual use’).
        2. Production requires minimal space and time, a characteristic 
        that is increasing with modern technology.
        3. Unlike any other weapon, infectious microorganisms are self-
        perpetuating, and therefore may be propagated among the 
        terrorist groups or cells.
        4. Several agents can cause casualties beyond those originally 
        infected.
    5. When human assets need to be preserved, these weapons allow the 
perpetrator to escape detection.
    From the perspective of the threat analyst, there are 7 overlapping 
conditions that need to be present for a terrorist group to produce an 
effective biological weapon. Failure to meet any of the following 
conditions can thwart an attempt at weapons production. These 
conditions are consolidated from consensus opinion of different U.S. 
Government working groups, by CIMIT’s modeling activities and from 
field experiences working with over one hundred laboratories in 
Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (reference Figure 1: a clinical 
infectious disease laboratory in rural northern Nigeria. The laboratory 
technician and I are holding up red blood cell agar plates containing 
the non-hemolytic Bacillus anthracis which was isolated from the skin 
lesion on a local goat herdsman. In this region, estimates of 15-40 
cases of cutaneous anthrax are observed annually): the seven conditions 
for biological weapon production are:
        1. Access to agent: this condition requires that the terrorist 
        has the ability to isolate or procure the microorganism or 
        biological toxin. Note that many threat agents are endemic in 
        Neotropical regions of the globe, including all countries of 
        concern to the U.S. Naturally-occurring infections resulting 
        from these microorganisms are routinely encountered in domestic 
        animals, as is the local expertise required to recognize these 
        infections. Procurement can involve coercion, misrepresentation 
        of intent, or illegal purchase from a former weapons program or 
        strain collection.
        2. Reagents: this condition includes availability of factors 
        required for successful biological isolation and amplification. 
        Examples include specialized or improvised culture media, 
        sporulation-inducers, and incipients to stabilize the agent or 
        to improve purity.
        3. Expertise: technical know-how can be derived from other 
        disciplines. In modeling studies stated knowledge gaps to 
        weapons manufacture may be overcome using internet based 
        literature and patent reviews, use of out of print texts, and 
        identification of solutions from parallel scientific or 
        manufacturing disciplines.
        4. Support technology: this category includes laboratory assets 
        such as roller bottles, agar trays, fermentors, lyophilizers, 
        egg incubators, cold storage capability, animal testing 
        capability and biochemical test kits. The recent 
        commercialization of an unnamed technology has dramatically 
        simplified the challenges to manufacture of one bioweapon by 
        allowing a less refined preparation to be used.
        5. Budget: in both resource rich and austere economies, the 
        financial cost of procurement, laboratory consumables, animals 
        and maintenance of laboratory operations is significant. In 
        modeling studies, the anticipated budget required to complete 
        all manufacture tasks posed a greater challenge to a minimally 
        resourced terrorist group than did other tasks.
    6. Covert production: modeling for small scale anthrax suggests 
that a small appropriately-equipped laboratory with a footprint of 250 
ft2 would meet the production needs of a small scale spore weapon. 
Although many agents can be purified and engineered in simple 
microbiology laboratories (which are found worldwide), large scale 
production, coating and stabilization would require a purpose-
designated facility.
    7. Laboratory Safety: skilled technicians require protection, 
however the procurement of specialized safety equipment is closely 
monitored. For this reason safety capability may be improvised, or lab 
workers may be hyper-vaccinated and maintained on antimicrobial 
prophylaxis to permit lower levels of containment to be used.
    What can the Former Soviet Union Weapons Program teach us about 
Engineered biological weapons and bioterrorism?
    Recent terrorist attacks in Russia have prompted government actions 
to protect against terrorism. However, an ethnically diverse 
population, poor border controls, regional corruption, and the 
continued conflict in Chechnya have all produced conditions that could 
still result in a biological weapons attack by terrorists. According to 
one Russian government official, ``In no other place do the microbes, 
the expertise, the infrastructure co-exist in such close proximity with 
terrorist groups and chaotic times’‘ (name omitted). In the last 2 yrs 
the concern about terrorism has prompted new levels of disclosure and 
cooperation between the Russian Federation and the United States. In 
the last 2 years there have been 4 conferences in Moscow and St 
Petersburg where prevention and response to bioterrorism was a major 
topic. These conferences are important for a second reason in that they 
provide a forum whereby the FSU scientists present previously unknown 
countermeasures or vaccine strategies which were used to protect 
production workers or government personnel from the USSR agents. Some 
recently described technologies, such as non-specific immune enhancers 
(immune modulators) have little precedence in Western biodefense and 
are exciting new additions to the BII’s Advanced Vaccine and Drug 
Development program.

