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.)
Suppose our enemies used the research to develop a vaccine? Then the research will have been wasted.
From TFA: The panel said conclusions should be published, but not “experimental details and mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.”
Have the "experimental details and mutation data" already been presented at these conferences, or only the conclusions?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
As far as I understand it, the soon-to-be-redacted information has already been publicly (wow, my spelling sucks) presented. I haven't seen it live, but everything could easily be cobbled together by someone with standard virology knowledge and the publicly presented information (mutational data with associated details.) Maybe someone who attended the actual conferences could speak up.
âoeexperimental details and mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.â
But the whole point of science is to see if results can be replicated or not. This is anti-science and pro-stupid and if taken to its logical conclusion means a drastic slowdown in research since people have to reinvent wheels for no reason except for bad movie plots.
Fuck this government-by-fear bullshit. Publish.
--
BMO
Was this something that they were able to do in a day after getting the idea?
A week?
A year?
I got my original idea of inverting a LALR parser in late 1986 in a 400-series compiler course. I remember discussing it with my lab partner, who's now a professor with Queen's University, specializing in (what else) compiler theory.
That was the inception, the spark, the egg-gets-knocked-up moment.
Gestation lasted 25 years for it to grow into something worthy of being turned into a product or service.
Ideas cannot be stopped or prevented; the risk of an idea being used by a terrorist depends on how much effort and luck is required to go from idea to implementation.
Just because the drug cartels are building custom narco-subs and fielding entire cell phone networks doesn't mean even they have the funding and tenacity to do bioweapons research on this scale or level of complexity, so I don't feel at ALL threatened by terrorists because of this research or it's publication.
Just another case of patriotic fervour and artificial fear being used to paint the world as a scarier and more dangerous place than I believe it is.
Perhaps most importantly, I believe their is risk to everything you choose to do, including the risk of your work being abused. No amount of legislation, threat, or outrage will prevent it, so I believe the benefits of open R&D far outweigh the risks of "terrorists might figure it out."
The United States of Dumberica: Home of Chicken Little Security Politics since 9/11
You fools -- you let the terrorists win. You let them change you at the heart and soul of what the country used to be about.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Grow a pair.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
After all, there's no way a terrorist organization could have their own scientists doing research for them into these things.
There is arguably some science that we don't want in the public domain. Weapons tech comes to mind, of which this is an excellent example - particularly if the methods involved (and I am completely ignorant on this subject but generally speaking) don't require much to duplicate (ie easier to replicate than a nuclear bomb).
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
then why fund it with public money (NIH funded this) which usually dictates that the information is placed into public domain.
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.
lol. this story has been circulating for many, many months around Europe. Much before it gained media attention. It's a commonly-known fact that the mutations and the methodologies have been publicly presented. But, that's OK, I'm sure that you know more about the situation.
Because nature will inevitably find a way to recreate those research results on it's own.
Atleast now we can be one step ahead of it and start researching ways to combat the virus before it's here.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
the editor of Science, Bruce Alberts, said the journal was taking the recommendations seriously and would probably withhold some information — but only if the government creates a system to provide the missing information to legitimate scientists worldwide who need it.
(emphasis mine). How that would be accomplished is left as a problem for the reader, though.
This is, of course, from the same man who later says
“I wouldn’t call this censorship,” Dr. Alberts said. “This is trying to avoid inappropriate censorship.”
So it isn't censorship, because they do it to avoid repercussions. That man is in serious need of a dictionary.
There is a huge difference between engineering plans for a weapon and the scientific research that underlies the technology; you cannot build a nuclear bomb knowing only the nuclear physics/chemistry of fission. Granted, in this particular case, the scientific discovery also contains the blueprints for creating the virus, but the authors are certainly not disclosing plans for making a biological weapon. In fact, you can construct a nuclear weapon without knowing any of the underlying science, but someone lacking extensive training in biochemistry/virology would not be able to reproduce the virus from this work from the experimental section of the their paper. And a nuclear weapon won't make itself. In this case, the authors have discovered that relatively small mutations can convert a benign virus into a deadly, pandemic-ready beast of a virus. Disclosing this information publicly will not change the probability of it occurring naturally through random mutation, will not enable your average terrorist to produce a weaponized virus, but it will spur the pro-active research of cures or preventative methods.
Think of it this way; I am a chemist. If I published a new and simple synthetic route to methamphetamine in Science, and then put photocopies of that paper under the windshield wipers of cars parked in front of every meth lab in the country, I would get sued by AAAS and exactly zero people in those labs would be able to utilize that information. If, however, I instead placed detailed, step-by-step instructions for how to perform that synthesis in a kitchen sink under those windshield wipers, then I would go to jail and make a lot of meth heads very happy. Science != Engineering
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
...about the US Government getting dangerous information.
