"Fortunately, and contrary to popular belief, it is not easy to produce and use biological weapons," Meselson says.
Still, evading biological warfare will require intense effort, a cause that Meselson has advanced for decades.
Both as a consultant to the State Department and as an academic, Meselson has worked against the proliferation of biological weapons, assisted at times by Harvard undergraduates.
He heads the Harvard Sussex Program on Chemical and Biological Warfare Armament and Arms Limitation, which recently drafted a proposed international convention to prohibit biological and chemical weapons.
The current international Biological Weapons Convention was drafted in 1972, three years after President Nixon ended the production of biological weapons in the United States.
Meselson hopes a new convention will be ratified which is similar to the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, which permits the inspection of any chemical weapons plant at any time.
"The [proposed] convention is an example of something that we can do as amateurs, as academics," Meselson says.
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