Will Science Become Another Victim of 9-11?*

Science is inherently a cooperative enterprise. Notwithstanding the Raelians and their supposed secret cloning laboratories, scientific research does not take place in isolation. It builds on what has come before and, in general, what others in the same field are doing contemporaneously. Those others may be in the lab next door or halfway around the world. These days, it doesn't matter. Science thrives in a climate of openness. Communication is its lifeblood. And communication does not stop at national borders. Indeed, internationalism has been a hallmark of science and a matter of pride among scientists for centuries.

The importance of cooperation and communication have been reinforced in recent decades by the phenomenon of globalization, by the opportunities provided by the Internet, by the relatively low costs of international travel, and by the accelerating pace of scientific progress. Evidence can be seen, for example, in data on authorship of scientific publications. Between 1988 and 1999, the percentage of scientific papers co-authored by American scientists and scientists from other countries more than doubled from 10.4 percent to 21.6 percent. In the field of physics as well as in earth and space sciences more than a third of all papers published by Americans now involve coauthors from other nations. (National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators 2002, supporting data for Overview Figure 18.)

The United States is home to the largest research enterprise in the world and is the leader in many fields of science. It is, quite understandably, a magnet for international cooperation. Scientists, engineers, and students of these fields from virtually every country are eager to collaborate with their American counterparts and to come here to study and to work. At the same time, Americans are finding it more important than ever to stay in touch and collaborate with foreign colleagues.

The events of September 11, 2001, the subsequent war on terrorism and the federal government's efforts to enhance homeland security, to protect American lives and assets, and—especially—to assure that the knowledge generated by our research enterprise accrues to our benefit and not to that of our enemies, all of these developments are having profound effects on the climate for research in this country.

Science and technology are being enlisted in the efforts to fight terrorism around the world as well as in efforts to protect our citizens from the threat of additional terrorist attacks at home. On the one hand, this is changing the R&D priorities of the federal government and providing opportunities for universities, national laboratories, and industrial firms to contribute their talents to a key national goal (and, by the way, to tap into a new and growing source of federal funds).

At the same time as the nation is looking to its technical capabilities for help in fighting terrorism, however, it is developing policies that could cause serious, long-term damage to the science and technology enterprise. There is a growing atmosphere of secrecy and nationalism in this country that poses the most serious challenge to the traditional values of openness and free communication in science that we have seen in many years.

The large number of foreign students studying science and engineering in U.S. universities, which most of us regard as a tremendous asset to our capabilities, is viewed as a threat in some quarters. Publications which would not have raised an eyebrow a couple of years ago are being scrutinized for their potential value to terrorists. The notion of "sensitive but unclassified" information, a term that we heard at the height of the Cold War, is being heard again and it is being applied to some areas of basic research. So we in the science community are already feeling the aftermath of 9-11 and we are likely to feel it even more strongly in coming months and years.

I don't intend to dwell on budget issues, but I think it is important to point out a few facts about these matters, because changes in R&D priorities are a key part of the new environment for science. The biggest change is in the life and biomedical sciences, which, in terms of R&D funds, have received the largest share and the most attention. And these funds and this attention have had major impacts on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Looking back to February of 2001—seven months before 9/11—the President's original budget for FY 2002 actually cut counter-terrorism research by about five percent (down to around half a billion dollars). This budget was still being debated in Congress on September 11. Within a few weeks, the President submitted a revised budget which doubled spending on counter-terrorism R&D, and, shortly thereafter, when the FY 2003 budget came out, counter-terrorism R&D was tripled to around $3 billion, about half of it devoted to bioterrorism R&D.

It is should be pointed out that a large part of these funds—NIH's share—was not added on to the NIH budget but is displacing other priorities. Fulfilling a commitment made several years ago to double the agency's budget, NIH had been slated for a 15 percent increase in FY 2003. That money was originally intended to support basic biomedical research and studies of AIDS, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other areas that have traditionally been part of NIH's mission. In the wake of 9-11, about half of the planned increase was redirected to bioterrorism research.

The displacement of priorities is even more evident at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, where priorities are shifting drastically. An article in The New York Times last October described CDC as going through "an uncomfortable metamorphosis, from an agency that focused on controlling naturally transmitted diseases to one heavily involved with bioterrorism and its possible effects on national security." That's a big change for the agency and raises concerns about what is going to happen to CDC's work on infectious diseases like tuberculosis, or on heart disease, cancer, and stroke.

Under the original plan for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the bioterrorism R&D programs of both NIH and CDC were to be transferred to the new department. These plans were dropped along the way, but the Secretary of Homeland Security was given joint authority with the Secretary of Health and Human Services to set priorities for bioterrorism R&D. How this is going to work in practice is not yet clear.

