Bioweapons initiatives bogged down in talks

Beefing up the bioweapons treaty

Alongside support for renewed funding for microbiological research, many scientists are also backing a greater role for international agreements to control potential biological weapons. But such efforts present considerable challenges. One of Britain's leading microbiologists, Hugh Pennington at Aberdeen University, has written of the ease of obtaining agents such as anthrax. " In principle any...

A survey of antiviral drugs for bioweapons.

Smallpox (variola major), and the haemorrhagic fever viruses (filoviruses and arenaviruses) are classified as Category A biowarfare agents by the Centers for Disease Control. Category A agents pose a significant risk to public health and national security because they can be easily disseminated by aerosol, although with the exception of variola, they are not easily transmitted from person to pe...

Plenary Talks

Invited Talks

In 2009, Peter Cameron introduced a common generalization of various classes of combinatorial designs such as balanced incomplete block designs, resolvable designs and orthogonal arrays. Generalized covering and packing designs can be defined in analogous way. These objects bring into this framework further classes of designs, including covering and packing arrays, Howell designs, monogamous cy...

Hour Talks

Efforts to detect targets of recent positive selection (“selective sweeps”) in the genome frequently involve an initial screen of a region of the genome at a low density of markers (either SNPs or microsatellites), followed by a denser screen in the region flanking markers that show reduced or skewed variation relative to that predicted by an equilibrium neutral model or relative to “background...