Abstract

The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) is an international treaty banning development and possession of biological weapons which also serves as a key forum for addressing risks from bioengineering and artificial pandemics. Adoption of the convention is nearly universal, with the notable exception among advanced countries of Israel. This presentation will discuss the history and current status of the Biological Weapons Convention, along with why it is important for the future. It will then briefly review the history and regional political situation leading to Israel’s current non-membership, along with recent developments, and what might be needed for a change in Israeli policy.

David Manheim is a public policy researcher currently visiting the Technion, specializing in biological and technological risks and the impacts of new technologies. He is also a lead researcher at 1Day Sooner, which advocates for participants in Human Challenge Trials, and a policy advisor at Guarding Against Pandemics, a US lobbying organization dedicated to preventing the next pandemic. He has done research on topics from COVID-19, to the future of pandemic response and monitoring, to forecasting risks of AI at a variety of organizations including the World Bank, the Council on Strategic Risks, and Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. In addition to dozens of academic publications in journals ranging from Technological Forecasting and Social Change to Clinical Infectious Diseases, and from Health Security to PLoS Computational Biology, his work on the implications, risks, and management of novel technologies has appeared in Foreign Affairs and TechCrunch.