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.
That is a valid point that you're making, perhaps without quite meaning to. Fear of a virus spreading uncontrollably would not deter people who are willing to blow themselves up to make a point or to get to their enemies.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
The article explains how the N1H5 (bird) flu virus, which has a 95% mortality rate for humans, can be genetically modified into a version that would be transmittable from human to human. If such a virus would get out into the wild, it could decimate human population on earth.
All military research is funded with public money and is not going to put into the public domain. This is research that has a military application and as such should perhaps have been more restrictive to start with.
I am not pro government and I am not at all against the sharing of information to further the good of human-kind.
I am, however, fully against the spread of weapon technology be it nuclear, chemical or as in this case, biological.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
I can see some discussions which kind of mention the recent virus experiment, or the weapon technology, as a way to partly agree with what TFA is about. How I see all this is under a different light though. Scientific research is science. It is not something which necessarily has to do with weapon, or war, or terrorism and such. Technology is simply technology and it remains such no matter how one puts it into use. It is like withholding information on how to produce high quality steel because it will be used to make very sharp swords, or nuclear energy and research is bad and information about it should be restricted because such knowledge is involved in producing bombs. One doesn't need a knife to commit murder, a fork can serve just as well. Awareness and choice on how technology is used has nothing to do with technology itself. If the concern is at such level that technology will be used for harm, the problem lies with the functioning of the social system, or what values the population has come to appreciate, or what classifies as justice and the feeling of whether it is applied justly or selectively, and so on. It most probably is not a problem of technology. Trying to solve whatever problem it really is by covering it with the veil of 'harmful tech' is burying the head in sand towards the real problem.
1) All information does not end up in the public domain and to think so implies a level of naivete a bit beyond belief.
2) 'The common man' does not need to know how to make nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. I'd just as soon that organizations that want to attack my society also not know how to make such weapons.
3) Where some few governments have succeeded, with the help of other governments, I'm sure there are a lot of people and organizations, not to mention countries, who have been very determined to make a nuclear weapon who have obviously failed or we'd know about it.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Stop beating that ridiculous straw man. Publicly funded does not automatically imply publication to the public at large. The Manhattan project was also publicly funded yet even independently researched theses that describe the implementation of an A-bomb cave been classified.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
I understand your very well presented point. I'll focus on one bit, if you don't mind: "...someone lacking extensive training in biochemistry/virology would not be able to reproduce the virus from this work from the experimental section of the their paper."
The problem comes in when you have people are are extensively trained in biochemistry/virology who might be able to do something with the information under discussion.
Similarly, it's not beyond believe to think that the organizations (in Mexico for example) making meth might be able to take your research and do something with it, even if the home brewers couldn't.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Militarily applicable research is generally fairly well protected. This research should probably have been kept 'in house' if it's something that the government is worried about.
I'm sorry but I just don't agree that all science should be available to everyone.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
The problem is that your assuming someone values control over the virus. Just as we once assumed that hijackers wanted to live after hijacking airplanes. It's a dangerous assumption to make.
A virus that would be out of control and could kill half the population of the world. It's an Eco-terrorists wet dream. Think of the carbon reduction from reducing the population by half? With one release of this virus you topple almost every government in the world, end globalization and meet just about every eco goal in existance.
Eco-terrorists are becoming increasingly radicalized, they already do things like break into research centers and release all of the animals into the wild without care for the fact that the animals will then all have to be euthanized. Assuming a bad guy is going to act rationally or have the same values as most people is a really good way to get screwed by the bad guys.
That being said, censorship is something I find abhorrently wrong, one of societies great evils. I'm just saying that something that would allow the weaponization of a biological agent arguably does rank up there with the fine details of how to build a nuclear bomb. Biological weapons of mass destruction were widely used in WW2 and killed far more people than the atomic bombs ever did.
I would have to imagine that the panel would have told them to go fish if there wasn't a reasonable basis for them asking to begin with. That being said I am far from qualified to know if this paper would raise that kind of concern. Their argument is valid, even if in this case they are wrong, I just don't know.
Umm. Is it just me, but even ignorant terrorists must be able to work out that creating and releasing a highly transmissible lethal flu virus is a bit stupid. Judging by most recent flu pandemics, they travel everywhere, not just the country/people/religion you hate. Not very targeted. How about a nuke instead?
Aside to the main topic, is there actually any data on how many people were infected with H5N1. Around the time of the last big scare (late 2009 in the UK IIRC) it seemed to me that a lot of people (myself and my wife and a lot of people we knew, and anecdotally in the population at large) got unusually bad colds and chest infections and what-not, that took a long time to shake off. FTA, "The virus, A(H5N1), causes bird flu, which rarely infects people but has an extraordinarily high death rate when it does" .... are there actually useful figures from random sampling amongst the population, or it is based on people being actively diagnosed with the infection and their subsequent death rate? Call me a cynic, but I have the feeling that there is a significant chance that the number of people infected was much larger than commonly supposed, adn the death rate correspondingly much smaller.
