6th EMBO/EMBL Conference on Science and Society
Science and Security

Empowerment and constriction in scientific communication Philip Campbell Editor in Chief, Nature, UK

Central to the freedom to conduct research is the freedom to disseminate and access information. This talk will focus on the changing nature of scientific communication enabled by the internet and the threats to dissemination arising on the grounds of security concerns.
I will anticipate changes to the internet and its functionality and to the types of content by which researchers communicate and work with each other. There has been much agonising in the US government about what types of restriction might make sense in connection with specific publications that have caused alarm. I will review incidents in which publications became the focus of government scrutiny. I will also discuss restrictions proposed by various people outside government.

Dr Philip Campbell has been the Editor-in-Chief of Nature since December 1995.

He has a BSc in aeronautical engineering from the University of Bristol (1969-72), an MSc in astrophysics from Queen Mary College, University of London (1972-74), and a PhD in upper atmospheric physics from the University of Leicester (1974-79). Following postdoctoral research, he worked at Nature from 1979 to 1988, first as Assistant Editor (Physical Sciences) and then as Physical Sciences Editor (1981-88).
He was the founding editor of Physics World, published by the UK’s Institute of Physics, from 1988 until his return to Nature as its Editor-in-Chief in 1995. He is a director of the Nature Publishing Group, having overall responsibility for the editorial quality of all Nature publications.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society (1979) and a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (1995). He was awarded an honorary DSc by Leicester University in 1999, and was the first person to be given the European Science Writers Award by the Euroscience Foundation, a prize inaugurated in 2001.
His publications include scientific papers, and countless articles in Physics World and Nature. He has written many articles for general publications such as national newspapers, New Scientist and The Economist, and has frequently been interviewed for the BBC in the UK and on the World Service. In 1999 he was an adviser to the UK government’s Office of Science and Technology on the public consultation on the regulation of biosciences and biotechnology. He is a trustee of Cancer Research UK.

Under his editorship, Nature has won several prestigious publishing awards from the Periodical Publishers’ Association, including International Magazine of the Year (1998). Nature’s circulation has grown continuously since 1996,and has the highest impact factor of multidisciplinary journals.

Recognising persons by their iris patterns: 200 billion iris comparisons John Daugman Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK

Iris recognition provides real-time, high confidence identification of persons by analysis and encoding of the random patterns that are visible within the iris of an eye from some distance.
Because the iris is a protected, internal organ whose random texture is epigenetic and stable over life, it can serve as a living password or passport that one need not remember but is always in one's possession. Recognition decisions are made with confidence levels high enough to support rapid exhaustive searches through national-sized databases. The principle that underlies these algorithms is the failure of an efficient test of statistical independence involving more than 200 degrees-of-freedom, based on phase sequencing each iris pattern with quadrature 2D wavelets. Different persons always pass this test of statistical independence, but images from the same iris almost always fail this test of independence. The combinatorial complexity of phase sequences enables operation always in one-to-many "identification" mode, which is more demanding and useful than just one-to-one "verification" mode in which each person must always first assert an identity that is then merely verified.
The benefit is cardless, PIN-less, hands-free identification, with database search speeds of about 1 million persons per second per CPU. The search engine is intrinsically parallel, and allows parallelisation to national scales. Data will be presented in this talk from 200 billion iris cross-comparisons between different eyes. The database consisted of 632,500 iris images acquired in the United Arab Emirates, in a national border-crossing security programme that uses the Daugman algorithms for iris recognition. A total of 152 different nationalities were represented in this database, which is the largest iris database in the world. Statistical analysis of the 200 billion iris cross-comparisons allows conclusions to be drawn about the numerical decision policies that should be implemented in large-scale identity searches using these algorithms, both to ensure the absence of False Matches and to calculate confidence levels, given the size of an enrolled database and the frequency of independent searches across it.

John Daugman received his degrees at Harvard University in the USA and then taught in the Harvard faculty before coming to Cambridge University, UK. He has held visiting Professorships at the University of Groningen (the Johann Bernoulli Chair) and the Tokyo Institute of Technology (the Toshiba Endowed Chair). His current areas of research and teaching are Computer Vision, Statistical Pattern Recognition, Information Theory, and Neural Computing. Dr Daugman is the inventor of iris recognition - the automatic identification of persons by the random patterns visible in the iris from a distance of up to a meter - and his algorithms are used in all current deployments of this biometric identification method.
His iris recognition algorithms won the Information Technology Award and Medal of the British Computer Society, the “Millennium Product” Award of the UK, the Smithsonian Award USA, and the “Time 100” Innovators Award.

