A National Research Council (NRC) committee Wednesday (October 8) proposed a self-policing administrative system whereby scientists would review all American biotechnology experiments to make sure that terrorists don't learn anything from cutting-edge research that they could use to harm American citizens.

Although the new bioresearch security program would apply to all US scientists, not just to publicly funded ones, cooperation with the program would be voluntary, relying on scientists' good will and their desire to avoid more cumbersome regulations that the federal government might otherwise impose. Scientists who choose not to cooperate would not be punished.

Noting that all new biotechnology discoveries have “dual use,” helpful/harmful potential, “The challenge is for the scientific community to develop a system that permits fundamental research to proceed unimpeded, while identifying research with great potential for misuse,” according to the report issued Wednesday by the NRC-appointed group, the Committee on Research Standards and Practices to Prevent the Destructive Application of Biotechnology.

The 109-page document rejected establishing any “top-down,” mandatory experiment review system out of fear that it would slow down progress in biotechnology, “which has revolutionized the practice of medicine” and whose progress is far too important to delay, said committee chairman Gerald Fink, a professor of genetics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

The report also rejects any new restrictions on the freedom of journal editors to publish federally funded fundamental research, unless the federal government had previously given it a national security classification.

Instead, the committee proposes a continuing dialogue between editors and national security experts to decide what results might be too dangerous to publish. In February, a group of journal editors proposed just such self-review to keep potentially harmful information out of terrorists' hands.

The NRC committee suggested a multitiered review system. If an organization's institutional biosafety committee could not decide whether to allow a certain experiment to take place in a nonsecure lab, it could contact the Recombinant Advisory Committee (RAC) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Currently, RAC only oversees genetic research funded by NIH, but the committee would expand its purview to all American research, regardless of funding source.

If the RAC were also unable to decide, it could ask the NIH director, who could in turn ask the advice of a new national science advisory board for biodefense, whose members would include both life scientists and national security experts.

Richard Ebright, a bioterrorism research expert and professor at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University, called the committee's proposed program “naïve,” predicting it would result in “minimal participation from laboratories in the industrial, government, and defense sectors.” Scientists wouldn't even need to refuse, he said. They could simply not opt into the system.

At a press conference Wednesday morning, The Scientist asked committee member Ron Atlas, biology professor and graduate dean at the University of Louisville, whether opposition from privately funded researchers could be expected.

“I expect there'll be concerns at all ends of the spectrum that the report perhaps did not go far enough in terms of statutory issues on the one hand,” Atlas said, “and on the other hand, that it perhaps went too far in trying to describe these experiments of concern, which might wind up restricting research. I personally feel we did a good job to achieve balance between these two extreme views.”

Others questioned the committee about whether any voluntary system could stop scientists who wanted to aid terrorists. In response, several committee members said that the USA Patriot Act, the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act, and regulations governing experiments using “Category A” (potentially lethal) diseases like anthrax, smallpox, and plague already address that problem. The proposed review system needs only to ensure that honest scientists don't accidentally aid terrorists, the committee members said.

Also on Wednesday morning, new Nobel Laureate Peter Agre, of Johns Hopkins University, expressed concern over antiterrorism-oriented scrutiny of scientists, particularly the prosecution of plague researcher Thomas Butler. Agre told the Reuters news agency that he was considering directing some of his prize money to “some social issues we're considering, including scientists who are being persecuted around the world and in the United States.”

Editor's note: The original version of this article misidentified Thomas Butler. The text has been corrected, and The Scientist regrets the error.