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In the post 9-11 era, when a good deal of the available works demands ramped up security, attracting talent becomes a little more difficult. Jim Spigarelli commented on the "whole new sense" that permeates a university when the work is being done at BL-3 labs, and the staff needs security clearances. "How do you deal with this?" he asked the participants. "With great difficulty," Ron Trewyn answered. The security issue raises instant questions with a campus’s international population. "Most graduate students in this country," he observed, "are not from this country." Steve Lufkin of MRI believes that universities will be "tremendously challenged" by the DOD’s demands for more security. The technology transfer process, he added, "is even more challenging." The reason is that the biotech industry’s workforce population is as rich in foreign nationals as a university’s. Some of these companies, he believes, will have a very hard time adapting to work in a classified environment. Given the typically open nature and easy access of the campus environment, Mike Chippendale opined that security and surveil-lance issues present some "real challenges." Joe Waeckerle raised the questioned of how intrusive the government has been. Chippendale answered that for the scientists, such intrusion "is a huge problem," particularly in regards to access to information and the right to publish. Michael Helmstetter of MRI observed that after 9-11, paranoia has increased and that some institutions are demanding more security than they might have in the past. Jim Spigarelli attested that there is a tremendous amount of funding going into building new facilities. "The problem," he added, "is that you need skilled new people to run them." And on the question of recruiting and screening them, the government has not provided "enough clarity."
Daniel Marcus, who manages KU’s $11 million COBRA grant, offered the sage advice that as a first step one ought to "determine from scientific grass roots what would serve the area the best." In his experience, Jim Spigarelli added, those cities that have suc-ceeded in the past knew what their strengths were, built on them, and identified the leadership to stay the course. Creating a life science center, Spigarelli observed, "is a long term project." Thinking out loud, Ben McAllister began to zero in on what the Kansas City area’s natural strengths might be given the opportunities presented by the nation’s war on bio-terrorism. "I am sitting here," said McAllister, "wondering whether we will ever be a major player in genomics and proteomics." Of that he could not be certain. But in contemplating the area’s strong background in agriculture and livestock and its growing strengths in life sciences, he was compelled to ask, "Is this a real opportunity for significant collaboration." Joe Waeckerle, who manages HCA Midwest’s emergency departments and happens to be the medical officer for the FBI and a national authority on the question of biological and chemical terror, also began to calculate the area’s advantages out loud. These included "two of the best veterinary schools in the world" (KSU and MU). The terrorist threat to the nation’s food and fiber industry could put those schools on the front line of our nation’s defense. "There is a lot of money out there," said Waeckerle, "if we collectively as a community get our act together."
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Security Complications
Natural advantages