WASHINGTON: One of the grand old men of biodefense, Dr. Matthew Meselson, left his Harvard lab and came to Washington to call for greater international cooperation in monitoring new diseases, whether they arise in the wild or in the lab. The Department of Homeland Security’s process for reviewing potentially dangerous research, he said at an event hosted yesterday by the Federation of American Scientists, was a model on which to build across the US government and world-wide.

Asked whether Republicans in Congress would tolerate anything that smacks of arms control, Meselson said that international cooperation was the only way to safeguard the country against biological threats. “We’re protecting against a devastating epidemic that comes out of China and kills all the Americans,” he said, referring to the recent outbreaks — bird flu (H5N1) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) — that have started in Asia. “Infectious agents don’t stop at frontiers, they don’t have passports.” Keep reading →