They may or may not count. But at least to some degree the future is ours to compose. Some of the major struggles before us are clear. Among the principal challenges of our generation is the imperative need to manage the adverse consequences of the powerful technologies we have created. At the top of this list are nuclear and biological weapons.
Biological weapons are in the world.
And there is evidence that at least in Iraq bioweapons may have been used on a small scale there. What has been largely overlooked in the complaints about the lack of a quantitative threat analysis, and arguments about how many microbiologists a terrorist must know to build a truly scary weapon, is the trajectory of biological science in these times. As George Poste said in his remarks, we are on the threshold of the age of big biology. The momentum and pace of this Cambrian explosion of biological knowledge are prodigious. And as our understanding of molecular biology expands, as we develop the ability to manipulate cellular processes, we will also inevitably create the tools to build more varied and more powerful biological weapons.