by Kevin Finneran

About the author: Kevin Finneran is editor-in-chief of Issues in Science and Technology magazine.

The horror of [the] September 11 [terrorist attacks on America] is difficult to absorb. We all looked in disbelief as the tape of the buildings collapsing was played over and over and over again. We watched thinking that if we saw it often enough perhaps we could feel the magnitude of the loss. For more than three months the New York Times ran biographical sketches of the people who were killed that day in an effort to help us slowly come to understand the magnitude of this mind-numbing tragedy.

On November 2, the Department of State in cooperation with the National Academies sponsored an all-day meeting on a human disaster of even greater magnitude—the spread of...