Quotes of the Day
Two years after that day in September, the nation is still worried about terrorism. At the airports we're taking off our shoes, at work we're flashing our badges, and at home we're making sure the duct tape is where we can find it in the dark. But these rituals seem inadequate for coping with some truly terrifying scenarios: "dirty bombs" slipped into the country, a smallpox outbreak. Well, there's help on the way. A variety of companies and laboratories, some fostered by Washington, are rushing to produce technologies that address our deepest post-9/11 fears. Many will come on line in the next year or two. The effort recalls the last time we launched a concerted attempt to resist a mortal threat: World War II's Manhattan Project, which produced the Bomb. This time the enemy is murkier and the battle more diffuse. "There isn't going to be one big breakthrough, one killer app," warns Katrina Heron, former editor of Wired, who along with David Kuhn is co-editing a book for HarperCollins on science and technology in the age of terrorism. "There isn't going to be a Los Alamos."
She's right — there will be many, many Los Alamos — type projects spearheaded by various teams of scientists and engineers seeking to head off a mind-numbing array of potential threats. This much you can count on: some will be elaborate but ineffectual (can you say Maginot Line?), some will be all hype, but some will improve our sense of safety. Because terrorists can pick targets anywhere, counterterrorism has to defend everywhere — from airports to office buildings to cargo ships to hospitals. Sept. 11 shed an urgent light on our vulnerabilities and galvanized us to protect ourselves with something better than duct tape. So get ready for the next wave of high-tech defense: radiation detectors, Internet safeguards, handheld anthrax "sniffers." There's no panacea, but in a world of ancient hatreds, modern shields still have their uses. Here's what's next in three key areas:
|
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
AIRPORTS Expect more big changes at the nation's air terminals — probably at the security checkpoints. The screening devices that currently check your bag and the beeping gateways you walk through are best at finding suspicious metal objects only. Soft explosives, such as plastique, can slip right through. In an age of suicide bombers, that's a fatal shortcoming. But as early as this November, L-3 Communications, a New York City manufacturer of screening devices, expects to demonstrate a machine that uses "millimeter microwave" technology, similar to what the military already uses to "see through" walls, to examine passengers for known explosives anywhere on their bodies. Even soft explosives show up. Why has this obvious safeguard taken so long to appear? "Until 9/11, no one believed that a bomber would get on the plane with his bomb," says Frank Lanza, the company's CEO. "Everyone assumed he would check the explosive in his luggage and stay off the flight."
As for that checked luggage, airport devices that inspect it now use X rays and C.T. scans to signal the possible presence of explosives. If they turn up something suspicious, a human handler has to open the suitcase and poke around inside — a time-consuming effort that can delay flights. But within the next year, InVision, a Newark, Calif., manufacturer of baggage-screening devices, plans to begin selling machines that marry existing baggage scanners with devices that use "X-ray diffraction" technology. When a bag is found to contain something suspicious, the specialized scanners can zoom in on the indicated area and analyze the suspect materials to determine their chemical composition, all with the suitcase closed.
BIOTERRORISM This is the area where our defenses most need a quick fix. Smallpox vaccines haven't improved much since the 1960s. Until 9/11, few drug companies felt the economic impetus to develop costly antidotes to all-but-conquered infections and ailments. Viagra was a sexier sell. Smallpox was considered to be a "market you hope will never exist," says Alan Goldhammer of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.
President Bush kick-started the effort to improve our medical defenses against biowarfare by launching Project BioShield last January. Its aim is to make Washington the guaranteed buyer for vaccines and drugs to combat bioterrorism. If it gets under way next month as planned — Senate passage still awaits — billions of federal dollars will be available to develop, purchase and stockpile those drugs over the next 10 years. The exact dollar amount remains unclear, but when the House approved Project BioShield in July by a vote of 421-2, it moved to cap the figure at $5.6 billion over 10 years, not the $6 billion Bush had first sought.