    Traditional weapons programs
    Traditional biological weapon manufacture is best illustrated by 
the former U.S., British and Soviet era production methods. In the 
Soviet era program, simple methodologies such as microbial fermentation 
were conducted on a grander scale. In two former production institutes 
(Stepnogorsk and Berdsk) fermentors used to produce weapon strains were 
many thousands of liters in volume, over two stories in height and 
under continuous stringent environmental control.
    In these programs the kill efficiencies of the weapons were 
increased by maximizing the number of viable microorganisms in the 
final munition rather than focusing on engineering of the organisms 
(which came later). SRCAM scientists recount that in the case of 
anthrax, attention was focused on increasing fermentation and spore 
production efficiency, and spore recovery using a number of methods 
such as foam flotation. Other expertise was directed at improved 
methods of milling to produce progressively smaller clusters of spores, 
a condition for successful delivery and sequestration in the terminal 
alveoli of the lung. By report, there were occasional production 
misadventures where fermentation runs were contaminated by other 
bacteria or anti-bacterial phages which destroyed the entire production 
run.
    In the years since the end of the Russian program, our scientific 
understanding of microbial metabolism and the improved efficiency of 
automated small scale fermentors have increased the amount of 
vegetative bacteria that can be produced with minimal resources. 
Parallel sciences, such as biological insecticides which use bacterial 
spores afor peaceful purposes, have provided clues to maximize yield in 
a small laboratory. Perhaps most disturbing is the growing availability 
of small scale, autonomous operating fermentation systems which reduce 
the need for skilled technicians and a complex support infrastructure 
(e.g. Bioflo IV Fermentor, New Brunswick, Inc). These systems are 
becoming more common in agricultural regions of Africa.
    When considered as a whole, traditional weapons technologies with 
alterations rather than genetic engineering are the most likely to be 
employed by a moderately resourced, moderately skilled terrorist group. 
There are many open sources and skilled personnel who can provide 
guidance to help assemble the critical components necessary for weapons 
development. Potentially, a former weapons scientist from Stepnogorsk 
could travel to country in the Middle East and reconvene a weapons 
capability from available veterinary, agricultural and clinical 
microbiology resources. For Middle Eastern countries, the easiest 
solution would be to isolate a virulent epizoonotic pathogen from a 
local infected animal. These scientists need not bring anything with 
them but their expertise.
    To summarize, efforts to prevent traditional biological weapon 
production should include efforts to prevent migration of skilled 
personnel to hostile groups. Additional measures for prevention of 
weapons development include tight scrutiny of international 
collaborations and tracking the importation of small scale bacterial 
growth systems and close human and animal surveillance efforts to 
detect infections resulting from deficits in the safety of a weapons 
laboratory.

