Washington

Last week's joint statement on the handling of sensitive biological information from a group of journal editors and authors (see page 771) has received a mixed response from researchers and security experts.

The statement, which was issued at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Denver, Colorado, says that the prospect of bioterrorism raises “legitimate concerns about the potential abuse of published information”. It is a response to repeated calls from US government officials to address the issue (see Nature 421, 197; 2003), and commits the editors to modifying papers that they believe could represent a security threat.

Some researchers say that the statement does not take a strong enough stand in the defence of scientific freedom. “It is more equivocal and less definitive than I would like to see,” says Steven Block, a biophysicist at Stanford University. But the journal editors insist that the peer-review process would not be compromised by new security concerns.

Ron Atlas, president of the American Society for Microbiology, says that in the past year the society has modified 2 out of 14,000 submitted papers for security reasons. In one, he says, an author had written that a toxin could kill 10,000 people, but that a molecular modification to it could kill a million people. The author was asked to delete the “cookbook detail” on the modified toxin. “I don't see this as censorship — I see it as an extension of the peer-review process,” Atlas says.

Others say that scientists should go much further to address security concerns about life-sciences research. David Heyman, a science and security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, says that the statement is “only a step” and that scientists should make changes earlier in the research process to reduce the risk of biological research being misused.