High-tech bioterrorism according to Jeremy Rifkin (Le Monde)

Jeremy Rifkin, the president of the Foundation on Economic Trends (Washington, DC) and the author of reflection books about the new economy resulting from Internet networks ("the age of access"), is publishing an interesting view in Le Monde about risks of the high-tech bioterrorism. According to him, those risks are linked to the fantastic progress in genetics. In "Bioterrorisme high-tech et révolution génétique, par Jeremy Rifkin", he focuses on the fact that "new discoveries on genome and their commercial use for genetic manipulations in agriculture, animal breeding and in medicine are potentially transposable to the development of a large range of new pathogenic agents, able to attack vegetal, animal and human populations".

Those new potential weapons are not expensive to develop and, consequently, they can be used by some determined terrorists. The solution ? Jeremy Rifkin is particularly in favour of the implementation of an international convention which would be efficient against biological and toxin weapons, a convention which would allow authorities to have an increased control over all of the researches on this field.