Vital Systems Security

Here is an interesting piece from NY Times on some familiar issues we have been dealing with in the OEP research. 

The record storms and floods that swept through the Midwest last month struck at the heart of America’s corn region, drowning fields and dashing hopes of a bumper crop.

They also brought into sharp relief a new economic hazard. As America grows more reliant on corn for its fuel supply, it is becoming vulnerable to the many hazards that can damage crops, ranging from droughts to plagues to storms.

Apparently the price of ethanol went up by 19 percent in a month after the floods. The article goes on to construct a scenario that can take place once the share of biofuel in the overall supply of gasoline goes up to 20 percent:

Experts fear that a future crop failure could take so much fuel out of the market that it would send prices soaring at the pump. Eventually, the cost of filling Americans’ gas tanks could be influenced as much by hail in Iowa as by the bombing of an oil pipeline in Nigeria.

Just as in the case of OEP once again a catastrophic event (storm and flood) in a medium inherently governed by stochastic processes (the weather) problematized as a potential threat to the stability of the economy as a vulnerable system (eventually leads to the question of resilience again as we saw in the case of war mobilization and inflation problem by the early 70s under Nixon). As the article argues, introduction of biofuel leads to a new level of vulnerability:

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita interrupted a quarter of the nation’s oil production and closed dozens of refineries for weeks. Lines formed for the first time since the 1970s as gasoline spiked above $3 a gallon, a record at the time. The nation’s increasing dependence on crops for motor fuel adds another level of vulnerability from the weather.

I thought what is particularly interesting in this case is the opening up of a blockage as we pass a threshold with the emergence of biofuel. To my knowledge this is a very new development as corn, a conventional and critical source of food for populations is becoming a source of energy as the seemingly stable barrier between these two categories of vital domains are being linked for the first time as we demolished the barrier separating these two domains. Now we face with a new interface that is in need of being governed as one can even see in the concerns that IMF and World Bank have expressed their worries about this new phenomenon recently. 

It seems like at a technical level the first 3 generations of biofuels, there is nothing new about the process of transforming biomass into biofuel. It is a simple process of production of ethanol. However, what is interesting is that a company called Synthetic Genomics is is genetically engineering microorganisms to produce fuel directly from carbon dioxide on an industrial scale, which might be a possible solution to the problem of vulnerability mentioned above. I believe the founder of the company might be a familiar figure to those who are working on synthetic biology: Craig Venter, a member of the effort to map the human genome and the founder of The Institute for Genomic Research. An interesting convergence of VSS and Synthetic Biology and Nanotechnology blogs…

I am happy to introduce Amelia Moore to this blog. Amelia is a doctoral student at UC Berkeley. Currently, she is conducting fieldwork in the Bahamas (and the U.S.). Her terrific research project focuses on biocomplexity and resonates with many other projects conducted by our little group over here at the vss blog. Amelia recently sent me a short description of her research project. To learn more, read on! Read the rest of this entry »

Here is the GAO report on the US government’s ill-conceived attempt to fund the development of a second-generation vaccine for anthrax.

In the last chapter (entitled “Death”) of her new book, Dolly Mixtures, Sarah Franklin comments in interesting ways on the food and mouth crisis of 2001 and the so-called slaughter policy.

Melinda Cooper recently drew my attention to an interesting study conducted by Harvard Medical School Center and sponsored by Swiss Re and the United Nations Development Programme. The study predicts that “climate change will significantly affect the health of humans and ecosystems and these impacts will have economic consequences.” In addition, the study attempts to “survey” existing and future costs of climate change. It argues that the insurance industry “will be at the center of this issue, absorbing risk and helping society and business to adapt and reduce new risks.”

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A recent series of NY Times articles has tracked novel risks emerging from the global food and drug supply chain. China, as has been mentioned before, seems to be the key source of threat. The major issue is that given the complexities of the supply chain (and the practice of erasing the original suppliers in order to protect the middleman) there is no way of tracking where ingredients come from - such as glycerin in toothpaste - and so if it turns out that there are dangerous counterfeit supplies, it is impossible to locate and punish the offending supplier. From the vantage of VSS, what is significant is both the sense that a global food and drug supply system generates novel risks, and the emerging demand to regulate this “global pipeline” of pharmaceutical and food ingredients. Developing a reliable tracking system will be a crucial step. There are similarities here to the solution proposed by Stephen Flynn to the problem of the uncertain origin of shipping containers - or to current European efforts to track the origins of GM foods, as described in this article by Javier Lezaun.

Here is an interesting critique of the work of NGO’s in the field of global health: The Challenge of Global Health

Apparently, there are now more than 60,000 AIDS-related NGOs alone. The piece, published in Foreign Affairs, also includes an exchange between journalist Laurie Garrett and medical anthropologist Paul Farmer.

What does it mean to move ‘global warming’ into the domain of security? - Here is an article in today’s New York Times.

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Here’s an excellent article in today’s New York Times on the drugs that are in your water.

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Here is an interesting research Project: Transformations in Global Public Health Surveillance. Read the rest of this entry »