Among the R&D activities that were transferred to DHS are the Department of Energy's Advanced Scientific Computing Program (located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and the Agriculture Department's Plum Island Animal Disease Laboratory off Long Island, New York. What is going to happen to the non-counter-terrorism research in these laboratories is also not clear. There is, by the way, a new agency being created within DHS called the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA), modeled on DARPA. It is going to award grants for basic and applied research with the goal of developing revolutionary technologies. It is authorized for up to $500 million a year and is slated for $350 million in FY 2004.

Clearly, defense and homeland security are top priorities in the budget these days. The President's proposed budget for FY 2004, released at the beginning of February, contains substantial increases for these two areas and very little new money for anything else. The increases for defense and homeland security R&D are of course needed and well-justified in the current environment. Nevertheless, the budget indicates a shift in how we are allocating our scarce R&D dollars and, more broadly, it suggests a substantial redeployment of our facilities and human resources toward military and counter-terrorism work.

These changes are, of course, direct consequences of decisions and policies that are intended to do just what that they are doing: to allocate resources to research on newly-urgent problems. But many other policies are being put in place that are having indirect, unintended consequences for science—consequences that may undermine the research community just as we trying to strengthen it. These policies have to do with secrecy and openness in research, with scientific publication, and with international communication, including foreign students and scholars coming to the U.S. and foreign collaborations of American scientists.

Let me begin in the lab itself with the matter of "select agents." Select agents are chemical and biological materials that are subject to regulation under the "Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness Act of 2002," a piece of legislation signed into law by President Bush last June. They are pathogens that can be used to make biological weapons or components of these pathogens that can affect their behavior (i.e., their toxicity or virulence).

Biomedical and agricultural laboratories are suddenly being seen not just as places that could help provide answers to the problems of terrorism, but also as targets of terrorists and as assets that can be turned against us. In July, the government published the rules implementing this bioterrorism preparedness act. The new rules extend regulations stemming from a 1996 law. I do not intend to criticize these rules. I believe that, on the whole, they are necessary in the current security climate. But I do want to point out that they, and the way they may be enforced, are going to change the atmosphere of many research labs.

Under the select agent rules, researchers must have a "legitimate need" in order to have access to the materials, and students or researchers from countries considered sponsors of terrorism and people with felony or drug convictions or histories of mental illness will be excluded. Universities and other labs were supposed to have submitted an inventory of select agents to the government by September 10 even if they don't have any of the agents. People who want access to select agents have to be licensed and undergo background checks by the Justice Department. The Department of Health and Human Services has been given broad inspection authority to go in and ensure compliance. And there are new criminal offenses. For example, knowing possession of listed agents without proper registration or transfer of an agent to person whom you know or suspect does not have proper registration is subject to criminal penalties. You can go to jail for giving one of these substances to someone who doesn't have a license.

Some universities are building special laboratories or converting existing facilities to conform to the new regulations by isolating them. Some institutions are simply getting out of the business entirely. Last December there were reports that universities were destroying collections of laboratory agents that could be critical for understanding and developing defenses against biological weapons in order to avoid the hassles of compliance. It is doubtful that Congress expected this when it passed this legislation. Faced with this urgent situation, the Centers for Disease Control established a temporary repository to preserve these agents and provide an alternative to their destruction.

A bizarre incident that took place at Texas Tech in January gives one indication of how life in the lab has been affected by these new regulations. Dr. Thomas Butler, chief of the infectious disease division at the university's health sciences center, and a respected researcher, inadvertently destroyed a number of vials containing bubonic plague bacteria. Apparently concerned about admitting his error, he instead compounded it by reporting the vials missing.

The plague bacterium is a select agent under federal regulations and Butler's actions set off a chain of events that was widely reported in the media and that led to the involvement of the FBI, to Dr. Butler's being arrested, jailed for several days, and finally released on bond. According to one of Dr. Butler's colleagues, the conditions of his release include "staying off Tech property, including his research lab, surrendering his passport, abiding by a curfew, submitting to electronic monitoring, and putting up his home as collateral for his bond." He has also agreed not to handle any biological agents or contact potential witnesses in the case. A colleague of Dr. Butler's in the Department of Microbiology at Texas Tech returned from a trip the following week and found his lab locked and guarded by police. The reason was that he had a small quantity of Ricin in the lab, which he is working on under a DOD grant.

A second area is which the climate for science has changed is that of publication. Section 892 of the Homeland Security Act passed by Congress in November instructs the President to "identify and safeguard homeland security information that is sensitive but unclassified." This provision writes into law a notion that has been under discussion for some time.

