Kathleen Vogel
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Kathleen M. Vogel is an associate professor at Cornell, with a joint appointment in the Department of Science and Technology Studies and the Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. Vogel holds a Ph.D. in biological chemistry from Princeton University.
Prior to joining the Cornell faculty, Vogel was appointed as a William C. Foster Fellow in the U.S. Department of State’s Office of Proliferation Threat Reduction in the Bureau of Nonproliferation. Vogel has also spent time as a visiting scholar at the Cooperative Monitoring Center, Sandia National Laboratories and the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies.
Since 11 September 2001 there is growing national and international policy focus on the increasing threat of bioterrorism. Underpinning this policy focus is a dominant frame of discourse for how to consider biosecurity threats. This presentation will describe some of the key ideas comprising the dominant biosecurity discourse and contrast it with an alternative framing of the issues. To illustrate these different frames, this presentation will draw on examples from the field of synthetic biology that have generated security concerns. This presentation will discuss how the current dominant frame takes away attention from other important considerations for assessing the threat from emerging biotechnologies.
