Physical Approaches to Civilian Biodefense

Although progress in biological sciences and technologies will offer more opportunities to improve human well-being in the coming decades, this progress may also lower barriers that are blocking bad actors from engineering pathogens to cause destruction. In severe cases, the harms of future biological attacks may approach the magnitudes of the worst plagues of history—from the devastation wrought by the Black Death to the epidemics that decimated Mesoamerican societies after initial European contact.

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