Mission
To strengthen bioviolence prevention and preparedness under law Bioscience’s enormous potential for benefiting humanity brings, inexorably, horrifying capacities to endanger humanity. The challenge is to develop bio-related international security policies that maximize potential benefits while minimizing dangers. ISBI’s mission is to bring together government officials, private sector entities, academic experts, and NGOs in an open and sophisticated intellectual process for initiating policies and strengthening institutional capabilities to address current and future challenges at the frontier of scientific advance.
What We Do
- Researching policies initiatives and legislation for improving global bioscience security and development, pandemic preparedness, terrorism and disease surveillance and detection;
- Building international networks of multiple stakeholders in science, law enforcement, public health, development and trade to cross-fertilize perspectives;
- Producing and publishing articles and reports to raise awareness of biopolicy issues and to broadly espouse ideas for strengthening international security;
- Convening workshops and other meetings worldwide for the purpose of identifying and raising awareness of progressive policies with regard to bioviolence.
- There is a compelling need to focus on all malevolent biothreats, whether from State bioweapons programs or bioterrorism, as fundamental security challenges. Although natural disease’s public health challenges are relevant in many respects, dangers of intentionally inflicted disease are centrally about violence and must be addressed accordingly.
- Bioviolence is a crime. Therefore, critical attention must be given to the development, implementation, and enforcement of law to combat bioviolence. Police and other law enforcers are central to combating dangers of bioviolence.
- Policies to address bioviolence must focus on both prevention and preparedness. Prevention refers to stopping potential perpetrators from committing bioviolence. Preparedness refers to mitigating and containing the consequences of an attack. Policies that address both dimensions are far stronger than either by itself.
- Engagement of the private sector in the development of policies to prevent and prepare for bioviolence is essential.
- Most important, the challenges and opportunities associated with advancing biotechnology are inherently and unavoidably global in nature and must be addressed accordingly. Traditional boundaries and country-specific plans make little sense. Because the potential benefits and dangers of bioscience are inherently global, security policies to promote bioscience’s potential and to reduce its dangers must be international.