Forensic human individualization from biometric data Didier Meuwly Project Manager, Netherlands Forensic Institute, The Hague, The Netherlands

The aim of this presentation is to convey the progress in forensic research towards developing and validating a logical inference framework – based on likelihood ratios – for individualization of humans from biometric data. As it is independent from the particular biometric used, the framework can be applied to the various biometric data that are present in forensic trace material, e.g. fingerprints, the characteristics of the face, speech and the shape of the ears.
At the end of the 19th century, the pioneers of forensic science developed forensic anthropometry and dactyloscopy. In so doing, they ushered in the usage of biometric data for human individualization. Following that, the development of computer technology gave rise to the automated capture of biometric data, their comparison and their discrimination or classification. The field of forensics has contributed to this technological evolution via the development of automatic fingerprint identification systems (AFIS) in the 70’s and, from 1985 onwards, to the development of the human individualization based on DNA-profiles. Individualization via DNA-profiles has significantly contributed to the development and use of this logical inference framework, which is based on Bayesian likelihood ratios.
Current forensic research focuses on the integration of various biometric technologies such as speaker recognition, face recognition and the ear recognition. There are many challenges, from feature selection to
scalability, but a crucial one is to develop a uniform inference framework to quantify the weight of different pieces of evidence.
This presentation will describe the inference framework currently used in forensic research, and describe the efforts that have been made towards its empirical validation in the fields of speaker recognition, fingerprint recognition and DNA profiling.

Didier Meuwly was born in 1968 in Fribourg, Switzerland. After a classical education (Latin/philosophy) in Fribourg, he graduated from the School of Forensic Science (IPS) of the University of Lausanne. From 1993 to 2000 he was research assistant at the IPS, where he obtained his PhD in the field of forensic automatic speaker recognition.
From 1999 to 2002 he was responsible for the biometric research group of the IPS, developing a research activity in the fields of fingerprint detection, forensic automatic speaker recognition and information technology. During this period he also taught a pre- and postgraduate course on human individualization.
From 2002 to 2004, he was a senior forensic scientist within the digital technology research group of the Forensic Science Service (FSS), an executive agency of the British Home Office, where his research activity was focused on the development of forensic services based on biometric data (speech, fingerprint and DNA).
Since July 2004, he has been a project manager within the chemistry department of the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI). He is currently responsible for a national research project on forensic individualization based on fingerprint statistics.
He is a founding member of 2 working groups of the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes (ENFSI): the Forensic Speech and Audio Analysis Working Group (FSAAWG) – founded in 1997 – and the European Fingerprint Working Group (EFPWG) – founded in 2000. He is also a member of the International Fingerprint Research Group (IFRG) and of the UK Government Biometric Working Group (UK gov-BWG).

Watching you - Humanity hurtles toward total surveillance David Shenk Freelance journalist and book writer, USA

With all possible speed we are hurtling toward constant electronic scrutiny of the enemy and of ourselves. Increasingly, ours is a world of ID checks, surveillance cameras, body scans, fingerprint databases, email
sifters, and cell phone interceptors designed to ensure that electronic trails don't grow cold. Add to that more mundane gadgets like nanny-cams, wireless heart monitors, swipe-in school and workplace IDs, and E-ZPass, and one begins to get a whiff of an emerging electronic vigilance, an everexamined, ever-watched landscape of Total Surveillance.
Total Surveillance is inevitable. Given that, what are the implications for civil liberties and for democracy? How can technologists and policymakers work together so that privacy intrusions are minimized and security is maximized?

