Al-Qaeda seeks toxins for biowarfare attack

THE international pursuit of Osama Bin Laden has not stopped his Al-Qaeda network from seeking to build weapons of mass destruction, senior US officials said last week. Recent intelligence indicates that the group is turning its attention to chemical and biological weapons. Despite severe technical obstacles to the launch of terrorist biowarfare, Washington believes Bin Laden has become convinced that only a WMD attack would be sufficient punishment for the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The overwhelming bulk of the evidence we have is that their efforts are focused on biological and chemical weapons,” said John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control.

Intelligence services in Egypt and Israel confirmed that Al-Qaeda had stepped up its efforts to acquire toxic materials as a result of the war in Iraq.

“They will use it unless stopped,” concluded one intelligence report handed to Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, last November.

American concern has been magnified by a series of intelligence and other reports warning that rapid advances in biotechnology could be exploited by terrorist groups seeking lethal bioweapons. “The technology for bio and chem is comparatively so much easier that that’s where their efforts are concentrating,” Bolton added.

In a study entitled The Darker Bioweapons Future, a CIA panel concluded that artificially engineered biological agents could prove “worse than any disease known to man”. The report said: “The same science that may cure some of our worst diseases could create the world’s most frightening weapons.”

Experts believe Al-Qaeda still lacks the laboratory access and scientific skills to produce weapons. But some of the administration’s scientific advisers have warned that the necessary technology is rapidly spreading. Some of it is even taught at undergraduate level.

“It seems likely that, over a period between a few months and a few years, broadly skilled individuals equipped with modest laboratory equipment can develop biological weapons,” said Richard Danzig, a biowarfare consultant to the Pentagon.

Other US officials suspect Bin Laden may be planting his acolytes in university science departments in the same way that he sent the September 11 hijackers to US flying schools.

“This is a guy who thinks long-term,” said one senior Washington source. “We have to learn to think like him.”

Suspicion that Bin Laden is increasingly focusing on WMD was heightened by reports last October that he had sought permission from a well-known Saudi Arabian theologian for an attack that would cause mass American casualties.

Bin Laden’s approach is said to have resulted in the publication of a religious decree entitled “Rules for the use of WMD against the infidels”. It was issued by Sheikh Nasser bin Hamad al-Fahd, who is currently under arrest in Riyadh.

Not all scientists believe a group such as Al-Qaeda will ever master biowarfare technologies. The main fear is that a rogue scientist may be prepared to sell his expertise.

“The people that I worry about are the lone operators, the scientist who is disgruntled, deranged or just bought off,” said Raymond Zilinskas, a Pentagon biowarfare consultant at the California-based Centre for Non-proliferation Studies.

“The probability of you or I dying from a terrorist bioweapon is smaller than our being eaten by a shark, but that is not to say we shouldn’t worry about it.”

American and British intelligence agencies have already confirmed Al-Qaeda’s interest in chemical experiments. Training videos were found in Afghanistan indicating that enough cyanide had been produced to kill several dogs.

“Only a thin wall of terrorist ignorance and inexperience now protects us,” said Danzig.

This is only a small part of Cuba's labs, they are building several new ones, there are reports of the biochems they manufacture, but this is today's news from the Google Groups Cuba group.

Topic in soc.culture.cuba
(in Google Groups)

The Cuban
Biotech
Revolution

Bromselick
Jan 3, 7:56 am show
options

The Cuban Biotech Revolution

Embargo or no, Castro's socialist paradise has quietly
become a pharmaceutical
powerhouse.

By Douglas Starr

The end of the cold war was cruel to Cuba. The
country's trading partners,
denied Soviet largesse, dried up. Hard cash ran low.
What food the country
could grow languished in the fields; trucks didn't
have enough gasoline to
bring the crops to market. And of course there was
the US embargo.

What Cubans call "the Special Period" produced one
notable success:
pharmaceuticals. In the wake of the Soviet collapse,
Cuba got so good at making
knockoff drugs that a thriving industry took hold.
Today the country is the
largest medicine exporter in Latin America and has
more than 50 nations on its
client list. Cuban meds cost far less than their
first-world counterparts, and
Fidel Castro's government has helped China,
Malaysia, India, and Iran set up
their own factories: "south-to-south technology
transfer."

Yet at the same time as they were selling generics,
the science-heroes of the
Cuban Revolution were inventing. Castro made
biotechnology one of the building
blocks of the economy, and that has opened the door
- just a crack - to
intellectual property. To date his researchers have
been granted more than 100
patents, 26 of them in the US. Now they're setting
their sights on the markets
of the West.

After the 1959 revolution, Cuba made it a priority to
find new ways to care for
a poor population; part of the solution was training
doctors and researchers.
Cuba currently exports thousands of doctors to
impoverished countries and
caters to an influx of "health tourists," mostly rich
Africans and Latin
Americans seeking cheap, high-quality care.

