File Under: Trust Us, We're Scientists

A federal advisory board proposed on Thursday ways for scientists and universities to minimize the risk that terrorists would use research findings about disease-causing microbes to mount biological-warfare attacks. The panel would give individual scientists much of the responsibility to police their conduct and decide how much sensitive information they publish....

Several of the panel's members are themselves biological scientists doing research relevant to biosecurity, and so some outsiders have worried that the board would lean toward self-regulation, not additional government controls.....

Raising another set of questions, the draft suggests few specific ways to ensure researcher's compliance. One is that institutions require their scientists to annually certify that they regularly and carefully monitor their own studies. The draft also calls for mandatory training of researchers about the code once it is finalized, but does not spell out who should receive that training or how.

The draft does recommend that the federal government check to make sure that scientists and universities are properly policing themselves, but again does not say how. It suggests that the government could make proper self-regulation and oversight a condition of its research grants.

What is more, the document does not specify criteria that researchers could use to decide which sensitive details of their work to publish and which to withhold for security reasons. The draft does recommend, however, that researchers conduct public-education efforts -- through newspaper opinion pieces, for example -- to assure the public that they have carefully considered security issues before publishing findings of dual-use research and to lay out the potential for misuse of their results.