Featured Topic 1/12: The Value of Secrecy?

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Domain-of-Darwin's avatar
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It's a pretty well-established fact, especially among the current generation of the internet elite, that censorship is bad - in pretty much all situations. When it comes to scientific censorship, it probably seems like even more of a black and white issue. How can keeping knowledge and research from the public possibly be a good thing?

As of 2011, researchers from Madison and Rotterdam have successfully tinkered with H1N1 - the dreaded bird flu - to make it considerably more dangerous. As most of you probably know, H1N1 has a pretty high fatality rate when it's contracted by humans, but it's failed to become a huge concern so far because it is not easily transmissible to or between people. Using ferrets as a model, the team of researchers has altered the virus so that it can be transferred through the air from animal to animal. They managed to do this via a process of drawn-out semi-artificial selection combined with some amount of genetic manipulation. This research is being done to determine whether the virus could potentially evolve or mutate on its own to travel through the air, and if it is, what types of drugs can be used to treat it.

The danger in this research is probably obvious. The information on how to manipulate this virus to go airborne, if it falls into the wrong hands, could clearly be disastrous, with the implication that it could be used for bioterrorism. The question that has arisen is whether these researchers should be allowed to publish their findings in scientific journals, which are accessible to anyone willing to pay for them. American authorities have asked the scientists to partially withhold their findings from Nature and Science, the two journals where the research would be published. They don't want the journals to withhold the research altogether, but they want to "strike a balance, suggesting that they publish enough information to encourage further understanding and responsible research, but not enough to allow the researchers’ methods to be put to nefarious use."

In more recent developments this month, the flu-research scientific community - at the wishes of the US government - has issued a statement where they proclaim a voluntary 60-day moratorium on this and similar research, stating that they want to give organizations and governments more time "to find the best solutions for opportunities and challenges that stem from the work." This will hopefully be decided for certain by the World Health Organization in February, at a summit in Geneva.

This month's question is: Is this kind of scientific censorship okay, if it's for the greater good, or should all research be accessible to the scientific community in the interest of progress and knowledge?

There seems to be quite a split about it so far, where a large percentage of the general public - and scientists in other fields - think it's a bad idea, and that the research should be put to a stop and the findings so far censored. But many virologists seem to think that the knowledge is valuable and that the research should be continued and shared with other scientists, and that that's the best (and perhaps only) way to combat its most dangerous potentials. It may be that the benefits of doing the research are easier to understand for virologists in the field, and that the benefits are too complex and difficult to explain for the general public and the media - which increasingly thrives on fear.
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knightsofsanghelios's avatar
I agree with sekele.