In 1981, half a dozen Cuban scientists went to
Finland to learn to synthesize
the virus-fighting protein interferon. Castro sent them
with money for a
shopping spree. They brought back a lab's worth of
equipment and took over a
white stucco guesthouse in the Havana suburbs; a
decade later, Cuba was the
pharmacy of the Soviet bloc and third world. Most
trade took the form of
barter, and development experts estimate that by the
early '90s the business
was worth more than $700 million a year.

"And then, almost from a Monday to a Tuesday," says
Carlos Borroto, vice
director of the Cuban Center for Genetic Engineering
and Biotechnology (known
as CIGB in Spanish), "the Soviet Union collapsed."
Cuba lost all its credit, 80
percent of its foreign trade, and a third of its food
imports.

Faced with economic calamity, Castro did something
remarkable: He poured
hundreds of millions of dollars into pharmaceuticals.
No one knows how - Cuba's
economy, with its secrecy and centralized structure,
defies market analysis.
One beneficiary was Concepcion Campa Huergo,
president and director general of
the Finlay Institute, a vaccine lab in Havana. She
developed the world's first
meningitis B vaccine, testing it by injecting herself
and her children before
giving it to volunteers. "I remember one day telling
Fidel that we needed a new
ultracentrifuge, which costs about $70,000," Campa
says. "After five minutes of
listening he said, 'No. You'll need 10.'"

Campa and her colleagues still have to scrimp and
scrounge. Labs are filled
with gear from Europe, Japan, and Brazil. The
occasional device from the US has
traveled the "long way around" - through so many
middlemen (and markups) that
it may well have circled the globe. Scientists develop
their own reagents,
enzymes, tissue cultures, and virus lines. Each
institute has its own
production facility and conducts clinical trials through
the state-run hospital
system.

Still, if pharma is to become an economic engine,
Cuban researchers acknowledge
that they'll have to join the international business
community. South-to-south
transfers simply don't raise enough cash. That's
where things get complicated.

Forty years after it began, Washington's embargo
remains a punishing weapon.
Not only are US companies banned from doing
business with Cuba, but so are
their foreign subsidiaries. No freighter that visits a
Cuban port may dock in
the US for the next six months. For a Cuban product
to reach US companies, the
makers have to prove a "compelling national interest"
to the US Office of
Foreign Assets Control. Consolidation in the drug
industry has made things
worse, says Ismael Clark, president of the Cuban
Academy of Sciences. "You'd
have a supplier for several years, and suddenly you'd
get a letter from the
company saying, 'We can't supply you anymore
because our firm was bought by an
American transnational.'"

The country has taken a few steps toward bridging
the gap. The American drug
company SmithKline Beecham (now part of a British
transnational) got permission
to license Campa's meningitis B vaccine in 1999. The
terms of the deal are
restrictive. SmithKline pays Cuba in products during
clinical trials (now in
Phase II in Belgium) and in cash only if the drug
proves to be viable.

In July, CancerVax, a California-based biotech
company, got federal approval to
test a Cuban vaccine that stimulates the immune
system against lung cancer
cells. CancerVax is the first US business to receive
such approval. CancerVax
staffers saw the research at an international
conference, and then spent two
years lobbying Capitol Hill and Cuban-American
interest groups.

Still, naïveté remains the real obstacle to a Cuban
biotech century. Fidel's
pharmacists lack slick brochures and golden-tongued
sales staff. Foreigners
tend to find Cuba overly bureaucratic, especially when
closing a deal.

"They just don't get capitalism," a diplomat tells me
over coffee in Boston.
"The elite may watch American TV and read The Wall
Street Journal on the Web,
so they have a conversational familiarity. But on a
fundamental level they
don't get it and don't want to get it. They still think
there's something
immoral about profit."

Borroto, of CIGB, remembers talking to colleagues
about using patents to
protect their expanding market. That was the moment
Castro decided to pop into
the lab. "What's all this about patents? You're
sounding crazy!" he said. "We
don't like patents, remember?"

Borroto stood his ground. "Even if you're giving
medicine to the third world,"
he said, "you still need to protect yourself."

Borroto knew he had to get better at the game. He
sent his staff to Canada to
get MBAs, to learn the language of capitalism. Yet
concepts like venture
capital still escape him. "I can't understand how 80
percent of the biotech
companies in the world make money without selling
any products," he says. "How
do they do this? Hopeness," he guesses, using a
neologism to stress the
absurdity. "They sell hopeness."

Asked for an annual report - a basic necessity of
international business -
Agustin Lage, director of the Center for Molecular
Immunology, merely says,
"You know, we've actually been meaning to produce
one." Then he smiles and
shrugs.

It's like Castro said: They don't really like patents.
They like medicine.
Cuba's drug pipeline is most interesting for what it
lacks: grand-slam
moneymakers, cures for baldness or impotence or
wrinkles. It's all cancer
therapies, AIDS medications, and vaccines against
tropical diseases.

That's probably why US and European scientists have
a soft spot for their Cuban
counterparts. Everywhere north of the Florida Keys,
once-magical biotech has
become just another expression of venture-driven
capitalism. Leave it to the
Cubans to make it revolutionary again.

Douglas Starr (dst...@bu.edu) is codirector of the
Center for Science and
Medical Journalism at Boston University.

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