A biochemist, molecular biologist and toxicologist, Dr. Portmann recently retired from the Spiez Laboratory. His comments highlight what current technology can and cannot do for the BTWC.

Proposed Declarations A Big Step Ahead:
Technology for Verification is Not Yet There
by Rudolf Portmann

          The negotiations for an extension to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) to develop a Protocol "to strengthen the effectiveness and improve the implementation of the Convention" has reached a critical point. The American have decided not to accept the current Protocol version, the result of long continuing negotiations since the Third Review conference in 1991. What is the crucial difference between the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) and the BTWC? It is the on site inspection by an international team.
          In the case of the inspection of a chemical plant or production and storage site which falls under the purview of the CWC, an inspection team records the amount of scheduled substances (precursor or toxic substances) that have been purchased or synthesized since the last control. To get a complete image, the trade in scheduled substances is monitored, thus the amount of scheduled substances sold is declared and the buyer is noted, which permits the calculation of a balance of what should still be on stock. This can be controlled and additional samples can be taken and analyzed by GC-MS on site. The result is a chemical formula, a molecular weight, and a specific fingerprint. To protect company proprietary interests, if a compound is not one of the scheduled substance, it may even be suppressed in the analytical instrument. One gets a priori no information about the way of synthesizing this substance. So in principle, the production secret is guaranteed.
          In the case of biology the situation is quite different. The big advantage of bookkeeping of the CWC can not be used. Additionally, in biology the sample might contain the entire information for synthesizing and producing the particular biological entity. There is the possibility that during an inspection a sample could be taken out that could directly lead a competitor to the production process and thus the production secrets would be lost. Here with a swipe of sampling material as simple as a piece of filter paper you actually might get the producing bacteria or fungus for the active substance.
          But verification has never been the objective of the BTWC protocol. Indeed although recognizing that "effective verification could reinforce the Convention", the Third Review Conference emphasized strengthening the BTWC's authority through confidence-building measures and organization arrangements. To achieve this the States have to declare the most relevant biotechnology installations. These will be subject to randomly selected transparency or clarification visits. During such visits no sampling is allowed and in every case the access is Host State controlled. Those visits are primarily to increase "confidence in the consistency of declaration". This type of visit has proven its value even by the UNSCOM inspection in Iraq. Only in the case of challenge investigations would sampling be permitted.
          "Effective verification" of violations is not yet achievable. The analytical techniques for biological macromolecules are not yet at the same confidence level as in chemistry. There are different ways to hide a clear-cut result (e.g., changing the triplet code for some amino acids, transferring the toxic gene into another host with changed triplet code usage, etc.) It is therefore clear that for this round, the BTWC protocol cannot detect violations to the same level of confidence as the CWC.
          The issues of both protecting proprietary production in biotechnology and the current lack of suitable analytical techniques (i.e., uncircumventable techniques) must be made clear and understandable to the producer, politicians and to the public for making the new, strengthened protocol for BTWC acceptable. One has to keep in mind that in the case of the CWC, the inspection protocol and the exact analysis techniques have been worked out after signing the convention and only partially completed before ratification by most states. Hence there is the possibility in the BTWC to require the producers to have a log book for the use of biotechnology equipment and to do a bookkeeping of scheduled substances, which is really a confidence building measure similar to that in the CWC. Of course, as analytical techniques in biology and biotechnology advance, the possibilities to analyze biological macromolecules with good reliability improve.
          It is important that the technical issues in analysis and verification in the case of the BTWC be made clear and understandable to everybody.

01-4, issue no. 85