Introduction

This chapter provides the background and context to the investigation that is conducted throughout this book. It identifies a turn by governments around the world towards the development and stockpiling of a range of new security technologies termed medical countermeasures to combat biological threats. This turn has been facilitated by a new molecular vision of life that has made visible and manipulable the workings of life at the molecular scale. It has made intelligible the contingent way that molecular life evolves into new forms of disease and the constant biological dynamics that are targeted by medical countermeasures in the prevention of disease. Notions of security and insecurity surrounding biological threats are characterised by these differing notions of life at the molecular level. Security has become molecularised. This chapter details the way in which each subsequent chapter supports this argument.