High-risk research can’t be kept secret forever

Should scientific journals publish high-risk scientific research that could in the wrong hands be disastrous for us all? Although it might be sensible to keep certain results secret for a while, I argue that eventually it does not make sense to withhold results in the long-term.

What is this all about? Yesterday saw the publication in Nature of the controversial mutant bird flu paper. Bird flu (H5N1) is highly lethal, more than 50% of those known to be infected have died from it, although such figures need to be treated with caution. There might be plenty of more benign cases that went undetected so this is more of an upper limit. Still, this is scary. The good news – so far at least – is that H5N1 in the wild doesn’t spread easily between humans and unlike other forms of flu does require physical contact.

Researchers in the US/Japan and separately in the Netherlands have now studied whether H5N1 can mutate to become highly contagious, which would be a real nightmare scenario: a lethal virus that transmits easily. And as these two papers show, using ferrets this requires only a few genetic mutations. What at least the US/Japanese group has done (the other paper has not been published yet, see below), is to use genetic variants from the highly contagious swine flu virus (H1N1) to modify the H5N1 virus accordingly. These genetic modifications, however, have not been successful on their own. It is interesting what happened then: after only two further rounds of infections of ferrets the virus mutated by itself to become highly contagious! Ed Yong has more details of this on his blog. But I like to emphasize that the contagious H5N1 variant as published now appears much less lethal than the original virus.

The publication of both papers has been withheld for months out of fear such knowledge could be used by terrorists  or other mad individuals to create a deadly pandemic. Given also a reversal of opinion from a US biosecurity board,  the US/Japan paper has now appeared in Nature, and the Dutch paper is expected to appear in Science shortly. Eventually, the decision was in favour of publication, because knowledge of the mutations and their effect on the biology of the virus are so crucial to combat this disease and to possibly develop vaccines. It is not terrorists we need to be afraid of, such mutations can easily happen in nature any moment. In an interview with the BBC, Nature‘s Editor-in-Chief Philip Campbell further rationalises the decision to publish.

Other than not publishing such research at all, two further options were debated: redacting the papers, or to make them available to selected trustworthy scientists only. In an editorial, Nature has now declined such possibilities out of principle and announced this important publishing policy:

Some lessons have emerged that point to actions and policies for the future. First, it was worth deliberating at length on the possibility of redacting the key findings of the paper instead of simply rejecting it. (Rejection has long been an option if Nature is advised by security experts that the risks of publication exceed the benefits.) There was also the option that the full paper might be distributed by some third party, to selected recipients only. Having now considered these matters in depth, the editors of this journal have decided that we will not consider either alternative for papers in Nature in the foreseeable future. A paper that omits key results or methods disables subsequent research and peer review. Furthermore, after much internal and external deliberation, we cannot imagine any mechanism or criterion by which to sensibly judge who should or should not be allowed to see the work. Nor do we believe that any restricted information distributed to university laboratories would stay confidential for long.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that Nature won’t be irresponsibly publishing high-risk research. Declining publication always remains an option. And, as the editorial continues:

We are aware that the lack of an option for restricted publication has its own risks in a discipline in which results might be both beneficial to the public benefit and a threat to security. We will willingly explore ways out of this dilemma.

With this being a physical sciences blog, it is important to keep in mind that such policies also apply to the physical sciences. Nuclear research for example, as discussed in Friedrich Dürrenmatt‘s 1962 play The Physicists. Given the background of the cold war, the play makes an important point. There, a brilliant physicist discovers a formula that could destroy the world. To keep his secret, he hides himself in an asylum, only to be pursued by two physicist government agents who also feign mental illness in order to obtain the formula. Eventually, the three physicists reveal their disguise to each other, although the discoverer of the world formula can convince the other two that his knowledge is so dangerous it needs to be kept secret. All three then vow to stay in the asylum forever. In a dramatic twist at the end, the director of the institution then reveals that she secretly copied all the research and will now make use of it.

The lesson here is that once a discovery has been made it will be impossible in the long-term to keep it secret. Sure, as a publisher it is certainly possible to decline publication of papers for security reasons to prevent a too fast spreading of dangerous knowledge. And this certainly makes sense. But let’s face it, if one person can make a discovery, so can others. If someone develops something in secret, it can be obtained through espionage. Everything has its price. Look how the development of the atomic bomb spread across the world. In the long-term, the spread of high-risk research can be delayed, but eventually it will always come out. This is all the more true for alternatives such as publishing redacted papers or to circulate them to a limited audience only. It would seem impossible that such initiatives really achieve what they set out to do. Therefore, I find the editorial policy expressed in Nature yesterday so remarkable and important.

References:

1. Imai, M., Watanabe, T., Hatta, M., Das, S., Ozawa, M., Shinya, K., Zhong, G., Hanson, A., Katsura, H., Watanabe, S., Li, C., Kawakami, E., Yamada, S., Kiso, M., Suzuki, Y., Maher, E., Neumann, G., & Kawaoka, Y. (2012). Experimental adaptation of an influenza H5 HA confers respiratory droplet transmission to a reassortant H5 HA/H1N1 virus in ferrets Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature10831

2. Editorial (2012). Publishing risky research Nature DOI: 10.1038/485005a