    Next-generation Biological Weapons
    Next-generation biological weapons are those that benefit from new 
technologies, those made from previously unknown infectious agents or 
biological toxins, and those where a traditional agent is dramatically 
altered by the addition of a high-tech capability. One concept that is 
central to discussions of enhanced virulence biological weapons is that 
the same open source methodologies that advance our ability to improve 
upon human health may also be commandeered for nefarious purposes. A 
second point is that traditional biological weapons such as those 
produced in military weapons programs can be modernized to achieve new 
levels of lethality. The following case is used to illustrate this 
point.
    In the former U.S. weapons program, estimates were made about the 
number of anthrax spores required for an LD50 (dose required to kill 
50% of a population) and LD90 (dose required to kill 90% of a 
population). Extrapolations from these estimates indicate that between 
8,000-10,000 spores would be required for infection. These estimates 
are likely accurate for the anthrax strains used in the pre-1971 
program. Unfortunately, in recent years there have been dramatic 
advances in the modeling of airflow in the human lung which in turn has 
driven the field of aerosolized drug and vaccine delivery. In the last 
8 years, particle physicists and pulmonary scientists have worked 
together to improve the efficiency with which drugs reach the alveoli 
of the lung, which is also the preferred target for the aerosolized 
anthrax spore. A parallel advancement has occurred in the field of 
immunology where new organic coatings have been invented which 
dramatically increase the uptake of particles by the specialized cells 
in the alveoli. Unfortunately these cells are also responsible for 
providing the anthrax bacillus with a protected beachhead for 
replication. The result is that two unrelated technologies, a method 
for generating small drug and vaccine aerosols, and the development of 
a specialized coating, are responsible for dramatically reducing the 
number of spores required to produce a successful infection. (Figure 3 
depicts the methods used to produce a coated anti-floculated spore as 
well as the calculated reduction in spore concentration required for 
infecting 80,000 people in a large city. Select steps and information 
omitted for this testimony)
    Genetic engineering has also played a role in altering the 
capability of biological weapons. Toward the end of the Soviet 
biological weapons program an effort had been made to make several 
agents resistant to antibiotics. Much of this work was done using 
techniques considered inefficient by today’s standards. Biological 
weapon analysts with expertise in molecular biology believe that drug 
resistant biological weapons are a moderate probability event that 
could have disastrous consequences. The reasons for this are based in 
the current health care impact of antibiotic-resistant microorganisms, 
which are arising as a consequence of indiscriminate antibiotic use. 
What is not clear is how likely it is that a biological weapons 
scientist could make a threat agent that is both highly resistant and 
highly virulent. Such balanced capability would require that the 
organism be continuously tested against animals to maintain virulence. 
Thus in this case, the requirements needed to engineer-in genes for 
antibiotic resistance might also require an attendant investment to 
insure that the agent remained highly pathogenic.
    Next generation biological weapons may also be engineered using 
negative selection techniques. In this case antigens to which the 
patient’s immune response is directed are removed from the biological 
weapon. In worse case scenarios, the terrorist might eliminate the 
antigen on a bacteria, virus or toxin that was used as the basis for a 
government vaccine. If the patient was exposed to one of these antigen-
negative biological weapons, they would be immunologically naive 
resulting in more severe infection and/or death. These types of agents 
are known as vaccine-evading biological weapons. Unfortunately, the 
concept that such agents could be developed is dramatically illustrated 
by the need for new vaccines to protect against circulating strains of 
influenza A/H3N2.
    Next-generation biological weapons also include the engineering-in 
of properties that influence the ability of the body to mount an immune 
response. In recent years, there have been several publications which 
have demonstrated this concept to biodefense scientists and 
potentially, to any terrorist with internet access. One of the most 
disquieting publication in 2002 described a method for defeating 
vaccine-protected animals by inserting a gene which down-regulated the 
immune system resulting in overwhelming infection and depth (reference 
provided upon request). Another publication which will appear in an 
international journal this September describes a methodology which 
single-handedly solves two separate challenges facing a biological 
terrorist: how to move virulence genes from one agent to another, and 
how to store a biological weapon without depending on freezers and 
liquid nitrogen (reference provided upon request).
    One of the most ominous of engineering feats that could be used by 
biological weapon scientists is to induce host tropism into the agent, 
whereby the agent is altered to favor infection of a specific human 
genotype. This seemingly far-fetched concept is already demonstrated by 
certain tropical parasite infections that cause more significant 
infections and sequelae in certain ethnic groups.
    The efforts of the biological terrorist to produce a new threat 
agent can also be assisted by natural events. This scenario is best 
illustrated by current experience with avian influenza in Southeast 
Asia. Since 1998, the pathogenicity of this bird virus has increased as 
has its ability to infect the upper respiratory systems of pigs and 
humans. The result is that infected patients are exposed to a novel, 
highly pathogenic respiratory virus to which their immune system is 
completely naive. The danger of this event is exacerbated by the fact 
that influenza, unlike anthrax, can be transmitted from person to 
person.
    I will summarize this written testimony by reaffirming the concept 
that the dark science of biological weapon design and manufacture 
parallels that of the health sciences and the cross mixed disciplines 
of modern technology. Potential advances in biological weapon lethality 
will in part be the byproduct of peaceful scientific progress. So, 
until the time when there are no more terrorists, the U.S. Government 
and the American people will depend on the scientific leaders of their 
field to identify any potential dark side aspect to every achievement
    Again, I appreciate the opportunity to present this information 
before the Committee. I shall be happy to answer your questions and to 
provide additional documentation supporting the material presented.

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Dr. Callahan, are we getting good access to the labs in the 
former Soviet Union?
    Dr. Callahan. Yes. And what is also critical to know is 
that Dr. Alibek is referring to the production capability, 
which is really 4 to 6 institutions, the Croftburg, Stavuguart, 
and several of the others. But the Russians choose those 
programs--and Ken can talk about this in great detail--based on 
the return on the investment, on the capital investment, some 
large fermentation capability involving multi-story, tens of 
thousands of liter fermenters were used. The Russians also had 
a B plan, though. Those were the very expensive high efficiency 
agents that sat on bench tops, and these--the pace to improve 
the efficiency of these agents remained in single scientific 
labs. And this is one of our critical focus areas is going 
after the former Soviet Union B plans. Short answer, yes, there 
is multiple levels of weaponization, there were multiple levels 
of technical development, and all have benefited from the 
evolution of technology and their migration across 
international borders.

