Shifting sands

From signs on laboratory walls, to university hiring practices and freedom to publish, terrorism has dramatically altered life for life scientists since fall 2001. Within weeks of September's attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and hard on the heels of anthrax-laced mailings first discovered last October, the regulatory climate for scientists began heating up.The 'USA Patriot Act' signed into law October 26, 2001, put criminal penalties into existing biological weapons regulations, and the proliferation of new rules continues even now, as Congress weighs revisions to the 'National Homeland Security and Combating Terrorism Act', which would hand control of bioterrorism research strategy to a new agency outside the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Daily, scientists are living with reminders that the work they have been doing to improve and extend lives has weapons potential. "Current CDC guidelines say we have to put a sign out to warn people, 'Anthrax in this room'," says Ronald Atlas, a microbiologist and dean of the University of Louisville's graduate school. "We see that as a public health warning. But you've also posted directions to the terrorists that say, 'If you want anthrax, here it is'. That's the problem in the life sciences, we don't know whether to post the signs or take them down."Many of the restrictions introduced since last fall inflicted seemingly minor irritations on working researchers. Laboratory managers scrambled to tighten inventory control practices, make sure materials-transfer paperwork was in order, and improve security training for personnel. Other rules provoked outrage from scientists accustomed to thinking of themselves as citizens of a friendly global community. New policies from federal departments of state, commerce, transportation and agriculture, among others, meant new registries for people and material, quiet crackdowns on visas, new scrutiny for shipments. "We keep even more careful records of our toxins box. We keep it in a locked freezer, separately," says Harvard Medical School researcher William F. Dietrich, who was years into a project on identifying the genetic base for resistance to anthrax when the threat of the bacterium's use in bioterrorism became a reality. Dietrich, who works with clones that express some anthrax toxins, not with anthrax itself, explains, "It's sort of a good faith gesture because we don't know how regulators will treat the material. The initial feel is that it's not a select agent. But if it is, I would be fine with that."Like many, Dietrich struggles for certainty in the new welter of rules. "I worry about the Patriot Act and how that impacts decisions on how I hire and who has access to this stuff," he says.Even lawyers worry about keeping up with the furious proliferation of new legislation. "The rate of change is just faster than the legal system can accommodate," says Barry Kellman, director of the international weapons control center at DePaul University College of Law and chair of the American Bar Association committee on law and national security. "It strikes me that the pace at which new developments are taking place and the complexity of those developments is outstripping the legal system."Researchers grumble but comply, anxious to keep terrorists from tainting their science. "People are very concerned about any governmental regulatory intrusion," says Atlas. "They become less concerned if they see it as reasonable."But even seemingly reasonable rules are fraught with complications, such as defining what constitutes dangerous information. Scientists working with "select agents," a list of biological materials and toxins identified as having weapons potential in the "Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Response Act of 2001," signed in June, are required to register with the government.The law's list is potentially incomplete, however, explains David R. Franz, a former commander of the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), now chief of the biological defense division of Southern Research Institute. "Those are the classical agents of biological warfare and that's a sensible place to start," says Franz. But pathogens not on the list yet common in hospitals and clinics throughout the country could also be made into instruments of terror, he notes. "Biological terrorism is 1% biology and 99% terrorism. You could use hepatitis C or HIV. The terrorist threat list — not the list of things that could kill a lot of people, but the list that could scare a lot of people — is a lot longer than the classical agents."Still, Franz doesn't endorse more far-reaching regulation. "I'm concerned that we not limit legitimate science too much just to feel that we've done something when it may be impossible to control the threat potential completely."Keeping the science in scientific regulation is a goal uniting life scientists, particularly in defense of the free and open communication of scientific data at the core of the research enterprise. "The best scientists will not want to do research that they cannot publish. Science is an iterative process — it builds upon itself. If the information is not placed in the public domain, the future of science is threatened," says Stephen Teitelbaum, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB).A pathology professor at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Teitelbaum was in Washington, DC last week, lobbying to keep the bioterrorism science agenda in the hands of NIH, and meeting with Bush administration officials to discuss rules that jeopardize open communication of scientific data.The Department of Defense (DOD) is considering a slate of new restrictions for information that falls outside the 'classified' status, which currently defines the difference between work scientists can publish freely and work they cannot discuss. A draft of the policy leaked last spring had university research administrators up in arms because it appeared to create a new category of sensitive material and threatened to limit speech, publication and travel by thousands of researchers doing basic science work.In August 2002, Atlas and other scientists sat at a White House Conference Center table with military regulators, arguing over the definition of 'sensitive material'. Atlas, who is president of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), told The Scientist that he left that meeting with the understanding that only government-owned information could be subject to restrictions outside the classification system. NIH-funded work will remain free of new complications, as Atlas understands the current state of DOD's proposed rules.This summer, ASM initiated a push for scientific societies to include counter-terrorism consciousness in their publication review agenda, to prevent misuse of new science on one front, and mishandling of scientific data by government censors on the other. "The scientific community is struggling in the wake of 9-11 to balance national security and biomedical research," says Atlas, who has acquired a collection of literature on the First Amendment over the past year. "It is proving much more difficult in the area of biology than in areas such as nuclear physics. If we find out why someone gets sick, it allows us to find a cure. If we tell the world why someone gets sick, a terrorist could misuse that information to make people sick. Finding the balancing point is proving very difficult."

Shifting sands

Scientists struggle to keep up with new regulations while protecting scientific freedom.

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