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.
Science journals are filled with research, done with the best of intentions, that might aid such efforts. Gene therapists who want to use viruses to shuttle disease-fighting DNA into cells are trying to engineer the viruses to evade the immune system--a desirable trait in a bioweapon. Researchers who want to do away with insulin injections are trying to develop new ways of aerosolizing drugs--and fine aerosols make the best weapons, as the anthrax attacks last fall showed. Scientists are trying to find out why the 1918 strain of influenza killed millions, so they'll be ready when the next killer flu emerges--yet few prospects are as terrifying as a deliberate reprise of that pandemic. Virologists interested in understanding viruses like Ebola have devised methods for assembling them from scratch and altering their genes. But that could mean that a bioterrorist would not even have to track down an Ebola outbreak to get the virus.
Recently, public attention has focused on the potential for altering the pox viruses--smallpox and its more benign relatives. In April, British scientists reported that they had compared smallpox's genetic code with that of its closest relative, camelpox. They noted that it "might be unwise" to change genes in camelpox to make them like those in smallpox. And early last year, scientists at an Australian research institute issued a wakeup call about the dangers of designer bioweapons. While trying to turn mousepox into a tool for pest control, the researchers inserted a gene that, to their surprise, made the virus far more deadly to mice and able to overcome vaccines. This finding raised the unsettling possibility that someone could alter smallpox in the same way.
To John Steinbruner, an arms control expert at the University of Maryland, bioengineered diseases pose a threat comparable to that of nuclear weapons--and a far more difficult public-policy challenge. Unlike nuclear physics, born in secrecy and tightly controlled by the government, biotechnology has marched forward unencumbered by security concerns. "You cannot just slap down the restrictive things you'd do with regard to nuclear weapons--the security and classified information," he warns. "It's not the weapons culture; it's basic medical science."
Yet biologists feel that they have to figure out ways to define and control risky technologies. If they don't, the government will. The Department of Defense, which funds basic research in many fields, last month issued a draft policy that would have forced scientists to get approval before publishing work done with military grants. This proposal created a furor, and the department did a quick about-face.
The mere thought of such restrictions puts scientists on edge. Another controversy erupted after a report that the White House asked the American Society for Microbiology to be careful about what it publishes in its 11 scientific journals. Bioweapons expert Ronald Atlas of the University of Louisville, the society's incoming president, says the White House never made the request. But he concedes there have been "lots of discussions" with government officials, and the society has taken action: It created a new policy requiring any submitted papers deemed sensitive to get a special peer review.
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.
This story appears in the June 24, 2002 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.