Dr. Callahan. I also need to add in here, working the Avian 
Influenza Syndrome and surveillance program throughout Asia, we 
are critically concerned about Avian Flu. I understand Sue 
Simonson has talked to you. We used the tippy top of the 
international flu community to help understand how to mitigate 
against this threat. It is a catastrophe. And one of the 
biggest evidence of this is that the influenza R&D for 
weaponization is occurring in small chicken farms throughout 
southeast Asia; you can’t forget that. Second point is that the 
co-infection between a normal circulating strain are current 
H3N2 and an H5N1 is statistically extremely probable. And what 
we see with the evolution of influenza in Southeast Asia, be it 
southern China, Hong Kong, the Himalayan region, and we go and 
see these patients and work with these collaborators, we are 
finding it slightly different from each other. That is bad 
news. That means it is not a single point transition, but it is 
a virus trying to find its way. And this is a very important 
point and is a live fire exercise for biological defense of 
this country.

Dr. Callahan. The sad misfortune is that vaccination 
technology is as old as dinner, I mean, it is literally two 
centuries old, and for that reason the technologies to 
vaccinate and protect an underresourced biological weapons 
scientist working in a remote lab are preexisting.
    I will note, though, that vaccines have a certain amount of 
efficacy. Our current vaccines are woefully inadequate, with 
the exception of potentially the smallpox dry vac. Without 
exception, our currently deployed stockpiles of vaccines are 
less effective. We use these vaccines as clinical infectious 
disease doctors protecting our people that go into harm’s way. 
We are not very interested in their long-term efficacy because, 
quite frankly, there is going to be the need for other care.
    So choke points on vaccines are a difficult issue. One of 
the ones that has shown up, though, in the laboratory modeling 
though has not been control of the agents, has not been 
tracking the vaccines, it has been tracking a critical recently 
emerged technology. In this year alone, in the first 4 months 
of 2005, there are 19 papers that have been produced which 
provide heavy, excellent answers for the challenges facing a 
biological weapon scientist working in the Khandalar cave. They 
usually allow them to forego cold chain refrigeration to store 
their agent. That way they could acquire genome in one place 
and put it into an agent to be used for dissemination.
    So certain technologies are a critical choke point. And Dr. 
Brent can probably comment more on that, as can those that are 
tracking technologies and migration around the planet, so I 
will stop there.

I think, Dr. Callahan, you have been very helpful to the 
committee in providing what I would refer to as the seven 
habits of highly effective bioterrorists. The seven 
characteristics that you describe as sine qua non of terrorist 
groups that might want to produce bioweapons, to what extent 
would this phenomenon of the garage hacker, if you will, if it 
is real, defeat our ability to rely on these seven 
characteristics? I mean, would it really require the kind of 
budget, for example--which is one of your seven factors that 
presently it does--would we be able to drill down on these 
preconditions to prevent terrorism, or do we need to rethink 
it.
    Dr. Callahan. Yes. Those are focus areas for interdiction, 
both for the intelligence community and for those that are 
monitoring migration technologies and agents. Using the garage 
hacker as a term, I need to stress that the technologies are 
now being downsized to the point where the laboratories operate 
autonomously. Before the scientific community and the 
biotechnology community was dependent on critical pieces of 
hardware in other institutions, gene chip machines, PCR 
machines, trial fermenters, and these sort of kept these 
programs very integrated for biodefense, or the normal 
construction of our understanding of clinical infectious 
diseases. The problem now is that there is an incredible 
community which is producing technologies, an entrepreneurial 
community which is producing technologies for civilian peaceful 
use that involved the propagation of infectious agents and 
their byproducts that marry medicine and vaccines, biological 
insecticides, fermentation sciences, endermatic control 
systems, and basically countermeasure flocculents and 
environmental mediation systems all use critical elements that 
are downsized. Literally our 30 liter process fermenter weighs 
130 pounds, it is easy to transport with two people.
    So these systems are throughout Africa. We see them all the 
time, they are a normal part of agricultural pesticide 
generating systems.
    There is a key point that I need to also instill on this, 
it is that the biological technology revolution, if you compare 
it to your analogy of the computer revolution, it is not 1965, 
we are in the late 1980s and the speed is picking up. We are 
consistently spending a lot of our attention looking at the 
open source published literature, and it is outpacing the 
Department of Homeland Security’s ability to do threat 
assessment. We can’t read fast enough nor cross-train enough 
for the infectious disease or molecular biologists at the pace 
necessary to determine what is the threat.
    So we are just picking up the big stuff, and we are 
probably about a year behind. We have received several red 
alerts this month alone for publications that will show up next 
month.
    And you mentioned, also, this interesting point about the 
suicide biological weaponeer. What is missing in our calculus, 
with the exception of the intelligence community’s 
contribution, is terrorist intent and what they are willing to 
do. And think of our situation, when we were responsible for 
controlling the public health security of the homeland during 
2003 SARS epidemic, and we have an international airline en 
route from Hong Kong and we get an alert that there are two 
SARS contacts on board. So what do we do? If we have that 
alert, it is a normal public health problem, it is going to 
inconvenience every passenger on that jet while we do contact 
tracing, but imagine if the intent is different and there is no 
alert. Imagine how that changes the response among civilian 
groups. This has been modeled, not by the Americans, but by the 
Europeans, looking at the American economy and the impact on 
our financial centers. And for the reasons that are obvious in 
an open source forum, we can’t go into the specifics, but it is 
intent.
    So an e-mail to The New York Times saying, hey, I have 
already been there and done my coughing versus somebody that 
you catch on the plane, these are very different responses to 
basically the same biological threat, the preexisting live fire 
and natural experience, someone with SARS coming to the U.S. 
that we pick up at the borders, versus someone that doesn’t 
want you to know.

