Image: NOAA
Two months after al Qaeda terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan on September 11, 2001, analytical chemist John Butler found himself working late nights in his lab, developing DNA assays to identify 911 victims from the tens of thousands of charred human remains recovered at Ground Zero. Thinking back, he still clearly remembers the sense of rising to a national need that was shared by dozens of researchers recruited to the same difficult problem. "People wanted to step up and help the country," he says.
Ten years on, Butler's solitary effort at National Institute of Standards and Technology has grown to a large research group working on the forensics of blended, degraded or soiled DNA, and U.S. expertise developed in the wake of 9/11 has also been exported worldwide, put to use identifying victims of mass atrocities in Africa, Asia, Bosnia and Iraq.
It is just one example of how a research direction blossomed as a result of 9/11. Scientists and science policy experts say the federal government's response to terrorist events in 2001, both the September attacks and the anthrax letters in October, have had a profound effect on U.S. research in areas as diverse as forensics, biodefense, infectious diseases, public health, cyber security, geology and infrastructure, energy, and nuclear weapons. Even the social sciences have been affected by the emergence of "terrorism studies" and the new emphasis on the threat in the field of risk analysis.
A major conduit for the shifts is the availability of money: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), created by consolidating 22 federal services and agencies in 2002 in direct response to September 11, had a science budget that peaked at $1.3 billion in 2006 before falling again to about $700 million in 2011. Key science-funding agencies including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Energy, also put money into research motivated by security concerns (amounting to a total homeland security (this number does not refer to DHS but to homeland security funding across all agencies) research budget of $7.3 billion in 2011) and a small amount of the U.S. Department of Defense money associated with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ended up in the hands of researchers as well—for example, by funding work on explosives detection and weaponry.
In biodefense, so much money poured into science that Judith Reppy, a science and technology studies expert at Cornell University, even considered whether (adapting the term coined by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1961) a "biomedical-military-industrial complex" has emerged in which scientists, the military and lobbyists conspire to try to keep the funds coming. She rejected that hypothesis, finding that biomedical science in the U.S. remains primarily a civilian endeavor, but says 9/11 has introduced trimmings of "guards, guns and gates," and increased funding research on pathogens that might be used by terrorists.
Some of the post-9/11 changes have entailed increased regulation. Jerry Jaax, a veterinarian and infectious disease researcher who oversees research compliance at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kans., says that many biomedical fields have been swamped by such new regulations or increased enforcement of pre-9/11 regulations in a bid to prevent researchers and the materials they handle from becoming security threats. He says federal rules on select agents—pathogens that require special facilities and handling—and on imports and exports of biological samples and materials, have slowed the ability of scientists to do research important to public and agricultural health. "Some say we're regulating away our ability to do this kind of research and I think there's some truth to that," he says.
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9 Comments
Add Comment"...victims from the tens of thousands of charred human remains recovered at Ground Zero." ...What?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs traumatic as this event was, initial estimates were 6000 fatalities which were later corrected to slightly less than 3000, including the plane passengers and Pentagon.
"...developing DNA assays to identify 911 victims from the tens of thousands of [fragments of] {charred} human remains recovered at Ground Zero."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps addition of [fragments of] and deletion of {charred} would be clearer and less sensational.
unfortunately - the method "they are doing terrorist acts/ genocide/ etc., So we (helpers?) should help them"* - still exists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this* for power, money, land etc. by killing more innocent people than terrorists do
To bad it does not analyze DNA for world take overs and secret societies powering the worlds crumbling adventures called life
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMore proof that "helpful regulation" is in danger of becoming an oxymoron and "dumb regulation" a redundancy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWow. Serious articles have the power to bring out the conspiracy theorists, the nut-bars and the nitpickers, don't they.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAirplanes with no windows, Demolition of building seven took 3 weeks of charge setting and no nplane hit that one. But it fell like a demo job, wake up blind man
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@rohemast -
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd meaningless commenters...hmm....
If it's not clear, precise and ultimately validatable it verges into Foxination.
A publication affiliating itself with science, yet unable to see through the propaganda that the official story defies Newton's laws: the official 11-second collapse time for WTC 1, 2 is absolutely impossible as it is exactly the fall time from 1360 feet in .. AIR. Further,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisno plane hit WTC 7, symmetrical debris has not yet been invented and, no one knows how to decide with an unnamed fire department commander to ""pull"" a 47 story building .. and watch it fall symmetrically five hours later unless demo materials were already in place awaiting the plane that never showed. Wake up. You've been had. Not fire; not heat: demolition by thermate!
(also: not GW, not Government, per se, but don't rule out
Larry, Dick and Don)