The future effectiveness of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) will be dependent largely on the introduction of an effective verification system. If such a system is to be effective, it will need to be underpinned by the expertise and reagents that have already been used to produce battlefield detectors for biological warfare (BW) agents. Samples for analysis could range from those taken from a fermenter vessel to samples taken from the environment surrounding the suspect facility. The analysis of such samples could be carried out in the field or at specialist laboratories. Specialist laboratories would offer a wider range of tests and a higher degree of test sensitivity; however, the problem of sample transport to the laboratory will need to be addressed. In the longer term, improved fieldable verification equipment could be developed.

Cooperation between politicians is often explained primarily by applying utilitarian concepts to coalition-building behavior. Usually, some direct or indirect advantage is held to be the main motive for cooperation, especially among those who are otherwise competitors. Drawing on sociobiological theory, this study presents an alternative approach in which truly altruistic motives may underlie and influence, as a biosocial substrate, even modern politics. This approach suggests that phenotypic similarities among individual politicians may play a role in the formation and stability of political alliances. To examine this hypothesis, physiognomic comparisons were made of the 65 delegates who gave speeches at the Nineteenth All-Soviet Party Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR, held in Moscow in 1988. The association between physiognomic similarity and expressions of verbal support was analyzed to test the hypothesis. Results suggest that speakers with faces more closely resembling that of the secretary-general were more likely to express verbal support for his policies than were others.

The target paper of this invited forum has a vaulting ambition: to convince readers that we ought to attempt to reduce evil in our world by constructing an interdisciplinary program, which I call the Genetic Virtue Program (GVP), to enhance the biological aspects of virtue. Most of the contributors to this forum are not sympathetic to the project—to put it mildly. Yet, one of the surprising things, at least to this author, is that comparatively little is said about the paper's overall ambition. Jamie Bronstein offers the idea that better socialization may be key: “No one would argue that there have not also been great evils; but the historical record doesn't support the level of improbability for further moral improvement through socialization that Walker would like to assign.” However, nowhere do I claim that there is no prospect for further moral improvement through socialization. Indeed, in recently published work I specifically recommend that we improve socialization efforts to enhance virtue by tracking prosocialization efforts.

Leadership roles, as this study suggests, may lead to breakdowns in individuals who have performed well in more routine positions. When the demand for creativity is high, but the routes to success ambiguous and the end goals controverted, vulnerable individuals may take refuge in drink and engage in public displays which undermine their performance. Such individuals may continue to provide positive contributions to national policy formation. Their loss of control, however, even if it is only episodic, is likely to cause significant others in the environment to depreciate their entire role performance, contributing further to their loss of influence.

A high capacity for visual perception distinguishes Homo sapiens from other primates. This human ability to detect social cues and retain visual records of social networks has been tested mostly with static facial images in laboratory settings. However, media consumption has become closely entangled with the way social life is navigated. Therefore, the study reported here tested demographic differences (gender and education) in visual information processing of social and nonsocial objects featured in audiovisual news content. Women recognized (accuracy) and recalled (salience) social images better than men. On the other hand, men were more skilled at recognizing, but not recalling, nonsocial images. Participants with lower educational levels recognized and recalled fewer images than individuals with higher educational levels. Interactions between demographic variables and time suggest that memory records for social images are more stable than those for nonsocial images. Memory may have survival-relevant importance, serving navigational functions that vary across environmental demands, resulting in differences across demographic groups.

Chemical developments during the past one hundred years have filled domestic medicine cabinets as well as pharmacies. The widespread availability of medications has clearly transformed life and living in the twentieth century, with the healing benefits of antibiotics and chemotherapy countered by the destructive effects of addictive drugs both old and new. Even those medications prescribed and supervised by physicians are but one of hundreds of factors which may influence human behavior, decision making, and even international affairs. Half-way through this century even a relatively harmless drug was the scapegoat in an American book, The Aspirin Age (Leighton, 1949), whose contributors reviewed the “utterly fantastic news events of the gaudy and chaotic years that separated Versailles and Pearl Harbor.”

Peter Barss makes a compelling case both for the value of epidemiology in investigating suspected use of chemical, biological, or toxin warfare (CBTW), and for consistency in epidemiologic procedures. Since John Snow in the nineteenth century, “armed only with [his] five senses and [his] notebook,” carried out his pioneering epidemiologic investigations to determine the source of the cholera epidemic then raging in London, the value of epidemiology for analyzing incidents of unexpected illness or death, in whatever context they occur, has been demonstrated many times over. Despite this, as Barss convincingly shows, the routine practice of field epidemiology is still often not fully or properly utilized in investigating alleged CBTW.

My thanks to the commentators for their thoughtful analyses. I will respond to their comments below. I should point out that under the format for this roundtable discussion, I have not yet seen Frank Sulloway's response to my article. Any reply I might have to his response will therefore have to come later.

Cass R. Sunstein’s 2016 book The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science provides an extremely informative introduction to the science and ethics of the exercise of “influence” over others. As a longtime physician employed in both the public and private sectors, I now recognize that most of my formal training has been in the hard sciences, with little, if any, training in the appropriate influence of the decision-making processes of my patients and/or other health care professionals in institutional settings. Breast cancer screening is an excellent example of the conflicts of modern medicine, highlighting our collective inability to effectively “nudge” others in the pursuit of health and/or organizational effectiveness and efficiency. Using the framework of Sunstein’s ethical values of welfare, autonomy, dignity, and self-government, I discuss many of the conflicting issues in a nationwide breast cancer screening program and the effects of these issues on client nudging to determine whether mammography screening is ethical.

Since the anthrax attacks of 2001 in the United States, annual U.S. government spending on biodefense programs has increased enormously. U.S. biodefense was once exclusively the domain of military agencies and was aimed principally at protecting battlefield troops against the products of state-run biological warfare programs. Today, it is engaged in and promoted by a variety of government agencies contemplating “bioterrorism,” and it is aimed principally at protecting the American civilian population. I ask if certain U.S. biodefense policies, pointedly those funding “threat assessment” projects, make biological attacks paradoxically more likely by undermining international norms against deliberately causing disease. I conclude that they do and consider the ramifications of this answer.