Meselson has a long record of fighting the proliferation of biological weapons as an amateur.

After the Vietnam War, he led a scientific expedition in Cambodia and Thailand that disproved allegations that the Soviet Union had dropped chemical agents on the nations. The expedition, which included a Harvard undergraduate, found that the suspicious "yellow rain" was actually caused by pollen granules processed by bees.

In the early 1990s, Meselson and his wife, Boston College biologist Jeanne Guillemin, led a team that investigated the deaths of almost 70 inhabitants around a germ warfare plant in Siberia in 1979. Undergraduates mapped the paths escaped anthrax germs may have traveled, proving that the deaths were indeed caused by the disease and not by bad meat, as Russian authorities claimed.

Though Meselson has devoted himself to fighting biological weapons, he believes that much of the public concern represents wasted energy.

"Some people in the government and people in the scientific community should be worrying about biological weapons, but not the average man in the street," Meselson says.

He says that much of the hyperbole surrounding fears of military destabilization in the former Soviet Union is counterproductive.

"Right now people are dying of normal diseases, and new diseases are being introduced by natural means," he says. "This is where we should focus most of our efforts."