David Shenk is an award-winning, national-bestselling author of four books, and a contributor to National Geographic, Harper’s, National Public Radio, Gourmet, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Wired, and The American Scholar. He has written about music, technology, food, politics, bioethics, the brain, corporate malfeasance and kids’ toys.
In November, 2003, he wrote the National Geographic cover story, “Watching You: The World of High-Tech Surveillance.”
His most recent book, “The Forgetting” (Doubleday, 2001), won First Prize in the British Medical Association’s Popular Medical Book Awards, and was called “A remarkable addition to the literature of the science of the mind,” by The Los Angeles Times Book Review.
“Data Smog” (HarperCollins, 1997) was hailed by The New York Times as an “indispensable guide to the big picture of technology’s cultural impact.” The book, profiled on 60 Minutes, was named a finalist for the McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communication Policy. In 1998, Shenk cofounded
“Technorealism,” a movement encouraging balanced consideration of technology’s effects on humanity. “The end of Patience” (Indiana University Press, 1999), a collection of Shenk’s essays and commentaries was praised by Sven Birkerts as, “Exhilarating to read...a startling glimpse of where we are.” Earlier on, he co-wrote “Skeleton Key” (Doubleday, 1994) with Steve Silberman.
He was raised in Ohio, graduated from Brown University in Rhode Island in 1988, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two children. His next book is a social history of chess.

Under the new US-VISIT programme started in 2004, all foreigners travelling to the US on visas must be fingerprinted and photographed. In addition, from 26 October 2005 all citizens from countries that are part of the Visa Waiver Program (including most of the EU-15 countries, Australia and Japan), must posses a passport with biometric features such as digital photographs or fingerprints if they want to enter the US without a visa.
As a consequence, from 2005, all EU countries have begun to work on the introduction of biometric data into newly-issued passports. Germany will be one of the first nations in Europe to issue biometric passes, starting from 1 November. The new passport, valid for 10 years, will include an embedded RFID (radio frequency identification) chip that will initially store a digital photo of the passport holder's face. Starting in March 2007, the holder's left and right index fingerprints will also be stored on the chip. Germany's new biometric passports are based on specifications approved by the New Technologies Working Group of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). The ICAO specifications call for a "globally interoperable" biometric system based on facial recognition – rather than fingerprinting or iris scanning – as the baseline biometric for machine-assisted identity confirmation with passports, visas and identity cards.

INTERPOL plays an increasingly important role in strengthening countries' defences against the counterfeiting of documents. INTERPOL’s Stolen Travel Documents Database contains details of more than one and a half million travel documents from 40 countries. The information is available to all of Interpol's 181 member countries through the organization's Command and Co-ordination Centre in Lyon, France. With the introduction of biometrics passports in different countries, the INTERPOL Database will probably include also biometrics information.
The developments cited above are certainly not without polemics. Studies from across Europe are casting doubt on the efficacy, validity and cost implications of biometric passport and identity card policies, and European Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini has written to the US Congress asking for the deadline to be delayed until August 2006.
In my presentation will explain the functioning of the globally interoperable biometric system, its pros and cons and its possible future developments.

A forensic expert on documents and handwriting, Ivanka Spadina was appointed as Project Manager of the Interpol Stolen Travel Documents Database (STD) Project at the beginning of 2005. The project aims at implementing integrated solutions that enable first line law enforcement officers or governmental officers to access Interpol databases.
She joined the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) in June 2000, as forensic analyst in the Counterfeits and Security Documents Branch of the Operational Police Support. Since September 2000, she is also a member of the ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) New Technologies Working Group, which aims at developing international standards for the use of biometrics for machine-readable passports. Before joining Interpol, she worked for nine years as forensic expert at the Forensic Institute of the Ministry of the Interior in Zagreb, Croatia.
Born in Zagreb, Croatia, she graduated in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Mechanical Engineering and Naval Architecture in Zagreb.

Governance of research – The international dimension Terence Taylor President and Executive Director, International Institute for Strategic Studies, USA

The rapid advances in the life sciences, while clearly bringing enormous benefits, have raised concerns among legislators and the public, who feel that ethical boundaries are put under pressure. This is further complicated by security concerns that in their application the advances might be misused by terrorists or even by some governments for weapons programmes. An explicit effort needs to be made by the multi-disciplinary science community to understand fully the risks involved and to explain them to the public in a balanced and objective way. Only by doing this can we ensure that public confidence in this scientific area is not undermined, and that sensible and practical regulations are developed and effectively implemented where they are needed. This effort needs to be conducted at an international level and requires leadership from the scientific community itself, if governments are to have any chance of enhancing public safety and security against risks arising from natural or man-made causes. Support for a new organisation, the International Council of the Life Sciences, effectively a ‘network of networks’, would be an important contribution to achieving this objective.

