PNAS publishes bioterror paper, after all

Four weeks after delaying publication of a paper at the request of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), who argued it provided information that was useful to terrorists, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published the paper yesterday (June 28). The study pinpoints areas in the dairy industry that are highly vulnerable to bioterror attacks.

In the paper, professor of management science Lawrence M. Wein and graduate student Yifan Liu of Stanford University in California explain how bioterrorists could poison the US milk supply with trace amounts of botulinum toxin, detailing the amount needed to kill hundreds of thousands of people, where it could sneak into the milk supply, and which interventions could head off such an attack.

In an accompanying editorial, Bruce Alberts, president of the National Academy of Sciences, noted that PNAS decided to publish the article "as originally accepted,"...