Slashdot Mirror
US Asks Scientists To Censor Reports To Prevent Terrorism
Following up on a disturbing story we discussed in November, Meshach writes "The United States is asking scientific journals publishing details about biomedical research to censor articles out of fear that terrorists could acquire the information. 'In the experiments, conducted in the United States and the Netherlands, scientists created a highly transmissible form of a deadly flu virus that does not normally spread from person to person. It was an ominous step, because easy transmission can lead the virus to spread all over the world. The work was done in ferrets, which are considered a good model for predicting what flu viruses will do in people.' The panel cannot force the journals to censor their articles, but the editor of Science, Bruce Alberts, said the journal was taking the recommendations seriously and would most likely withhold some information. Are we heading for another Rorschach-style cheat sheet being developed?"
... at several conferences. Anyone who wants the information can get it. This is RIDICULOUS (coming from a biochemist.)
Now that the whole world knows what it is about and since some of the results (if not all) have already been presented at public events, it seems likely that the information will anyway percolate to the scientific community at large in the years to come. Moreover, the virus does not seem like a very good weapon to me as it is simply impossible to control or contain its propagation once released. This is the reason why modern armies do not use gas for instance. The Germans tried it during the first world war and it proved to be rather unpredictable making it in effect useless.
This is research that has a military application and as such should perhaps have been more restrictive to start with.
Arguably, most research can have military application. If we start asking all such projects to self sensor themselves, the scientific process gets cut off at the knees. The dividing line between civilian and military applications is vacuous at best (think Internet).
Actually, if I understand the project correctly the purpose was the OPPOSITE of "kill a metric f**kton of people". Two strains of influenza can often require two totally different methods of developing a vaccine, and two totally different methods to cure. When the two strains trade genes you may well end up with something that needs an entirely different method to prevent or kill it. The purpose of this was to find out if a third method was going to be needed if/when these two strains combine in the wild.
What the found was that this third strain, if it developed in a certain way, was an order of magnitude worse than either one alone. Prevention and treatment regimens are going to need a new paradigm to attack a disease like this, and it was totally responsible of the researchers to warn the medical industry of this fact.
This is not the US Army spiriting Ken Alibeck out of the Soviet Union so that he could recreate Black Pox (a smallpox/Marburg chimera) for them. These were actual scientists doing legitimate work.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin