Questions like these are bound to arise more often as scientific discovery and technological development proceed inexorably. “I worry about how this develops,” said California Sen. Diane Feinstein in an interview with the Washington Post. “I’m worried because of what increased technology will make it capable of doing.”

“Each step in the laboratory toward understanding what makes a pathogen tick… ratchets up the dual-use dilemma.” The knowledge can be used for protection, or aggression.

Feinstein was not talking about H5N1 experiments—about mutations created in a biosafety laboratory that allow the deadly virus to infect through the air—but about what the newspaper headlined as “an emerging global apparatus for drone killing.” Remotely piloted drones are quietly but surely changing the face of warfare. Advances in electronics, physics, optics, materials, and other fields represent the “increased technology” Sen. Feinstein alludes to, technology that is certain to evolve because it goes to the heart of national security. Thus funding will be plentiful.

Defense agency funding has flowed generously into biology for two decades and massively since 9/11 and the anthrax attacks that followed. One of the predictable consequences of the federal largess has been the rise of a national biodefense industry with its hub in Arlington, Virginia. Bioprotection against bioterror attacks is offered as the justification for the buildup. Of course, bioprotection is also advanced by microbiologists, virologists, public health agencies, and drug and vaccine manufacturers as justification for experimenting with dangerous microbes.

The problem is that each step in the laboratory toward understanding what makes a pathogen tick and what modifications would make it more robust or enable it to go airborne or evade immunity (in the event evolution consents to such modifications outside the lab) ratchets up the dual-use dilemma.  The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) defines dual-use research as “biological research with legitimate scientific purpose, the results of which may be misused to pose a biologic threat to public health and/or national security.”  Because the human immune system is our most vital biodefense shield, technology that mimics its function and discloses its vulnerabilities also ratchets up the dual-use dilemma. As we know, technology rarely stays safely at home.

When asked by the New York Times about what information should be shared from his experiments with the H5N1 virus, Dutch scientist Ron Fouchier said three types: information about the fact that the virus can be genetically modified to go airborne between mammals; information necessary to direct surveillance in the field to these mutations; and information necessary to prepare ourselves “by evaluating vaccines and antivirals.”

As we explain in a chapter of our book The Stem Cell Dilemma, technologies for “rapid vaccine assessment” do exist thanks to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA banks on high risk, high reward projects. The agency that brought us the Internet, stealth technology, and global positioning system, or GPS, satellites routinely excludes from funding consideration “research that primarily results in evolutionary improvements to the existing state of practice.” In 2002, DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office launched an engineered tissue constructs program. The stated goal of the program was “to develop an interactive and functional human immune system” in the laboratory from “a common stem cell source” using tissue-engineering technologies. Such a system would be used to develop and test new vaccines rapidly in a human immune system replica rather than in mice and rats.

The program morphed into “Modular Immune In Vitro Constructs,” or MIMIC, in 2009, one of three prongs of a new DARPA program called “Blue Angel” designed to speed up the development of vaccines in response to the H1N1 pandemic. The MIMIC machine was developed by VaxDesign, Inc., an Orlando, Florida-based company established by former DARPA program manager William Warren. In 2006, Warren and members of his scientific team filed patent applications in the United States, Canada, and Europe for an “Automated artificial immune system” to test vaccines, drugs, and biologics. According to the application, “Functional equivalency to the human immune system is achieved by building engineered tissue constructs (ETCs) housed in a modular, immunobioreactor system.” The MIMIC, which is manufactured by robots, enables researchers to test the immune response to an experimental vaccine or drug developed to fight natural or engineered viruses or other pathogens. Each well in MIMIC’s 96-well plastic plate is said to represent a human immune system complete with B cells, T cells, and dendritic cells, the progeny of blood-forming stem cells.

The success of VaxDesign’s immune system-mimicking technology was borne out when the French multinational firm Sanofi Pasteur, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, purchased the company in 2010. VaxDesign and Sanofi scientists have filed patents claiming propriety interest in using additional immunological components, such as lymph node germinal centers, to enhance the performance of the machine. Step by step, the human immune system is being mechanized.

We write in our book: “What would it mean to capture the power of the human immune system, a system that took evolution millennia to create? The drive to disclose the secrets of the stem cell is relentless. Just as war accelerated the harnessing of the power of the atom, the prospects of bird flu as well as bioterror accelerate the application of molecular and stem cell biology for bioprotection.”

As if on cue, just before the second edition of our book was published last fall, DARPA announced a partnership with the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in launching its Microphysiological Systems program. The five-year $140 million program ($70 million from DARPA and $70 million from NIH) “will develop a platform that uses engineered human tissue to mimic human physiological systems” including the immune system. Human cell types found in different human physiological systems will be arranged in 3D constructs so they can “talk to each other” on a chip. Biochips equipped with embryonic stem cells, induced pluripotent stem cells, progenitor cells, or cells found in specific tissues and organs will be used to predict whether a drug or vaccine is safe and effective.  A candidate vaccine designed to be protective against Fouchier’s airborne H5N1 virus could be tested and, in theory, perfected.

Such knowledge platforms would be of incalculable value to medicine and public health. They would also be an incalculable hazard were they to fall into the wrong hands, hands capable of engineering lethal agents. With the expansion of biological knowledge around the world, these hands are proliferating, too. The complementarity of sword and shield, arrow and armor, bullet and vest, and bomb and shelter is represented today by engineered viruses and engineered immune systems. The click-click cadence of the dual-use ratchet will surely grow louder.

William Hoffman is co-author with Leo Furcht, MD of The Stem Cell Dilemma: The Scientific Breakthroughs, Ethical Concerns, Political Tensions, and Hope Surrounding Stem Cell Research (Arcade Publishing, 2011). Both are in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology, University of Minnesota.

Yet Obama’s use of a single word toward the end of his address was riveting. The word is “curiosity.” Obama had not used the word before in a major speech, yet here it was in his inaugural, teamed up with iconic words of Presidential inaugural addresses: “Our challenges may be new,” Obama said. “The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends—hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism—these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history” (emphasis added).

The word curiosity had been used only once before in a Presidential Inaugural Address—by William Henry Harrison in March 1841. Harrison referred to “the gratification of the curiosity of speculative statesmen,” what we would call today “idle curiosity.” The other values that Obama cites as “upon which our success depends” were used repeatedly by his predecessors: “hard work” or a variation (8 times), honesty (6 times), courage (10 times), “fair play” or a variation (4 times), tolerance (5 times), loyalty (4 times), and patriotism (21 times). These old and true values, President Obama said, are the quiet force of “progress,” a word used 33 times by presidents beginning with James Madison in his first inaugural address when he noted “the progress of manufacturers and useful arts” in the young republic.

So why did Obama include “curiosity” in his listing of “old-fashioned values” essential for progress? Did he plug it into the list because he understands the importance of scientific curiosity, of open inquiry into the how the natural world works? Much has been made of his intent, as he put it in his speech, to “restore science to its rightful place.” The word “science” appears in 15 inaugural addresses preceding Obama’s, beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s second inaugural address. The last president to use the word was Richard Nixon who noted the nation’s “enormous strides in science and industry and agriculture” in 1969.

Clearly Obama understands that progress depends on ideas as well as virtues. Ideas are generated and translated into useful objects and processes through the process of innovation. To the extent innovation occurs, it is in part because curiosity is granted free rein. In his first weekly address as president, Obama called for tripling the number of science fellowships “to help spur the next generation of innovation.” Science, innovation, and curiosity are inextricably bound.

