USF College of Public Health MPH student Nick Cropper was part of a three-person international team (all students or recent graduates) to win the Next Generation for Biosecurity Competition. 

The competition was sponsored by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) in partnership with several other global health security organizations. NTI is a nonprofit, nonpartisan global security organization based in Washington, D.C., focused on reducing nuclear and biological threats imperiling humanity.

An international expert panel of 23 judges evaluated the papers in a three-round process. 

The competition drew students and young professionals from 11 countries across five continents whose papers aimed at answering the question: How can the global community leverage the tools of modern science to develop an effective and politically acceptable verification protocol to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC)? 

Cropper and his teammates wrote, “Creating a Verification Protocol for the Biological Weapons Convention: A Modular-Incremental Approach.”

A verification protocol is, according to Cropper, a mechanism by which the signatories to a convention or treaty can confirm that other signatories are not in violation of their obligations to the agreement. 

“In the nuclear context, for example, this might involve reporting of a nation’s total fissile material, paired with inspections by mutually agreed-upon inspectors at facilities of their choosing,” he explained. “But this accounting-driven approach doesn’t work for biological weapons, so we redefined ‘verification’ as part of our proposal.”

Cropper and his team, which consisted of Shrestha Rath, a biosecurity researcher at the Centre for Effective Altruism, a U.K./U.S. charity organization, and Ryan Teo, a master’s candidate in mathematics of systems at Britain’s University of Warwick, redefined verification as an ongoing process of data monitoring, assessment and evaluation aimed at appraising a state party’s intent to comply with the BWC. 

“Our answer to the question was to offer policymakers a ‘menu’ of modular policy proposals designed to be implemented in minimalist, politically acceptable forms with the idea being that they would grow over time to adapt to changing politics, scientific advancements and need. With each proposal, we paired a tool of modern science, like genetic engineering attribution methods or open-source intelligence, that we believed could be keystone tools in making the policy more effective.”

Some of these proposals included strengthening certain articles of the BWC, expanding institutional support to BWC member states and instituting a formal mechanism to collaboratively review evidence of noncompliance. 

Cropper, who has hopes of working in domestic or international scientific diplomacy, said identifying ways to establish a state’s adherence to biosecurity conventions and treaties is more important now than ever.

“Modern bioscience has reached a point where we are increasingly constrained not by the limits of science, but of our imagination,” Cropper noted. “Unfortunately, some people’s imaginations include visions of violence and death, and the potential for these people to misuse the tools of modern biology have never been greater.”

Unlike other arms control/disarmament treaties, the tools needed to develop a biological weapon are just as applicable to peaceful research purposes as they are to developing a weapon, Cropper explained. “This ambiguity, paired with the chronic inability to reach agreement on a workable verification mechanism for the BWC, has created an unacceptable global risk,” he said. “Answering the prompt question to overcome the political and technical barriers to a verification protocol is an ever more urgent need in the modern context.”

Story by Donna Campisano, USF College of Public Health