Slashdot Mirror
Security Versus Science
dogfrt writes "According to this Wired News article, post-9/11 homeland security has had a decidedly negative effect on US scientific research. In specific, researchers are self-censoring what they publish, talented foreign students are being denied visas (approximately 20%, according to one source in the article), and researchers are avoiding work with dangerous pathogens, choosing more innocuous micro-organisms."
A different world? Correct me if I'm wrong, but Bush wasn't elected on Sep. 11, either. Moreover, we had already identified Osama as a threat, and Bush was busy cancelling funds to arrest him. Nothing on 9-11 made the world so different. We had terrorist attacks around the world both before and after. There was war before and after. Bush sold us change the same way a used car salesman might. He told us the the world had changed in a fundamental way, and that we had to give up our freedom because of it. IIRC, the founding fathers had to worry about security, too. Security is not a new concern. The OK City bombing should have shown us that much. Alas, 9-11 was used by Bush to justify a huge expenditure of effort and money, at the expense of freedom.
#define DRM chmod 000
I recently started working as a physics Ph. D. student in Innsbruck, Austria. In our group we have a Taiwanese post-doc who is really talented and does a tremendous job, working 12 hours a day, six days a week.
This guy used to be at Stanford, but when he wanted to get his visa renewed he was told he had to go back to Taiwan and renew it there. So he went to Taiwan, where he was told that he could not get a new visa. There he was in Taiwan, with all his stuff left in California, unable to go back! After some time he managed to get a temporary visa so he could at least go back for 14 days, sell his car and take care of his belongings. Then he went working with us in Austria instead.
Good for us, bad for USA.
currently, i'm employed at a major research institution as a postdoctoral researcher. One of our research projects currently is examining the factors influencing the transport of microorganisms in porous media (i.e., what happens to the bugs as they go into the groundwater).
One of the bugs we're looking at is Cryptosporidium parvum, a nasty parasite that was responsible for an outbreak in Milwaukee in 1993 that sickened something like 400,000 people and killed at least 100.
Interesting facts about crypto: It can be purchased over the phone with a credit card. With no previous clearance or paperwork or anything (at least as far as we can tell) to ensure that it is going to someone who won't misuse it. And it comes fully viable and capable of infecting individuals (as we accidently discovered a couple months back).
back of envelope calculations say that if we were to find a 1 million gallon reservoir, and dumped our sample in, (and somehow could mix it real well) there'd be near 1,000 particles per gallon. Given that it takes 1-10 to cause an infection, that's enough to infect the entire town i live in.
amazing. and all it takes is a credit card...
My hope is that the situation will improve with the next presidential elections. I can't believe that Americans will not defend their freedom.