New York Times solicits views on the right balance between biosecurity, scientific openness
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0734
As reported earlier , the New York Times and the Washington Post responded with front-page stories late last month after the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity asked for self-censorship by researchers who had generated a strain of bird flu easily transmissible among humans. For this week’s ‘Sunday Dialogue,’ the Times is now inviting brief responses to a letter written by the director of a biosecurity center on this security-vs.-openness dilemma.
It’s not physics, but it has obvious implications for science generally.
Under the headline ‘Invitation to a dialogue: Research and its risks,’ infectious disease expert Tom Inglesby has responded to the Times‘s 21 January article ‘Bird flu scientists agree to delay virus research.’
‘The question,’ writes Inglesby, ‘is whether these new experiments increase or decrease the dangers of a bird flu pandemic. . . . If this engineered transmissible H5N1 strain were to escape the lab by accident or intentional act, and if it maintained high lethality while spreading as effectively as seasonal flu, it could kill tens or hundreds of millions of people worldwide.’ His ending paragraphs require quoting:
Those in favor of the work have argued that it will improve bird flu surveillance and vaccine development efforts. But it seems unlikely that bird flu surveillance and control programs will be substantially changed based on this research. And developing vaccines against H5N1 strains that are actually emerging in nature does not require this kind of research.
The potential benefits of the research do not justify the potential dangers, so the research should be discontinued. While in almost all circumstances basic research should be fully disseminated in the science community, in this case the results should not be published in a way that allows them to be replicated by others. If allowed to continue, the research should be performed only in pursuit of concrete, urgent goals under international approval and the greatest possible safety conditions.
The Times adds this editors’ note: ‘We invite readers to respond to this letter for our Sunday Dialogue. We plan to publish responses and Dr. Inglesby’s rejoinder in the Sunday Review. E-mail: letters@nytimes.com.’ And I add this one: Since the editors must select responses and then give Inglesby a chance to write a reply, all by sometime late Friday or early Saturday, it seems advisable for those who respond to be not only pithy (about 150 words or less) but prompt.
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.