Grow a pair and ignore them.
I fixed that for the GP. The way to combat terror is to not be afraid of "them." That's the whole point of a terrorist - to create fear. They can't actually do much physical damage, as they're too small. Dropping all of the public security that was put in back in 2001, and funneling even half of that theater money into coordination of intelligence and PSAs about how safe a place the first world really is would do far, far more to combat "terror" than the entire government and media playing an unintentional, supporting role in the terror plan.
More troops were killed - by an order of magnitude - and more foreign civilians were killed - by almost 3 orders of magnitude - than died on 9/1/2001 in both towers. Trillions of dollars - more than the entire Wall Street bailout and recovery stimulus - have been spent or lost in productivity due to the reaction to that "attack" - a third of which was foiled by average citizens on the third plane with no training and no advanced knowledge of the attack.. All as a result of our "reaction", the terrorists had their effort multiplied thousands of times.
If you stop fearing a terrorist, you take most of their power away from them. So, yes - all we really need to do is grow a pair.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Streisand effect -- somebody tried to ban the paper and now even the nerds on Slashdot knows about it. It has made multiple hits on Reddit, Digg, Fark, the social networks, TV channels and the blogosphere. The whole internet is aware of it and talking about it. Finally it is time to suppress and censor the journals with a scientific Patriot act of sorts. Face palm.
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).
Biological engineering is incredibly cheap compared to nuclear engineering.
The main reason that nuclear weapons are not more of a threat is that uranium enrichment is such an expensive process. The economic and manufacturing activity associated with doing it is easy to spot. Chemical weapons require feedstocks that are often tracked. It's harder to control, because the level of activity required to produce a successful weapon is much lower.
You could make a biological weapon in a lab with a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, a small team or a lone worker, and sufficient patience. The base materials (biological samples) are available for a few hundred dollars from any number of lab supply companies. You don't need large scale manufacturing to make it effective - bacteria and viruses have this neat property that they will arrange to manufacture themselves. The main constraint on biological weapon manufacture is thus the availability of skills and knowledge, which are becoming much cheaper and easier to obtain.
I also abhor the censorship, but they do have a point. It's a shame they have the wrong response - if the knowledge is already out there (and from comments here, it is), then making a fuss about it will only draw attention from the kind of nutjobs they want to prevent using it. I wouldn't be surprised if radical organizations and individuals are already investigating the requirements to set up their own labs, in response to this.
I'm not sure what the right response would be. Mostly to grow up as a society and stop alienating people to the point where they decide that the solution to their problems with the rest of society is to eliminate as much of it as possible. But I really have no idea how to achieve that.
99% of people and researchers who saw this research would use it for good, or would try to. Unfortunately, the true ratio is irrelevant. Out of the billions of people on earth, all it would take is one competent person who wanted (for whatever reason) to wreak real havoc. If the virus in question maintained the lethality that H5N1 has displayed in bird-to-human transmission, you're literally looking at billions of lives at risk.
Kythe
When I first read that the government wanted a scientific journal to bowdlerize their findings, I was naturally appalled. Then I read the article further and I was even more appalled – at the scientists.
Deliberately researching how to spread lethal bird flu to humans and make it more infectious? What the hell were they thinking? How could this possibly be a good idea? Even as a weapon, it's far too dangerous to ever use – once unleashed, it can and probably will spread back to whoever initiated it.
To quote Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
Yes, exactly. If it wasn't for all the hype around the subject, I would never even have come up with the idea of making those viruses in my basement. And I would never have contracted that nasty cough that I don't seem to be able to get rid of. Well, at least I'll have some great results to publish.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114746/
From back when Hollywood bad guys weren't all from the Middle East.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
One does wonder.
If some research created a super deadly easy to spread virus would it be wise to release that information to the public. This does remind me of nuclear weapons in many ways. the scientists told the military that their was no way to keep them a secret because their are no secrets in physics. The Universe allows for nuclear weapons so they are their for anyone to find if they look. The same is probably true for biomedical research as well. The question is then what do you do about knowledge that could easily kill millions of people if someone is crazy enough to use it?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
yet even independently researched theses that describe the implementation of an A-bomb cave been classified.
