"Living Nightmares: Facing the Growing Threat of Biological Terrorism" will be the subject of a public talk to be given at Cornell May 3 by Steven M. Block, professor of biological sciences and of applied physics at Stanford University.
The talk, at 7:30 p.m. in Schwartz Auditorium of Rockefeller Hall, will be his first in the series of Bethe Lectures at Cornell. As a molecular biologist, Block has written about the parallel rise of biotechnology and terrorist activity, which, he says, arguably poses a greater threat to humankind than the nuclear menace that overshadowed the Cold War.
Block believes it is necessary to contemplate the danger to health and security that would accompany the release of genetically engineered pathogens. The next generations of biowarfare agents, he says, will have the potential to become true biological weapons of mass destruction.
Other scientific lectures by Block in the Bethe series will be: "Sensory Transduction: Clever Physics by Dumb Organisms," a physics colloquium May 8, 4:30 p.m., in Schwartz Auditorium; and "Kinesin Motors: Mastering the Molecular Mechanism of Movement by Mechanoenzymes," a biophysics colloquium May 10, 4:30 p.m., 700 Clark Hall.
Block, who is from Durham, N.C., obtained his undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics at Oxford University in England and his Ph.D. in biology at the California Institute of Technology.
The Bethe Lectures, established by the Cornell physics department and the College of Arts and Sciences, honor Hans A. Bethe, Cornell professor emeritus of physics, who won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1967. The annual lecture series began in 1977.
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