New U.K. center's mission: Use science to make world safer

When Sir Keith O’Nions was chief scientist at the U.K. Ministry of Defense, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, British Intelligence picked up what he describes as “a signal.” Radiation sensors deployed at a British port had sounded an alert: gamma rays were coming from a container. Amid widespread fears about the prospect of a “dirty bomb,” the potential threat was chilling. The suspicious cargo, however, was rather more prosaic than trafficked nuclear material. It was a large consignment of fruit juice. “It turned out it was concentrate that had come from Eastern Europe, from an area where there was still a large amount of radioactive fallout from Chernobyl,” Sir Keith explained in an interview with the Times’s Mark Henderson. “It wasn’t at a hazardous level in the fruit, but when concentrated into a juice the signal was strong enough to measure, though not harmful.”

The false alarm still weighs on the scientist, for his latest job is to head Britain’s first academic center devoted to exploiting cutting-edge science to improve security at every level from terrorist surveillance to identity theft, e-mail “phishing,” and protecting sensitive memory sticks. The Institute for Security, Science and Technology at Imperial College London will scour the research world — from physics’ quest for the “God particle” to biological insights into bacteria and viruses — for innovations that could make us safer.

The fruit juice incident is a perfect illustration of how basic science that was never intended to have security applications is already being used to that end, and of how far such systems could still be refined. The sensors that picked up the radiation were originally developed by astronomers to track gamma-ray bursts — the most violent explosions in the Universe, so powerful that an event 3,000 light years away could destroy life on Earth. As the juice proved, however, even this highly sensitive tool is not quite fit for purpose. “What you really need is not to say, ‘Ah, I can find some gamma rays coming out of that container,’ but to say, ‘Actually, what sort of stuff is it?’,” Sir Keith said. “And if it’s something that’s very low and fruit juice, it’s all right. You need to distinguish between that and hospital waste that may be the forerunner of a dirty bomb. You can have very sensitive information, but you always need more sensitive information.”

That, he hopes, is where the new