Speak No Evil
Should biologists publish work that could be misused?
Ariella Rosengard of the University of Pennsylvania didn't set out to scare anyone. She just wanted to investigate a little-understood part of the immune system by studying how viral proteins interact with it. At first, Rosengard worked with a common virus called vaccinia. But vaccinia rarely makes people sick, and she began to worry that it wouldn't tell her much about the human immune system. So she turned to a closely related, far more fearsome virus: smallpox.
Smallpox virus isn't easy to come by. Officially, it resides in only two places--secure labs in the United States and Russia--although some states like Iraq may have secret stores. But Rosengard didn't need the virus itself. Scientists have made its genetic code freely available on the Internet, giving her the data she needed to synthesize a key smallpox protein in the lab. Test-tube studies showed that it works far better than the corresponding vaccinia protein at blocking a key step in the human immune response. The discovery may help explain why smallpox kills, and it could lead to new treatments.
But when Rosengard published her report last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a slightly defensive commentary appeared with it. The article said it would be out of the question to use the work as a blueprint for making vaccinia more like smallpox. It acknowledged, however, that "the idea that bioterrorists might be tempted to attempt such an experiment has been suggested as a reason for considering it imprudent to publish observations of this nature."
The best defense. Rosengard, who does not even work with live viruses, rejects the idea that basic science like hers should be put under wraps. "Think how many brilliant minds would not be able to participate in finding a cure," she says. "My feeling is that you can't predict the mind of a madman. The best defense against any virus is understanding how it functions."
Most biologists would agree. But these days, they find themselves grappling with a dilemma, as their tradition of openness clashes with the fear that well-intentioned research could be misused to develop bioweapons. As much as scientists fear aiding their enemies, they get unnerved when government officials talk about restricting their freedom to publish. So researchers have started to take the initiative, with prestigious scientific societies debating ideas for self-regulation. The task won't be easy, and some critics question whether scientists really can police themselves. One thing's for sure--the problem won't just go away. If anything, it will get worse. The Bush administration has proposed a dramatic increase in funding for basic research on potential biowarfare agents. This means that many more scientists will study deadly germs, and they'll inevitably want to publish what they find.
Some researchers downplay fears that basic research on microbes could benefit weapons programs; nature, they say, has already provided plenty of perfect killers. To worry about, say, genetically altered smallpox is "to miss the point," says Andrew Ball, a molecular virologist at the University of Alabama. "The danger is out there, and it's the virus itself." But Ken Alibek, who helped run the former Soviet Union's huge biowarfare program, has called this point of view "naive." Weapons scientists would love to engineer bugs to spread more readily, to resist antibiotics and vaccines, and to exhibit new traits that might delay diagnosis, he says. Alibek has described how Soviet scientists transferred genes for nerve toxins into plague. In 1997, Russian scientists published an article showing how to engineer anthrax so that it could overcome a vaccine; the U.S. government reportedly wants to repeat this experiment. And Iraq is thought to have a genetic-engineering program, though its progress remains unknown.
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