Discriminations

Reproducible Results - Hanah just sent me this very balanced article from the New York Times about individual scientists asking scientific journals of microbiology to withold information from their papers, so terrorists could not benefit from the knowledge. I was very impressed that, even when the scientists worked for government organisations, the scientists, and not the government, were the ones requesting that the information go unpublished. Still, if crucial information is not included in the paper, the editors of the journals worry that the results published might not be reproducible.

I am very skeptical about the ability of terrorists to reproduce cutting edge scientific work. This summer, I'm working for NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) - the government, I know... - in chemical physics. Nanotech, to be precise. Anyway, I have spent all summer, with a pile of about 100 papers (I'm serious!), trying to reproduce results. We have state-of-the-art equipment, a group of first-class scientists, and complete papers, but we still can't do it.

Reproducing results is just plain hard. No matter what, your equipment is not going to be the same as that of the group in the paper, and the miniscule things that the authors didn't bother to put in are always going to trip you up (you need to clean your glassware with sulfuric acid, if you expose that to the air it burns up, if you put that in all at once your experiment blows up, etc...). Sure, papers are endlessly helpful, but they simply can't tell you everything in a quick and easy ten pages.

I know nothing about microbiology, and certainly I bow to the judgement of the microbiologists who think their work is dangerous. Still, I can't imagine that biological materials would be less touchy than what we're working with. How are the terrorists going to order expensive custom-order bio molecules? How are they going to get the necessary equipment? How are they going to get highly trained scientists to help them?

The article states a precedent:

In June 1940 ... the academy secured the cooperation of 237 journals in withholding papers on uranium and related matters, resulting in "the almost total cessation of publication on nuclear physics."

The academy, however, circulated the articles privately among American physicists.

Perhaps that was needed, then, I don't presume to judge. However, this isn't Germany we're dealing with.