In a recent book entitled The Stem Cell Dilemma, my coauthor and I describe how Leonardo da Vinci, when a young man wandering among the Tuscan hills after a fierce storm, came upon the mouth of a dark cave. As he stood in front of it, he was seized by the question of what to do—to explore or to retreat. “I had been there for some time, when there suddenly arose in me two things, fear and desire—fear of that threatening dark cave; desire to see if there was some marvelous thing within.” As we wrote, in all of history up to that time “fear tended to overcome curiosity about what was inside the cave, what lay beyond the darkness” (emphasis added).

Da Vinci, the man who British art historian Sir Kenneth Clark called “the most relentlessly curious man in history,” entered the cave, symbolically making a clean break from the medieval order, “from a world influenced by things unseen to a world influenced by things seen and understood through careful observation.” Soon he would turn his attention to explorations of the human body, revealing through his anatomical drawings things revealed for the first time despite the social and religious taboos surrounding human dissection.

Ever since, scientific curiosity has been part and parcel of our understanding of progress, especially economic progress. And economic progress, with its corollary of a rising standard of living, has moral consequences, as Harvard political economist Benjamin M. Friedman argues in his book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. With economic growth comes “greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy.” With economic stagnation comes hardened attitudes toward openness and mobility, the desire to retreat into the past, and the search for scapegoats.

It is surely unfair to compare da Vinci with his polar opposite on the “curiosity” spectrum, former President George W. Bush. But if we are to understand why Obama’s interest in science, discovery, and innovation resonates with so many people, it is in part because he succeeds arguably the most incurious of all American presidents. At the very outset of Bush’s presidency in 2001, Princeton University political scientist Fred Greenstein observed: “As his lackluster academic record indicates, he lacks intellectual curiosity and is impatient with the play of ideas.”

By the end of his first term Bush was being dubbed “Incurious George,” single-handedly resurrecting the words “incurious” and “incuriosity” from the lexicographical grave and sending them to the top of an index that monitors words and phrases that appear in the news media. One wonders how Bush’s legacy might fare if he had been, say, even mildly curious about possible sectarian difficulties following the invasion of Iraq, the capability of the federal government to respond to a natural disaster of unexpected size, the strength of critical joints and ties propping up the nation’s financial infrastructure, or the possible consequences to innovation and global competitiveness of quarantining some fields of scientific endeavor. We will never know.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne wrote that Obama’s use of “tolerance and curiosity” is apt in the context of progress because these values are “notoriously associated with the adventurous, with those who seek out the new and the novel.” With his emphasis on progress, Obama clearly broke with the recent conservative past going back to Ronald Reagan, in Dionne’s view.

I don’t think of curiosity as an old-fashioned value but rather as a time-honored mental trait, a desire to know something more than what is readily apparent. In the realm of science and technology, the free play of curiosity may shed new light on something poorly understood with the possibility of changing things forever. That’s what happened to Isaac Newton as he was examining a glass prism in 1666: “Comparing the length of this coloured Spectrum with its breadth, I found it about five times greater; a disproportion so extravagant, that it excited me to a more then ordinary curiosity of examining, from whence it might proceed” (emphasis added).

I have no proof, but I wonder if Obama quite intentionally debuted “curiosity” in his list of old-fashioned values responsible for progress because we are going to need a lot more of it in the years to come to move beyond our economic and political impasses—as Newton might have put it, to see the light. Honesty, hard work, courage, fair play, tolerance, loyalty and patriotism—these old and true virtues will be necessary to do the heavy lifting, of course. But we have to be able to explore our own mental terrain and feel free to ask questions based on what we find.

Unlike his predecessor, Obama cannot be accused of lacking intellectual curiosity. And unless early signs are completely misleading, ideas will get greater play in this White House than at any time since the John F. Kennedy observed that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”

William Hoffman is founder of the Minnesota Biomedical & Bioscience Network (MBBNet.umn.edu) and coauthor of The Stem Cell Dilemma: Beacons of Hope or Harbingers of Doom? (Arcade Publishing, 2008).