Should Americans be afraid of an attack with biological weapons?

The country is in no grave danger of germ warfare from abroad, according to one Harvard professor who says the media tends to exaggerate the threat and inflate popular fears.

In a speech to a national scientific organization on Friday, Cabot Professor of Natural Sciences Matthew S. Meselson expressed cautious optimism that biotechnology will not necessarily be used for weapons of mass destruction.

Meselson's speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, entitled "The Problem of Biological Weapons," noted that although superpowers have developed and stockpiled biological weapons for over 50 years, they have only been employed once, by Japan in the 1930s.

"Every major technology--metallurgy, explosives, internal combustion, aviation, electronics, nuclear energy--has been intensively exploited not only for peaceful purposes but also for hostile ones," Meselson said in the speech. "But it may be possible to reverse the usual course of things and avoid the hostile exploitation of biotechnology."

But an article in Saturday's edition of the San Francisco Chronicle claimed Meselson "charged that Russia's widespread network of germ warfare plants remain barred to Western inspectors despite long-standing agreements with the United States and Britain to end the secrecy."

Despite the article's claim, he says, no agreement ever existed between the three nations, though talks about a similar agreement broke down several years ago.

Meselson says such reporting is an example of the trend towards feeding fears of terrorist attacks involving nuclear or biological weapons from the former Soviet Union. Such an attack is very unlikely, he adds.

"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.

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."