Terence Taylor is President and Executive Director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies - US (IISS-US), and Assistant Director of the IISS in London. He leads the Institute’s project on the International Council of the Life Sciences. His research focuses on international security policy, risk analysis, scientific and technological developments and their impact on political and economic stability worldwide. He is one of the Institute’s leading experts on issues associated with nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and their means of delivery, and is responsible for all issues affecting public safety and security in relation to biological risks and advances in the life sciences.

Terence Taylor was one of the Commissioners to the UN Special Commission on Iraq, for which he also conducted missions as Chief Inspector. As a Research Fellow on the Science Program at the Center for International Security and Co-operation at Stanford University, he carried out studies on the implications for government and industry of the treaties and agreements on weapons of mass destruction. He has also carried out consultancy work for the International Committee of the Red Cross on the implementation and development of the laws of armed conflict, and for private companies on political risk analysis (both regional and country-specific). He is chairman of the Permanent Monitoring Panel on Risk Analysis for the World Federation of Scientists and served as a career officer in the British Army on operations in many parts of the world, including counter-terrorist operations and UN Peacekeeping. His publications include monographs, book chapters and articles for, among others, Stanford University, the World Economic Forum,SIPRI, the Crimes of War Project, International Herald Tribune, Wall Street Journal, the International Defence Review, the Independent (London), Tiempo(Madrid), the International and Comparative Law Quarterly, The Washington Quarterly and other scholarly journals including unsigned contributions to IISS publications.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: dancing the thin line between biological defensive and offensive research Jan Van Aken Study Group on Biological Arms Control, Hamburg University, and Sunshine Project, Germany

The rapid development of the life sciences is a major challenge for the global ban on biological weapons. In many countries, the biotechnology revolution generates the material prerequisites for the development and production of biological weapons. At the same time, new biochemical weapons become a possibility that is fuelling new interest in chemical and biological weapons even in countries that so far advocated a ban on them.
Modern biotechnology can clearly contribute to make classical biowarfare agents more effective. It can facilitate access to them, enable the construction of novel BW agents, and it opens the avenue for a broad array of new types of weapons. It is of crucial importance for scientists and policymakers alike to address the increasing threat and prevent the misuse of biological knowledge.
An area of specific concern is biodefense research. Under the Biological Weapons Convention, research and development for defensive purposes is explicitly allowed. Some countries, however, abuse this exemption for projects with little defensive, but clear offensive applications. Under the cover of "defense"’, genetically engineered pathogens with enhanced offensive potential and even new types of delivery systems for biological weapons had been developed. Governments should restrict themselves in their biodefense programs to areas that are of clear defensive value and add little to a country’s offensive capabilities.

Engineering pathogens to increase treatment resistance, environmental stability or pathogenicity, for example, should be entirely off-limits for biodefence programmes. But similarily, life scientists need to restrict themselves as well. Research restrictions, which are an inherently more effective approach than
imposing limits on publication, should apply in a limited number of situations, such as cases where a military abuse appears to be imminent, where no effective multilateral arms control is presently feasible, and where other technical avenues to reach the same scientific goal are (potentially) available. It can be anticipated that only few research projects would fall into this category, but in these specific cases, clear limits on basic research should be implemented.

Currently head of Hamburg University’s ‘Study Group on Biological Arms Control’, Jan van Aken has worked for more than twenty years to analyse the implications of genetic engineering to human relations, health and the environment. He holds a PhD in cell biology from Hamburg University, where he worked on a variety of projects pertaining to the risks of genetically engineered crops and the implications of pharmacogenetics at the University’s ‘Research Center for Biology, Society and Environment’ (FSP BIOGUM). A former genetic engineering campaigner and scientific advisor to Greenpeace, in 1999 he co-founded the Sunshine Project, an international research and advocacy group on biological arms control. Jan van Aken is a member of the Pugwash Study Group on the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions, a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of IPPNW Germany, and a trained biological weapons inspector on the roster of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC). He is married and has three children.

