Governments should use an upcoming conference to curb the spread of arms that target the central nervous system.

Harvard professor Graham Allison once helped secure nuclear missiles in the former Soviet Union, now he's grading states on how well they're vaccinating people against COVID-19. The famed analyst of great power competition is taking on a new (great) challenge.

In late August, I travelled to Geneva for an intersessional meeting of the States Parties to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC). The meeting, which included representatives from the expert level, considered biosafety, biosecurity, and issues such as awareness raising, education, oversight of scientific activities, and codes of conduct for life scientists. (Concise daily accounts of these proceedings are available through the Acronym Institute for Disarmament Diplomacy).

When survivors of the 2002 theater siege in Moscow -- in which Russian police used a gas widely believed to be a fentanyl derivative to flush out terrorists -- brought claims before the European Court of Human Rights, the ruling came down with mixed results.

As I endeavored to write a positive take on the prospects for the upcoming Seventh Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in December, the proverb "There's many a slip 'twixt cup and lip" kept coming to mind. In other words, a lot could still go wrong in December. Perhaps it's the history of the near-death experience of the Convention in the 2001-2002 Fifth Review Conference, or maybe it's the Convention's existence on the intersessional process (ISP) life-support system of 2003-2005 and 2007-2010.

If you are not automatically redirected, please click here: https://thebulletin.org/magazine/2024-01/

Something more than journalism, something that approaches … poetry.

Something more than journalism, something that approaches … poetry.

Something more than journalism, something that approaches … poetry.

Something more than journalism, something that approaches … poetry.

Science won’t be able to solve global issues without US-China scientific collaboration.

Something more than journalism, something that approaches … poetry.

The president of the United States and his wife have tested positive for COVID-19, CNN reports, based on the president’s own Twitter post. The test results on Donald Trump and his wife Melania were made public in the hours following news reports that top presidential advisor Hope Hicks had contracted the disease.

Something more than journalism, something that approaches … poetry.

Something more than journalism, something that approaches … poetry.

There isn’t any reason to really agonize over your antibodies—at least, not yet.

Eight years ago, author David Quammen interviewed scientists about the possibility of a new pandemic. Their prediction: there would indeed be a new disease, likely from the coronavirus family, coming out of a bat, and it would happen in or around a wet market in China. But what was not predictable was how unprepared the world would be.

In the 1940s, the number two item on the US War Department’s wishlist was the mass production of an antibiotic like penicillin. (Number one was the atomic bomb.) What can we learn about developing a coronavirus vaccine from the penicillin experience?

One physician wanted to be sure that when historians write up the story of the coronavirus, they get the bottom-up perspective. Enter his Facebook group, the People’s History of the Coronavirus.