Faced with the possibility of a wide-scale biological attack in the post 9-11 era, a new team of superheroes — comprising scientists, international lawyers and FBI agents — has banded together to fight crimes of bioterrorism, known as biocrimes.

At a conference Friday at the Center for Science, Technology and Security Policy, experts from each area stressed the need for the science and law enforcement communities to establish standards to prevent bioterrorism attacks, such as anthrax mailings or releases of a virus in a subway system, through heightened security measures, especially in laboratories. Those measures would include securing labs to prevent theft, teaching workers and other personnel how to respond to a spill or a release of such strains in a lab and increasing security around those who are allowed in labs that are testing such strains.

Kristine Beardsley, a bioterrorism special agent for the FBI, said right now the agency is focusing on preventing terrorists from testing or dispersing a biological agent. Its efforts involve hindering terrorists from obtaining virulent strains of any biological agent, exploiting their access to expertise in the area, and stopping them from finding a safe place to work, store or deploy a biological agent, she said.

Scientists, meanwhile, have had to adjust to the tighter security measures. After the still-unsolved anthrax attacks in 2001, scientists at labs that handle dangerous bacterial strains, such as anthrax or bubonic plague, have had to follow increasingly rigorous protocol that has made the work more costly and slowed the research progress of some labs. Nearly 600 labs in the United States, most at universities, have been affected by the new rules.

Under the tightened protocol, it costs about $25,000 to upgrade a small lab to the level necessary to handle such strains. Outfitting a medium-sized lab costs $750,000. Installing a closed-circuit television system for 24-hour monitoring of a lab could cost up to $50 million.

It also has become a lengthy process to just set up an experiment — it takes about a year to a year and a half to follow all the steps now required to register and prepare the lab, experts said Friday. Other protocol, such as test runs of emergency response, require participation from more than 100 people from outside the lab, including representatives from local law enforcement and the fire department, disrupting lab work for a week, they said.

But Nancy Connell, director of the Center for Biodefense at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, said such lab work was vital despite the phenomenal amount of effort and paperwork, because the work advances their ability to respond to incidents, even on a small scale.

The inspection and more intense protocol processes have become much smoother, Connell said, with better communication and more willingness to work together between the scientific and law enforcement communities.

Because a disease has no sense of national boundaries and an attack could be international in nature, all three groups agreed that it is necessary to establish something like a international code of ethics to promote global standards and discussion among the countries of the world about the risk of attacks — which can be a touchy process, said Barry Kellman, director of the International Weapons Control Center at DePaul University College of Law.

“The bottom line is, we must bridge this gap among the scientific community, law enforcement, regulators and policy makers,” Beardsley said.