Dr. Callahan. I am intimately involved with the material 
threat assessments and can tell you about their benefits and 
their lessons. The key point here though is, if you step back 
and look at it the way our former enemy looks at it, each of 
these strategies is easy to defeat. We have vaccine-evading 
biological weapons. We have detector-evading biological 
munitions. These systems are currentlySec. 
    Mr. Dicks. So do we do nothing?
    Dr. Callahan. Negative. What happens is, there needs to be 
a paradigm shift with our approach to the problem.
    Dr. Alibek actually has worked and has expertise in 
nonspecific immunomodulators, the way you enhance immune 
response in a way that will bolster nonspecific immunity.
    It is absolutely critical to understand that you might not 
get anthrax, you might get something that is anthrax-like. It 
has the guts and the payload of the anthrax bacillus put inside 
another spore. It will defeat our public health surveillance 
capability because it won’t grow on the right plates in our 
reference labs. It will defeat the clinical diagnostic criteria 
because it may not show up correctly in the hospital labs, and 
it will present, clinically, differences so that you don’t get 
necrotic skin lesions in the injuries.
    So, again, we need to sort of step back and think of an 
integrated approach that involves all elements of our 
scientific discipline, spanning molecular biology, but 
certainly more terrorist intent and understanding the force and 
futures that modulate the strategic thinking to make these 
offensive agents.
    They are agents of terrorism. They want to get away with 
the crime, and they also want to be culpable and say, look what 
we did to you.
    Mr. Dicks. But is anybody doing that actually?
    Dr. Callahan. Think of the subject matter that must have 
been convened by Homeland Security through DHHS in part. What 
happened is that we used an anthrax expert. We used a botulism 
expert. We used a tularemia expert. These people are mono-bug 
people. They have been working all their life with one agent 
and their ability to think like a terrorist in a Kandahar cave 
cannot be replicated by a well-resourced scientist in some 
major academic or biotechnology institution.
    We need to step back and produce a realistic premise for 
the force and features which influence these technologies in 
bringing them together for bad use. So we really need an 
integrated plan. The detectors need to not detect a single 
antigen on an anthrax spore, they need to detect difference in 
change, rapid amplitude escalations we need for the unknown. 
And quite frankly, this has a tremendous return for our public 
health preparedness for avian influenza and the as yet unknown 
infectious diseases that give me job security for next year. 
Nature is working for me.

Mr. Markey. Dr. Callahan, do you think that we have 
adequate security around biohazard storage facilities in the 
United States?
    Dr. Callahan. Yes, I think they have dramatically improved 
in recent years, but they are easily circumvented by the novel 
engineering of a new agent. And getting a new anthrax strain 
out of Texas, South Dakota or Maine, we can have a few in about 
10 days.

