Blossoming networks and integrated infrastructure: mitigating disaster through human-centered technology.

• Author: Clark, Aaron
• Position: SAFE: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World - Book review

SAFE: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World Martha Baer, Katrina Heron, Oliver Morton, Evan Ratliff (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 404 pages.

Traditional emergency response systems are "command-and-control" structures: A defense minister, mayor or fire chief makes a decision that flows down to the troops, police officers or firefighters on the ground. (1) One flaw of such hierarchical systems is that a single bad decision can reverberate throughout the response to a disaster, amplifying the overall tragedy. (2) As infrastructure systems become more interconnected with advances in modern technology, the cascading effects of a single catastrophe, or a single bad decision, become increasingly widespread. The authors of Safe: The Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World argue that a new, more open framework for sharing information is necessary for security in this interconnected environment. (3) Baer, Heron, Morton and Ratliff, four former and current writers and editors from Wired magazine, probe the vulnerabilities that pulse through everything from water supplies and electrical grids to telecommunications networks and bio-defense labs, and examine new technologies that are reshaping the thinking behind disaster preparedness and response. (4) The book highlights how the roles of individual practitioners--systems engineers, molecular geneticists and infectious disease doctors--are more critical to security than ever before, and proposes systems that would allow for greater connectivity and interaction among scientists, emergency responders and the public. (5) What emerges is a riveting look into a world where scientific possibility and human ingenuity increasingly intersect and the rules of the game change constantly.

In one of the most compelling and controversial sections of the book, the authors examine the burgeoning field of molecular biology. While today's middle school students splice genes at a level that only Nobel Prize winners could in 1980, professional scientists engineer super-strong mice and glow-in-the-dark fish. (6) Along with the extraordinary health benefits that advances in this field may afford comes the fear that a single disgruntled scientist could employ the past few decades of research to "weaponize" a natural pathogen that could kill tens of thousands of people. (7) Put bluntly by a U.S. Department of Defense official, "the creative intellect of a group of Dr. Evils could find many more ways to usurp what's going on in biology than they could in any other discipline." (8) Yet the U.S. government is still woefully under-prepared for a man-made or natural pathogenic outbreak. (9) Although the National Institutes of Health (NIH) bio-defense budget surged from a few hundred million dollars in 2002 to $1.5 billion in 2003, and the government has both spurred private companies to renew production of smallpox vaccine and...