The Role Of Governments

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Most of the emphasis in this report has been on the "bottom up" approach that so far characterizes most of the efforts to expand the attention given to dual use issues in life sciences education. Participants also discussed how important some forms of "top down" support from governments would be to complement and help sustain the "bottom up" activities and initiatives. Perhaps the most obvious role, given the many needs identified during the course of the workshop, is financial support.

The sums are not very large relative to other expenditures, for example, on science education, and certainly not relative to the expenditures that a few nations such as the United States are making in biodefense. But over the next several years they are likely to make the difference in whether the promising initiatives expanded by the workshop participants, can be increased and, just as important, sustained. Governments can play other roles in encouraging education about dual use issues. The United States offers a number of examples. As cited in Chapter 1, the 2009 National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats gives a prominent role ...
... to scientists to foster and sustain a culture of responsibility. The NSABB has offered general guid- ance through its Strategic Framework for Outreach and Education on Dual Use Issues. Since the 1990s the NIH has made RCR education a requirement for all student traineeships and postdoctoral fellowships, although it does not prescribe how the training will be carried out nor collect data on the number of students actually trained. The require- ment announced in 2009 by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that all undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who receive NSF support to do their research must receive RCR education is an even broader mandate. The Select Agent Program that regulates research with a list of biological agents and toxins has requirements for laboratory security training, and there are proposals to expand this to include broader concepts of responsible conduct and personnel management

As already mentioned, the NSABB and the U.S. State Department (reflecting wider interagency agreement) have proposed that educa- tion about dual use issues be mandatory. Participants in the Warsaw workshop, as in other international discus- sions, disagreed about the advisability and feasibility of imposing an educational requirement. The major advantage cited was the pressure this would provide to overcome the many barriers and impediments to expanding education beyond the current limited base. Some of the resistance to the idea was philosophical, reflecting a general objection to such government requirements. Some of the resistance was practical-given the current lack of faculty and materials, there was concern that mandates could not be successfully implemented. A few participants also noted that education in some countries is so clearly the responsibility of local or state/regional governments that national mandates would be futile. And as described above, for some the wide array of methods by which courses are developed and adopted nationally, from the local and informal to the highly centralized, underscored the need to be flexible and to produce materials that can be adapted to a range of circumstances, even within a particular country.

Some participants also suggested other ways in which governments could encourage broader adoption of education on dual use issues short of a general mandate, such as by linking such education to funding agency requirements in ways analogous to the NIH and NSF RCR requirements that would target key audiences, or by using the accreditation process or other legal structures that govern degree requirements in some countries. Some participants suggested that research funders consider incentives as well as requirements, such as funding innovative efforts to train faculty or develop resources.

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