So national security and some of the other properties in 
the world go hand-in-hand.
    Dr. Callahan. I would comment only that the natural 
experience of facing a threat agent that you don’t understand, 
we haven’t done very well. If we think back about SARS, that 
was using 2003 technology. It was using some of the most 
resource-rich laboratories around the planet. It took 19 days 
to actually isolate the specific genera of the organism, and 
that came from an electronmicrograph of a patient’s lung.
    By the time we returned to Hong Kong, there were 470 people 
on ventilators, and we were flying ventilators all around in 
Southeast Asia to try to shore up their health care capability, 
which, by the way, is a Western standard.
    So, to your first point, to mitigate against these events, 
an unknown threat agent, we are going to do poorly based on 
what our current success record has been with avian influenza 
in the past, orthopox viruses in the past, particularly the 
recent cow pox from several years ago, and SARS being a crystal 
clear example of our capability when put on the line.
    The second point is, DARPA has been mentioned, as has BII. 
These two extremes of resources have not been capitalized on in 
a major way. The reason why I will suggest to you that we need 
a closer attention here to support the Homeland Security effort 
is because BII in Russia is looking at countermeasures that 
haven’t even been considered by the Western cognition, by the 
American sort of way of thinking. Classic antibiotics and 
vaccines for one bug, nonspecific immune enhancers and 
bolstering the immunity of a population have some principles in 
natural history and, of course, military history.
    The last and final point is that DARPA is certainly one of 
the convening arms for these technologies and needs to be 
supported with subject matter expertise, it needs to be read in 
and integrated.
    This just raises a critical concern because imagine being 
that biotechnology company that you are trying to entice with 
biodefense dollars, and yet your antigen, the thing in the bug 
that you are trying to block, needs to be classified because it 
is so easy to circumvent it if you are a terrorist. So that is 
not the way that science and certainly not the way basic 
science infectious disease has operated.
    So these are some of the dilemmas which are procedural, 
which are policy relevant and involve all the basic science 
community, which is intending to publish, as well as our 
intelligence and medical intelligence communities.
    Thank you.

We heard testimony yesterday on BioShield, and I am 
wondering, first, are we approaching BioShield in a manner that 
the scientific community supports, or are we just putting money 
out there and people are chasing the money? I hope you 
understand what I am saying.
    I will take any answer.
    Dr. Callahan. Clearly, these are large appropriations and 
large allocations, and they entice a lot of competitive grants. 
The trouble is that the best of the experts are oftentimes 
individual scientists in small laboratories and they are 
largely disengaged from the system.
    The second point is, there is a huge resource in the 
biotechnology-for-profit sector. The best of the minds get 
bought away from the academic centers. As opposed to the DHS 
effort, it capitalizes heavily on the national labs, usually 
driven by the need for security clearances and to put big 
fences around things. The trouble is that those shops tend to 
be single shops and they try to keep everybody else out.
    If we are truly mission driven and we are truly trying to 
get the best of the talent at the table, we need to step back a 
little bit to a great review using the best of our review 
capabilities out of NIAID, CDC, DARPA specifically, and 
USAMRID, to find these agents that can really help us with 
this.

Also I am interested in what I understand was some mention 
of broad spectrum antibiotics. Whoever would be best informed 
on those subjects.
    Dr. Callahan. I think that you are hitting a critical 
point, which is that fairly moderate efficiency biological 
weapons gain efficiency when kept contained. They also, if we 
model HVAC systems for indoor air attack and HVAC systems such 
as serving this room, allow for remote delivery of an agent, 
allowing chances for folks to get away.
    The third point, which is very much in evidence in the 
community here, is that buildings tend to house a lot of the 
same type of people, and if those are desirable targets, be it 
military personnel, government officials, school kids, whoever, 
you get a higher return. This is actually modern military 
strategy, it falls into the CARVER-SHOCK analysis.
    So indoor air attack is absolutely critical. The detectors 
are woefully inadequate and the currently deployed ones all 
have device-defeat capability with currently existing 
technology. That is a fact.
    Ms. Norton. Well, if that happened, let us say, in a subway 
car, would you end up shutting down your entire subway system 
for a long time just to decontaminate it? What would be the 
consequences?
    Dr. Callahan. The area denial consequences are vast. The 
current projections right now, for example, if we have another 
SARS event on an airplane, because that happened in Southeast 
Asia, is, you don’t decontaminate the plane, you scrap it.
    With subway systems, the amount of effort that would be 
required to decontaminate those systems to allow for the return 
of public confidence in those systems is so extraordinary, you 
might call upon the cost of the Brentwood postal facility decon 
as an example for that.

Ms. Norton. And I take it, we don’t have any defense at the 
moment against such an attack in a closed system such as a bus 
or subway.
    Dr. Brent. Well, with SARS, no.
    Dr. Callahan. No, and the key point is the migration. 
Remember, these are not conventional high explosive events, 
neither are they really dirty bombs; but these materials, 
particularly if infectious, but also in the case of anthrax 
spores, they are going to migrate. So your contaminated zone, 
how big a yellow circle you draw around the District of 
Columbia, the city of Boston or New York, gets bigger and 
bigger over time. And if these are infected patients, a 
contagious disease such as killer flu or another agent like 
that, then your problems have a tremendous magnitude.
    Ms. Norton. So I take it the problem of infection is even 
worse than the problem of death.
    Dr. Callahan. Oh, absolutely. It is how big a ring you need 
to treat. And also there are huge consequences to treatment. 
There are several people in this room who have been on Cipro 
for 2 months. That had a burden to them, and for clinical 
infectious disease, we are realizing it now.

