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Publication and Security T
he violent events of Sept. 11, 2001, have brought changes to the lives of analytical chemists. The quest of governments and society for improved security against terrorist actions is substantially founded on progress in science and technology, and analytical chemistry is a big part of that scene. The need for rapid, low-cost, and selective detection and sensing for a host of dangerous chemical (explosives, toxins) and biological (bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens) agents was already known, but finding answers has become more urgent. There is already a quickening of the pace of publications in, for example, mass spectral characterization of bacteria and viruses and array (“lab-on-a-chip”) analyses of chemical agents. Many analytical researchers and industries are shifting their emphasis to security-related analytical measurements or are volunteering technical advice. However, university faculty who want to help society through security-related research may soon face a conflict between their desires and obligations as educators. Essential tenets of universities are the pursuit of scientific understanding and giving students that understanding through research opportunities. The research interests of university faculty are necessarily entwined with their obligations as mentors of undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students. Universities have long avoided involving students in research projects in which the government or corporate sponsors restrict publication of the results, including minimizing delay attendant to patent filing. Numerous (most?) universities prohibit classified research projects—at least those pursued on campus. Analytical chemists and other university faculty now face a looming challenge to their freedom to publish their research. A draft policy has appeared from the U.S. Department of Defense that is entitled “Mandatory Procedures for Research and Technology Protection within the DOD” (Malakoff, D. Science 2002, 296, 826). Lest you think that real demands for publication preapproval in contract negotiations with universities are unlikely, see www.spo.berkeley.edu/RA/05_02/may. html#desktop, which describes a tirade from a U.S. “government official who was pontificating about a stalled contract negotiation . . . [and] a clause that restricted the rights of our [principal investigator] to publish.” According to an e-mail
from the official, “The University may not look upon themselves as competing within a market, but they are. It’s the market for Uncle Sam’s money. It is also a market for future students. It would be of great interest to me, to see the impact on the Universities [sic] future business base, because they decided to stand fast on a policy that may no longer fit a new world.” Within the complete e-mail message are also found the threatening words “future programs may suffer.” Clearly, this government official views a university as just another business enterprise. Is this person completely atypical? I do not imply that research results emanating from securityrelated research—analytical chemistry or otherwise—cannot be recused from publication; obviously, they can be in a commercial laboratory or at a government lab, such as Los Alamos. Unclassified research by an educational institution should not be. Weighing open, scientific publication against the complaint that published information may be used by enemies of society or governments is an old argument, dating at least to the dawn of modern science in the 20th century. Some complainers would say that the solution is simply to forbid the study of certain subjects. Free societies know, however, that the generation of knowledge cannot be managed by a policy because true discovery cannot be predicted. As a simple example, consider the analytical chemist evaluating a widely used airport security test for an explosive’s vapor. A student discovers that the simultaneous presence of an uncommon substance’s vapor renders the test completely insensitive. Adding the substance to the explosive’s matrix makes it a “stealthy” explosive. Should this unexpected knowledge be secreted away by the researcher and student or be refused by the journal editor? I would say that their experiment reveals a weakness of the security test of which the analytical chemistry community needs to be aware, so that good minds can immediately research a better one.
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