That sounds like a lot of cash, but when it can cost, say, $900 million to develop just one drug, according to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, the money goes fast. The standard drug-approval process poses a problem, and Washington hopes to reduce the time and expense by simplifying the approval process for pharmaceuticals useful against bioterrorism. Because things like radiation poisoning or plague occur rarely, it's difficult to find human subjects to test new cures. The FDA has eased the rules for bioterrorism-related drugs, allowing tests for effectiveness to be conducted entirely on animals, though a human test to establish safety is still required.
Some companies are making progress with vaccines and treatments. Anacor Pharmaceuticals, a Palo Alto, Calif., start-up launched in 2001 with $21.6 million of Pentagon and venture-capital money, is conducting animal tests for antibiotics to treat anthrax and other bioterrorism agents. And DynPort, a company based in Frederick, Md., has developed a faster-acting anthrax vaccine that by next year is expected to complete Phase I clinical trials, in which a substance is tested on healthy volunteers to evaluate its safety in increased doses. Current anthrax vaccines require 18 injections over six months. That's too slow to defend against a sudden widespread outbreak or to permit people to return safely to contaminated homes and workplaces, where spores may linger for years.
A few months ago, DynPort moved a new smallpox vaccine through a Phase I test — a hurdle that several other companies have also cleared in recent months with their own vaccines. And the company's vaccinia immune globulin, VIG, which has completed the second of its three Phase I trials, could make smallpox vaccines more useful by countering their potentially dangerous effects, which include infection and even death.
Other companies are working out ways to limit the wave of terrorism that a bio-attack could set in motion. At Los Alamos and at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., scientists have developed an air-quality testing unit the size of an ATM. When installed in subway stations, airports, arenas or convention centers, these devices sample the air and submit it to tests in a self-contained laboratory. Within an hour, they can report the presence of anthrax, smallpox or other pathogens.
In our just-in-time society, that may not seem like a lightning response. But it's far better than allowing the invisible killers to linger undetected for days, exposing ever more people to infection. Also, it makes it possible for newly infected people to seek prompt treatment. "You can usually treat things like anthrax fairly well within the first day," says Richard Langlois, senior biomedical scientist at Livermore. "Once you have symptoms, it's very difficult."
PORT SECURITY Few scenarios fray the nerves of counterterrorism planners more than the prospect of someone sneaking a nuclear warhead such as a dirty bomb aboard a cargo container headed for a U.S. port. For a nation that took in more than 7 million pieces of container freight last year, the security challenges are awesome. To ensure that those containers aren't used to smuggle in nuclear terrorism, U.S. customs agents often track ships before they leave foreign ports, using computers to keep tabs on their cargo. Some containers have electronic lids that will indicate if they have been tampered with en route. And when suspect vessels approach U.S. ports, the Coast Guard can intercept and examine them.
All the same, "the ports and sea cargo are our most vulnerable areas right now," says Lester Boeh, a vice president of Varian Medical Systems in Palo Alto, Calif. Varian produces high-energy X-ray systems that the company says can penetrate 17 inches of steel, giving customs inspectors a view of what's hidden behind the thick walls of a cargo container. Another company, NucSafe, in Oak Ridge, Tenn., is producing radiation sensors that determine whether suspicious items within a cargo container might be dangerous. The scanners irradiate the cargo, and NucSafe's sensors read the "signature" that is sent back.
An important next step would be to make the detection technologies faster and smaller. At Livermore, scientists developed and recently licensed a device called RadScout. Designed to detect trace amounts of radiation, it's a battery-powered, lunch-box-size handheld detector that customs officers could use to inspect suspicious containers at close range. Bruce Goodwin, head of the lab's nuclear-weapons program, says he hopes to see future versions of the device no bigger than a pen and "cheap enough so that every cop can have one."
Will these innovations make us safer? Don't forget that Maginot Line. And with terrorists, it's a never-ending contest. We close the old gaps; they probe for new ones. They thrust; we parry. In some ways, we've only just entered the fight. If nothing else, we'll soon be better armed.
- Richard Lacayo