Dr. Callahan, you talked about the 19 studies that have 
come out this year, talking about the migration and movement of 
these facilities. Would you expand on that?
    Dr. Callahan. Can you restate the question?
    Mr. Linder. You talked earlier about 19 studies you read 
this year about the movement of some of these labs and the 
migration of the expertise.
    Dr. Callahan. Yes, and the tragedy is how difficult it is 
to find a forum outside of Homeland Security and the 
Intelligence Community to share that information. The reports 
come in because they shore up the capability of remotely 
operating terrorists, specifically for small-scale 
laboratories.
    Most of the reports have to do with the new methodology 
which has been proposed by a well-intentioned group which is 
thinking about another problem, the preservation of genomic 
material being a specific example. Then what happens is, they 
go ahead and put it out there, and because of the lack of 
review at the international level and the fact that many of 
these journals are international and Internet-based, that 
allows the information to get out there.
    So there is no single group in the United States at this 
time that is doing formalized reviews, and this is an excellent 
space for the Homeland Security to convene expertise here. The 
closest is the National Bioterrorism Analysis and 
Countermeasures Center, which is a part of Homeland Security, 
based at Fort Detrick.
    But that makes use of highly specific basic scientists. 
Unfortunately, the real space is the convening of all these 
disciplines to help determine the threat waiting, and those 
people are remarkably rare. We have to grow them, in fact.
Mr. Linder. Did you want to comment on that?
    Dr. Brent. I concur.
    Mr. Linder. You also mentioned several times avian flu. Is 
there a way you think that terrorists could expand on that?
    Dr. Callahan. Yes. We find avian influenza disquieting in 
the extreme, and the reasons are basically that most of the 
work is already being done for the terrorists. The second point 
is that the number of countries that are demonstrating cases of 
avian influenza in humans are increasing by the month, 
effectively, as are the number of cases within each of those 
countries.
    Several of those countries have become more difficult to 
work with in recent history because these are economically 
relevant diseases and can stress their economies greatly. I 
call your attention to the reports on 2003 SARS and its impact 
on the Government of China's economy.
    But think also about DPRK. Avian influenza is found on both 
sides of DPRK, and we know it migrates on the wings of birds, 
so you can bet that North Korea has a critical threat to its 
protein stocks. Since one out of three chickens eaten on the 
planet is grown, raised and eaten in China, including in these 
countries, it is a big deal.
    So what do we do about avian influenza? The first thing is, 
we don't know exactly what the final humanized version of avian 
influenza is going to be like. We do have important 
countermeasures from a chemotherapeutic standpoint. These are 
the new inhibitors, drugs that have been on the market for some 
period of time; and it would be technically more difficult--not 
impossible, but more difficult--to clone out or negatively 
select out the resistance of those features.
    So investing in this new class of drug, broadening its 
capability and then, most critically, investing in a fast 
through-put vaccine capability to make this system, to make 
this use of a threat agent less viable, is an appropriate 
investment of resources; and it fits our routine public health 
needs as well as our needs in biodefense.
Mr. Linder. Thank you.
    Mr. Dicks?
    Mr. Dicks. Thank you.
    Just following up on that, Mr. Chairman, you said prepare a 
quick vaccine preparation capability. Is that what you are 
saying?
    Dr. Callahan. Yes.
    Mr. Dicks. Talk about that a little bit. Some of these 
vaccines cost $800 million, or they are very expensive.
    Dr. Callahan. Yes. It is interesting that the production 
cost is actually much smaller. Remember, the majority of these 
vaccines have never been tested with exposure in humans.