The UK National DNA Database: balancing crime detection, human rights and privacy Helen Wallace Deputy Director, GeneWatch, UK

The UK National DNA Database (NDNAD) is the oldest, largest and most inclusive national forensic DNA database in the world. Now in its 10th year of operation, it contains DNA samples and profiles from more than 2.5 million individuals and is expected to expand over the next few years to include some 5 million people, nearly 10% of the population. The database includes information on people convicted of a wide range of crimes, including serious violent crimes and minor public order offences, as well as many people who have never have been convicted or charged with any criminal offence.
In England and Wales, DNA profiles and samples are now kept permanently from anyone arrested for any recordable offence, whether or not they are charged or convicted. Other countries are now interested in expanding these so-called “criminal” databases and there are indications that the policies, trends and practices adopted in the UK are likely to be globalized. The DNA Database is an important tool for criminal investigations and brings some major benefits – including helping to identify some murderers and rapists.
However, there are questions about the extent to which all the DNA samples and profiles taken should be kept indefinitely. New technologies and policies are also beginning to raise privacy issues. Existing practices that raise human rights and privacy concerns are:

• retaining DNA samples, rather than just the DNA profiles used for identification;
• using the Database for genetic research without consent;
• retaining people’s records permanently on the Database regardless of the nature of their offence;
• including people permanently on the Database who have been arrested but not charged, or who have been acquitted.

This presentation describes the National DNA Database, its role in tackling crime, and the need to balance crime detection, human rights and privacy. It asks whether better safeguards could be introduced without compromising the role of DNA databases in tackling crime.

Helen Wallace is Deputy Director of GeneWatch UK, where she is responsible for GeneWatch’s work on human genetics, including DNA databases. GeneWatch UK is a not-for-profit group that monitors developments in genetic technologies from a public interest, environmental protection, human rights and animal welfare perspective. GeneWatch believes people should have a voice in whether or how these technologies are used and campaigns for safeguards for people, animals and the environment.
Helen has worked at GeneWatch for 4 years. Previously she was Senior Scientist at Greenpeace UK, working mainly on issues related to nuclear waste and marine pollution. She has a degree in physics and a doctorate in mathematics (oceanography) and worked for four years in industry (writing computer models of coastal erosion).

Test tube synthesis of a human pathogenic virus (poliovirus): societal implications Eckard Wimmer Professor, Stony Brook University School of Medicine, New York, USA

In 2002, the de novo chemical-biochemical synthesis of a human pathogenic virus - poliovirus - in the absence of a natural template provoked a highly diverse response. On the one hand the experiment was hailed as a milestone in synthetic biology, on the other it was dubbed both irresponsible and dangerous. Indeed, it was suggested that for the sake of national security the work should never have been published. In addition, the experiment raised ethical questions of whether viruses are living or non-living biological entities,and whether it is possible to create entirely new viruses. Another issue impacts on the global eradication of human pathogenic viruses: Can a virus still be considered irreversibly extinct if the chemical formula (sequence) of its genome is known, and biomedical methods allow this virus to be recreated in the test tube at any time? Due to recent advances in DNA synthesis, all small pathogenic viruses can be synthesized swiftly at low cost, but even the largest human pathogenic viruses can - in principle - be made. Since the information about viral genome sequences and biomedical procedures is in the public domain, research should focus on the prevention (vaccines) and treatment (antiviral drugs, research on innate immunity) of the most dangerous viral diseases. This, in turn, may discourage intentional misuse (bioterrorism), a threat that is inherent to progress in biomedical research and biotechnology.

Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1936, Eckard Wimmer was awarded the doctor rerum naturalium in organic chemistry from Göttingen University, Germany, in 1962. Intrigued by the chemistry of living cells, he shifted his research interests first to biochemistry at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in 1964, then to virology at the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1966. Wimmer started his independent academic career as an Assistant Professor of Microbiology at St. Louis University, St. Louis, in 1968, where he began to study poliovirus, a system that became the scientific pursuit and challenge of his life. In 1974, he joined the Department of Microbiology at Stony Brook University, where he served as Chairperson from 1984 to 1999. In 2002 he was promoted to the rank of Distinguished Professor.
Wimmer has published more than 300 papers, among them the first genome sequence and genetic organization of a eukaryotic RNA virus (poliovirus), the discovery of the internal ribosomal entry site (IRES), the mechanism of viral polyprotein processing, and the cell-free synthesis of a virus in a naive cell extract seeded with poliovirus RNA.
Wimmer has always viewed viruses from two perspectives: as biological entities that replicate and can cause disease; and as aggregates of organic compounds. His research, therefore, focuses on mechanisms of pathogenesis and the (bio)chemistry of poliovirus. The latter led to the cell free chemicalbiochemical synthesis of poliovirus in the absence of a natural template by his research group in 2002.

Top| Contact Us