Edward McSweegan
State Diplomacy Fellow, 1986-87
Edward McSweegan
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Biographical Information
Edward McSweegan graduated from Boston College and has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Rhode Island. He moved to Washington in 1984 for a two-year postdoctoral position through the National Research Council. He was a AAAS Diplomacy Fellow (1986-87) in the State Department and received a State Department Tribute for his work in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. After moving to DHHS, he worked on international health projects in Egypt, India and Russia. Last year, he accompanied a delegation from the State Department and the Office of Global Health Affairs to Siberia as part of an ongoing effort to engage former Soviet bioweapons experts in collaborative infectious disease research. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine's Forum on Emerging Infections, and a PHS interagency working group on smallpox.
Dr. McSweegan is married and has two children. In his spare time he writes magazine articles and reviews science books. One of his stories appeared in Science as part of the magazine's millennial essay series, "Visions of the Future." A medical mystery won First Place in Writer's Digest genre fiction contest and was published in The Year's Best Writing 2001. More recently he has taken to pestering the editors of Science, Nature, the Washington Post, ASM News and The Scientist with letters about diplomacy, science cooperation and bioterrorism.
Vignette
A few weeks ago, I read an article in Science about Poland buying U.S. F-16 fighter planes. The $3.5 billion deal will also provide money for new investments in Polish science, including biotechnology. I had to smile.
In 1987, as a newly oriented and vetted Diplomacy Fellow in the State Department, one of my first assignments was to draft and help negotiate a new science and technology (S&T) agreement with the communist government of Poland. A brutal period of martial law had just ended there and a Republican administration in Washington was making hesitant diplomatic overtures to nations still locked behind the Wall. Drafts of the agreement began winding their way through the interagency approval process, occasionally stumbling over lightening rod issues such as IPR (intellectual property rights) and technology transfer. At one point in the negotiations I was asked to finesse the word 'biotechnology' out of the Polish draft without causing too much angst on the Polish delegation. (I was the only one on the U.S. side who knew what biotechnology was so I seemed like a good choice for the job. For their part, the Poles asked that we stop using the word 'collaborator.' Apparently, it meant something quite different to them and they did not want anything to do with collaborators, scientific or otherwise.)
Months later, on a cold and rainy day in Warsaw, I sat with an interpreter on my right and a State Department lawyer on my left and went over the final English and Polish drafts with our Polish counterparts. The head of the U.S. delegation initialed the new agreement. A few weeks later, three of us went over to the White House to convince Vice President Bush to formally sign it during an upcoming visit to Warsaw. He did, and now another Bush has approved another U.S.-Polish agreement full of advanced technology, including biotechnology.
That first foray into diplomacy and international science was followed by a new basic sciences agreement with Gorbachev's perestroika government and a renewed S&T agreement with Hungary. It also convinced me to stay in Washington and work on international science, technology and health issues.
When my diplomacy fellowship ended, I was able to move to DHHS and the Office of Tropical Medicine and International Research. From there I worked on USAID-funded infectious disease projects in Egypt and Israel. Later, I helped manage a vaccine research program in India, and met with Palestinian health delegations to discuss expanding health care cooperation in the West Bank and Gaza. Other international work included emerging diseases workshops with Italy and Japan, AIDS and relief efforts in Romania, and U.S.-Mexico-Canada meetings on NAFTA and the impact of cross-border infectious diseases.
But for the Fellowship, I would have left Washington for a conventional R&D position in my field. I would have missed having lunch with Arafat's brother, riding horses around the pyramids, dodging sacred cows in Madras, arguing about monkeypox at WHO in Lyon, poking through the sinister remains of Vector's smallpox factories, and sipping buffalo grass vodka with the Polish deputy chief of mission. It probably would have been a comfortable, productive life, but not nearly as interesting as the one provided by AAAS.
Return to 30th Anniversary of AAAS Fellowship Program.
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