Yes, and it was pretty damn conclusively proven back in 1967 (Nth country experiment) that was pretty much completely pointless and it's hardly any less true today.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
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
"You assume that the eco-terrorists are the bad guys. Releasing a few research animals, or driving spikes into trees, or hell even committing their own 9/11 level terrorist attack is small potatos compared to what is going to happen to this world if "
And that is the the true face of evil, justification.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Deliberately researching how to spread lethal bird flu to humans and make it more infectious? What the hell were they thinking? How could this possibly be a good idea?
Because the probability of said mutation sequence happening in nature is non-trivial and this research allows us to have information to be prepared for if/when it does happen on its own.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
As I understand it, their intention is to figure out how to combat something like this when it will appear in the wild. Which it will do at some point, given how viruses work.
To figure out how to combat it, they needed something to study and test.
As I understood this is quite normal procedure.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
This is research that has a military application and as such should perhaps have been more restrictive to start with.
All research has a military application.
Do you know what happens when real CIA agents get outed or academic cryptographers discover NSA breakthroughs? Absolutely nothing
If any real security threat appears, the CIA or NSA quietly say "Oops, too bad they figured that out. Please nobody make this worse by confirming its importance."
What does DHS do? "Oh hey, the media covered this biology paper. Let's get ourselves in the news by redacting it!"
And later they argue over who gets dibs on starting the DHS subcontractor to review all biology research before publication. Imagine all those biologists who didn't get accepted into PhD programs being paid per word redacted. Joking, you think I am, mmm?
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Somebody said on Belgian Radio that the real enemy is not some terrorist who could abuse it but mother nature. She can trow much worse at us AND has the access of enough test subject to do so and already has.
And I agree. Mother nature has more kills on her name then any terrorist group. Even if you combine them all and include indirect kills, like wars over the centuries.
WWII had up to 80 million. That is over several years. Roughly the same amount of people dies of influenza in 1918 in one year. And that is only one example.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This is the first time I've seen a clear expression of the the dominant dilemma we're facing as a species in the open press. This dilemma will come to dominate not just our national security, but also our academic institutions, our manufacturing, our privacy laws and our civil liberties.. every aspect of our lives. Ultimately it will inevitably lead us to change who we are in a very fundamental way.
The dilemma is this:
The number of people needed to inflict damage on others is dropping at an alarming rate, tending towards the limit of ...one ...everyone
AND AT THE SAME TIME
the number of people that damage can be inflicted upon more or less simultaneously is rising at an equally alarming rate, tending towards the limit of
AND AT THE SAME TIME
the extent of the damage they can inflict is rising at an alarming rate, tending towards... death.
If C is your civil liberties then we can put this in the form of an equation thus:
C= (number of terrorists required) / [(victim number)^2 * (degree of damage) ]
Where the power of two reflects the fact that if death is inflicted on a few thousand , a few hundred million will come to the erroneous conclusion that they're next.
In a nutshell, your civil liberties are inversely proportional to how much mayhem how few people can produce against how many.
Nuclear proliferation is a walk in a (dark and dangerous) park (in an admittedly bad neighborhood) compared to what microbiology offers the aspiring terrorist / religious misanthrope.
There is no turning off the fount of knowledge, which is not to say we shouldn't try, because there IS buying time and time is what we need in order to begin to level the inequality which exists between our knowledge and control over nature and our knowledge and control over our own nature.
When just anyone can create a doomsday machine, then no one can be trusted. That's where this goes. The only possible defense against this is more detailed knowledge of the potential destructiveness implied in the capabilities of microbiology- for the purpose of countering it- and more knowledge of the individual personalities in every nation who would study this and related fields.
We need more knowledge of what everyone is doing in certain fields. That is where this has to go, at least. It's not perfect, but it buys us time.
And with that time we have to acquire knowledge of why people are fanatical. What about some humans leads them to the conclusion that everyone should die for the sake of some cause. What about humans causes them to to be illiberal in the broad sense of that term?
Let's just say it. It's not latte sipping, Volvo driving, paper recycling liberals who write their congressmen about danger of global warming who want to splice their way to a doomsday tweety.
It's religious conservatives and adherents of other irrational belief systems like Aum Shinrikyo and or the equally religious Mao adherents. It's the authoritarian personality type, a topic science needs to study more.
In the Middle East that means religious fundamentalists. In the US that means religious fundamentalists... Christian Dominionists and other cults, and secular right wing anti-collectivist extremists like Timothy McVeigh. Even the Koch brothers can be seen as extremist terrorists because what is the continued release of C02 into the atmosphere but a form of religious violence against billions of innocent people?
So what's wrong with these people and how can we prevent it? That's the million dollar question. What is it about their makeup that enables them to blind themselves, or just not care, about the real world suffering they inflict on people-who-are-not-them, while at the same time running arms outstretched to the promise of some grand future paradise?
We have the concept of the sociopathic personality and that's a part of the puzzle, but lots of sociopaths confine themselves to livin