Dr. Brent. It should be done by creation of a government 
bioindustrial complex, and likely it should be orchestrated by 
the government, but done by the private sector, which is 
somewhat different from the pharmaceutical biotech private 
sector that exists.
    Dr. Callahan. And critically important to national health 
security is that that be American-owned. Our current vaccines 
are purchased overseas, and we know from working with our close 
European partners that vaccines purchased by the U.S. were not 
available for U.S. use when our own vaccines for the past H3N2 
season became compromised with a contaminant.
    In other words, we own vaccines manufactured in offshore 
locations that can be commandeered by the host countries to 
meet their own emergency public health needs. So that is a 
critical point.
    Mr. Dicks. But who should take the lead on this? HHS?
    Dr. Callahan. HHS is absolutely the source for basic 
science expertise. I believe that the biotechnology sector is 
going to advance this, because their incentives are greater and 
they think very much outside of the box.
    Mr. Dicks. The companies themselves?
    Dr. Callahan. The companies.
    Mr. Dicks. They are going to need some incentive from the 
government to do this, right?
    Dr. Callahan. Indeed, the process for which that could be 
executed is not completely clear at this time.
    Mr. Dicks. Since we have not done these material threat 
assessments and we have this money left in project BioShield, 
the $5.6 billion of which only a small part has been committed, 
should we start using that money? Would that be a possible 
source?
    Dr. Callahan. Creating models that mimic the threat for 
which a technology user and a technology response like a 
company can respond to are absolutely valid ways of testing the 
system, absolutely valid.
    The last point I will just mention is computational. Dr. 
Alibek has talked about this. We can predict mutations that can 
arise in an agent. This involves computational science, which 
is a fairly recent intersect with biotechnology and molecular 
biology.
    But we can take flu and understand the permutations in its 
genome that will happen over time and anticipate in advance our 
vaccines needs. It will not be in production, which commands 
huge investment in our resources, but it can be there as a 
prototype, as a seedling that is ready to go.
    The last point is that the $800 million--which Dr. Brent 
and others can talk about; we all consult with biotechnology 
companies so we understand their perspective--is that, A, they 
are not getting good guidance; B, they find that the BAAs and 
the allocations and appropriations are not very linear for them 
and easy to decipher; and, C, they don’t have the capability to 
test their system and to argue in the marketplace that they 
have the best deal for the government to choose. And the 
discussion of sole-source appropriations, I think, is pertinent 
here as well.

Dr. Alibek. What I want like to say, we need to establish a 
national educational program for biodefense extras in the field 
of nonproliferation, counterterrorism, investigation--
    Mr. Shays. So your point is that in the United States we 
don’t have enough qualified people going into this area?
    Dr. Alibek. We don’t have enough qualified people who would 
be able, let me say, to deal with the more, let me say, 
sophisticated threat.
    Mr. Shays. Let me go to you, Dr. Callahan.
    Dr. Callahan. My only two points in response to that is, 
with regard to the treaties, we can use all of our other 
benefits and attributes of the United States, such as our 
health care, to get out there and to penetrate into the 
countries of concern. Using Russia as a specific example, is 
that we are in almost all the nooks and crannies of the open 
programs in the Ministry of Health, kept out only of the 
Ministry of Defense programs and a couple little shops out in 
the far east of Russia.
    The key point is that those have been driven by strong 
incentives for sustainable value and economic development, 
quite frankly, because we bring Merck and Pfizer with us rather 
than the Department of Defense. We bring money and we bring 
autonomy, and we bring the ability for them to work in a 
private market.
    It is that second group that you talked about, the Ted 
Kaczynski bioweaponeer, someone in the basement who is 
supported by novel technologies, who is going to be the more 
dramatic of the two and make a loud bang in a small place. That 
can happen behind national lines in university laboratories, 
and then there are smaller biotech shops. And that is where the 
intelligence community needs to intersect with the biodefense 
community to provide steering and guidance, because those 
communities remain largely disengaged because of the need for 
clearances and the need to keep your subject matter experts 
operating in open source. Some mechanisms to get a large number 
of people informed for informed research and development to 
mitigate against these threats is absolutely critical.

One thing I would like to kind of get your individual 
thoughts on, everybody pretty much agrees anthrax is kind of 
number one on the list, or something like that--
    Mr. Shays. No. You have got a shaking head here.
    Mr. Thompson. Well, all right. Then give me number one and 
number two, and then I will ask for number three.
    Mr. Shays. Yeah, I want to know that, too.
    Mr. Thompson. So if it is not--
    Dr. Callahan. These are probability estimates. And we are 
all products of our experience in a formal weapons program, in 
molecular biology and technology, and in the remote developing 
countries where you see these diseases all the time.
    I do actually put anthrax up there because of the technical 
challenges; you don’t have to store it, it lives forever, and 
you don’t have to feed it. It is also easy to get because it is 
found in almost every neotropical country that is available. So 
I do actually put anthrax up there. And there is also a great 
cache with it right now; it is easy to recognize in all of the 
cultures in the world, including terrorist cultures. And also 
it has huge public health importance in countries of concern 
because it kills a lot of meat stock. It is a huge pathogen in 
veterinarian populations. It happens in areas there.
    After that, I am going to go to avian influenza. And this 
is another wild-type agent, meaning naturally occurring agent, 
which could be commandeered and used for ill purposes. And it 
is a great example where you will have tremendous impact in 
undermining of confidence, for which you do not have an 
effective disease, and for which you will have guaranteed 
contagion and transmission, so that would be number two.
    Third would be the moderately engineered pathogens, those 
that are hardened to survive in sunlight and survive in low-
halogen environments. They make them difficult to decon.
    And after that, we are going to get into much more 
complicated agents, and then go back to those zoological 
pathogens, such as Glanders and those that will affect your 
agriculture reserves and meat stocks.