In fact, the idea of restricting unclassified information that is considered sensitive first came up about in the mid-1980s, at the height of the Cold War. At that time, a number of policymakers in the White House and the Pentagon proposed that the government impose restrictions on information that was not classified but that might be helpful to potential enemies. The proposals raised concerns among scientists that such a category of information could be ad hoc and could be subject to arbitrary interpretation rather than the established laws and regulations that govern classified information. Questions were raised about why such restrictions might be needed in regard to basic research and whether they might not hurt our own research capabilities more than any potential enemy. The White House undertook a study of the issue and, in the end, President Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 189, which states that "No restrictions may be placed upon the conduct or reporting of federally-funded fundamental research that has not received national security classification, except as provided in applicable U.S. Statutes." That policy remains in place today, but how it will be affected by Section 892 is going to be resolved is not yet clear.

In the days since 9/11 there have been a number of incidents which have brought the issue of safeguarding information that might be of value to terrorists to the fore. Last summer Science published a paper on the synthesis of the polio virus from off-the-shelf materials and not long after the National Academies tangled with the Department of Agriculture over the right to publish an unclassified report on potential vulnerabilities in the nation's food supply that the Department had commissioned. In the case of the polio virus paper, the concerns were raised after the paper was published, while in the situation involving the Academies, the issue came up before publication and a compromise was reached in which certain sections were removed from the report and placed in a separate, limited circulation appendix.

This is a problem that the leaders of the scientific community have been trying to deal with on their own terms, concerned that if they can't handle it, the government may step in and take more drastic action. In January, a group of scientific leaders, including the editors of several major journals, met with security experts and government officials at a day-long workshop at the National Academy of Sciences to discuss how to achieve a balance between the needs for security and openness in scientific publication. The result was a document entitled somewhat blandly, "Statement of Scientific Publication and Security." It was published in late February by Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The statement affirms the need for scientific journals to publish research in sufficient detail to permit the work to be reproduced—an essential element of the integrity of science. At the same time, however, it recognizes that sometimes the potential harm that could result from publishing a paper outweighs its potential societal benefits and that under these circumstances it should be modified before publication or not published at all.

The statement has been criticized by some scientists (and, surprisingly, by some in the press) as going too far in the direction of advocating censorship. And it has been faulted by some in the security community as being too general and not giving any meaningful guidance to authors or editors on what criteria to use in decided whether a paper is potentially more harmful than beneficial. But it is a step toward recognizing the seriousness of this issue. As Don Kennedy, editor of Science, said in his accompanying editorial on the two cultures of science and security: "The statement is perhaps unremarkable in that it poses no radical policy departure. But it makes good sense, and that's a place to start in getting the two cultures together."

Finally, there are the issues affecting foreign students and visiting foreign scientists.

Foreign students—especially graduate students and post-docs—play an enormously important role in U.S. academic science and engineering. According to NSF, nearly a third of the doctoral degrees and a quarter of the master's degrees in science and engineering awarded in the U.S each year go to foreign nationals. The proportion is even higher in certain fields, such as electrical engineering, math, and computer science. More than two-thirds of foreign science and engineering Ph.D. recipients currently stay in the U.S. In engineering, nearly 40 percent of U.S. university faculty are foreign-born. These people have made an enormous contribution to U.S. science and technology. They range from Andy Grove, founder of Intel to Elias Zerhouni, the new director of NIH. More than a third of U.S. Nobel Laureates are foreign born.

Two Americans and a Japanese researcher shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for Physics. One of the two Americans, Riccardo Giacconi, was born in Italy. The 2002 Chemistry Nobel was shared by an American, a Japanese, and a Swiss chemist who splits his time between the Technical University in Zurich and the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla. And Sydney Brenner, one of three scientists who shared equally in the Nobel Prize for Medicine, is a British citizen who was born in South Africa and directs the Molecular Sciences Institute at Berkeley.

Until recently, foreign students and visitors have not been regarded as a problem that we need to solve. Yet, in the wake of September 11, we have put in place policies that are making it harder for students and scientists from other countries to the U.S. to study or work.

There are three related aspects to the foreign student and visitor issue. First, there is a system for keeping track of foreign students in the U.S. called SEVIS. This system, which is currently being implemented, is probably the least controversial of the measures affecting foreign students, although it has raised some questions. Second, there is a system which is intended to screen foreign student applicants and make sure that those who pose a risk are not allowed in. This system, called IPASS, is still in the development stage. And third, and perhaps of greatest concern, there is the issue of how long it takes a prospective student or visitor who has already been admitted to an academic program or invited to come and work or to attend a meeting to get a U.S. visa.

