From The Wall Street Journal:

Rapid advances in bioscience are raising alarms among terrorism experts that amateur scientists will soon be able to gin up deadly pathogens for nefarious uses.

Fears of bioterror have been on the rise since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, stoking tens of billions of dollars of government spending on defenses, and the White House and Congress continue to push for new measures.

But the fear of a mass-casualty terrorist attack using bioweapons has always been tempered by a single fact: Of the scores of plots uncovered during the past decade, none have featured biological weapons. Indeed, many experts doubt terrorists even have the technical capability to acquire and weaponize deadly bugs.

The new fear, though, is that scientific advances that enable amateur scientists to carry out once-exotic experiments, such as DNA cloning, could be put to criminal use. Many well-known figures are sounding the alarm over the revolution in biological science, which amounts to a proliferation of know-how—if not the actual pathogens.

Another bit later in the article:

All the government attention comes despite the absence of known terrorist plots involving biological weapons. According to U.S. counterterrorism officials, al Qaeda last actively tried to work with bioweapons—specifically anthrax—before the 2001 invasion of that uprooted its leadership from Afghanistan.

This is great. It’s best to pay attention to obvious risks, like this, nuclear terrorism, the integrity of the power grid under solar storms, major earthquakes, etc., before they happen, not after. Often times, adequate preparation even requires little marginal effort.