(this article originated in The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Thursday, October 9, 2003

By Richard Monastersky

A panel of the National Research Council on Wednesday called for scientists and the federal government to establish safeguards that would prevent biological researchers from inadvertently providing information useful to would-be terrorists or bioweapons inventors working for rogue nations.

In a report, the panel said the National Institutes of Health should have increased power to oversee research financed not only by that agency but also by other federal agencies and private companies.  While calling for new actions, however, the report suggests that no new regulation is needed and that the scientific community can largely police itself.

"The report recommends augmenting the review system now in place--one that has the support of the scientific community and the public," said Gerald R. Fink, the panel's chairman and a professor of genetics at the Whitehead Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  "But [we're] not seeking to overhaul a framework that works well."

One of the prime goals of the panel was to protect the vitality of biological research in the United States.  "We must not adversely impact science," said Ronald M. Atlas, a panel member and a professor of biology and graduate dean at the University of Louisville.  "It is the advance of science that provides the real future protection" from diseases, he said.  "We have provided an architecture that helps prevent the subversion of science."

Although it was begun before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the report reflects the nation's heightened concern about the potential for terrorists to misuse information produced for legitimate research.  In the past two years, a handful of scientific papers have sparked criticism and calls for tighter controls of what gets published.  In one case, highlighted by the panel as an example of "contentious research," Ariella M. Rosengard of the University of Pennsylvania and her colleagues created a smallpox protein and studied its properties (The Chronicle, October 11, 2002).

The panel's report calls for a series of filters to prevent scientists from engaging in potentially dangerous lines of research in the first place.    The primary level of screening would take place within institutional biosafety committees, which are bodies set up by universities and other entities that receive NIH support for research involving reincumbant DNA, or alterations to genetic material.

Those committees consist of at least five members, two of whom come from outside the institution, and they screen research proposals for such issues as safety to the investigators and to the surrounding area.  The National Research Council envisions that the committees will expand their roles to examine whether proposed projects would raise any bioterrorism concerns, such as by demonstrating how to render a vaccine ineffective or how to make a bacterium resistant to antibiotics.

If such issues did arise, an institutional biosafety committee could reject a proposal or seek guidance from the NIH's Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, also known as RAC, or the NIH's director.  The RAC now deals mostly with proposals for gene-therapy experiments, so it would have to add national-security experts and would require substantially increased support to take on the proposed new role.

The panel calls for the creation of a National Science Advisory Board for Biodefense, made up of experts in bioscience and national security, to advise the RAC and the NIH director, and to help inform other scientists and government officials.

As for publishing scientific papers, the panel said that journal editors and scientific societies should take charge by screening submitted manuscripts.    "The issue of whether these results should be published needs to be resolved within the scientific community, no within the federal government," Mr. Fink said.

The NIH declined to comment on the report on Wednesday.

Penn's Dr. Rosengard said, "I'm deeply sad that they list mine as a contentious paper.  It really wasn't.  If they would have read the commentary by somebody who truly knows my field, they would have said it's not a contentious paper."

Still, she said the panel's general recommendations are sound.    "But I just hope that it doesn't delay research," she added.    "All these [review] layers are crucial, but we need to make sure the university has the means and the money to do it quickly."

David Heyman, director of science and security initiatives at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here, praised the report's recommendations.    "There's clearly a need for raising awareness and assessing the national- security implications of research in the life sciences.  This is a field that -- unlike the physics world that developed nuclear weapons -- has had almost no interactions with classification, with the national-security implications of its research.   So at a minimum, a review process, particularly at the beginning of research, raises awareness."