Speak No Evil
Should biologists publish work that could be misused?
The National Academy of Sciences, meanwhile, has set up a committee to figure out how to prevent the "destructive application of advanced biotechnology." The panel will consider ideas from specialists like Steinbruner, who envisions an international committee of scientists to control the most dangerous research, as the World Health Organization currently oversees smallpox.
Even though scientists treasure freedom of inquiry, many seem ready to go along with reasonable controls. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases believes scientists should push for "transparency, but not ruling out the possibility that you might stumble on something that you might not want to disseminate."
Self-policing? Susan Wright, a historian of science at the University of Michigan who has studied the regulation of genetic engineering, questions whether scientists alone should make these decisions. "It's not a technical question. It's a public-policy question," she says, pointing out that scientists "have a vested interest in pursuing research." Indeed, the American Society for Microbiology published the mousepox finding in one of its journals. "We would do so again today," says Atlas, who concedes that "not everybody is going to agree with that." To debate these thorny questions, Atlas hopes to call for a national conference like the now famous Asilomar meeting, which scientists held in 1975 to consider dangers posed by their new ability to insert foreign genes into cells.
Yet that meeting may not be the best precedent. Even then, geneticists foresaw the possibility that these new tools could have military uses, says Alexander Capron, who is now at the University of Southern California. But they chose not to discuss that concern openly. Their main goal was to ensure that their work could go forward, and for that they needed to reassure the public that they were putting safeguards in place to prevent accidents--the inadvertent creation of new pathogens. "It wasn't the time to say, `Oh, and by the way, this is all going to be used to create horrible new weapons,' " Capron notes wryly. Now, that danger can't be ignored. And this time, moving forward will require facing the issue head-on.
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