This is not entirely a new issue. Foreign students at U.S. colleges and universities have been receiving attention from policymakers for some time. In April 2001, five months before 9/11, the INS announced a plan for an Internet-based system to track all foreign students in the U.S. The system is called SEVIS (Student and Exchange Visitor Information System). The fact that SEVIS is Internet-based is new, but the idea of keeping track of all foreign students in the U.S. comes from a 1996 law that was passed in the wake of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. That law had not been implemented due to the failure of Congress to appropriate the necessary funds and to the fact that INS hadn't come up with a workable plan.

The announcement of the SEVIS system initially stirred strong criticism from several quarters, including universities, who worried about the costs, and civil liberties groups, who saw the shadow of "Big Brother." But after it was reported that three of the 19 September 11 hijackers had entered the country on student visas, the opposition largely evaporated. Ironically, one of the factors that probably helped mute criticism of the plan was a piece of legislation proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein in late September, which called for a six-month moratorium on student visas, in order to give INS time to implement SEVIS.

This proposal, not surprisingly, created quite a storm of controversy. In the end, an accommodation was reached. Feinstein dropped her proposed moratorium and the university and foreign student advocacy groups made it clear that they no longer opposed the idea of SEVIS, although there were (and are) still concerns about the costs it imposes on the universities and the students who have to pay a fee to register. In addition, there have been problems with the software and the procedures, causing the INS to delay the deadline for universities to be in compliance with the system several times. Under the latest plan, universities were given until February 15 of this year to be in compliance (that is, to be set up to input data) and now have until August 1 to complete entering the data for all of their foreign students.

Before they get into the U.S., however, there are other hurdles that prospective students need to pass. One is a system that is intended to screen foreign students from specific countries applying for admission to study in science and engineering programs that the administration considers "sensitive." This system, which was announced by the White House in May 2002, is called IPASS. IPASS, which stands for Interagency Panel on Advanced Sciences Security, will be run by a committee comprised of representatives from the FBI, CIA, INS, DOS and government science agencies, including NSF and NIH. Its goal is "to ensure that international students or visiting scholars do not acquire 'uniquely available' and 'sensitive' education and training at U.S. institutions and facilities that can be used against us in a terrorist attack."

INS is supposed to do an initial screening to see if an applicant should be given IPASS review. The panel expects to review only about 2,000 out of the half a million or so foreign students who enter the U.S. every year. Still, there are concerns about what constitutes "sensitive" and "uniquely available" education and training and who will decide. Scientific leaders generally understand the need for this and are somewhat reassured by the fact that science agencies will be represented on the panel. Nevertheless, there are many questions about how the system will work in practice, something which has not yet been fully worked out.

As I said a few moments ago, the question of how long it takes for a prospective student or a scientific visitor who has been invited or admitted to actually get a visa is probably the issue of most immediate concern. Two pieces of legislation have resulted in backlogs and delays in granting visas that are of increasing concern to the science community: the USA Patriot Act of 2001 and the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002. Prior to these new laws, when a prospective student applied for a visa at a U.S. consulate, he or she was generally told that a decision would be made within 30 days. This was intended to allow the State Department to do a security check. If the consular officer did not receive a reply from the relevant security agencies within 30 days, the visa was granted. In November 2001, shortly after passage of the Patriot Act, the State Department announced that visa applications from 26 Arab and Muslim nations were to undergo special FBI security checks before receiving approval and that they would not be able to say how long processing might take. In fact, it has been reported that since last summer consular officers—concerned that they are now legally liable if they grant visas to individuals who turn out to be terrorists—have been applying this procedure to applicants from many countries beyond these 26, including notably, China.

It's hard to pin down exactly how many prospective students and other scientific visitors have been affected by the resulting delays, but numerous anecdotal reports have surfaced in the press and in discussions among leaders of scientific societies. One report indicated that 102 scientists were unable attend the World Space Congress in Houston last October because of visa delays. An article in the New York Times reported that Kip Thorne of Caltech, one of the most prominent physicists in the country, was unable to get a visa for a Russian colleague with whom he has been collaborating for 30 years and who has visited the U.S. many times during that period. Yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education on line reported that only a handful of the more than 100 Cubans who had been invited to the Latin American Studies Association meeting—40 of whom were scheduled to present papers—have received visas. The meeting is coming up in a couple of weeks. Cuban scholars have come to these meetings in the past without difficulty.

The Association of International Educators did a survey of 77 universities and reported that 486 students missed their start dates in the fall of 2002, more than twice the number the previous fall. They also reported a substantial increase in visa denials, mostly from China and Muslim and Arab countries. And there have been many stories in the papers about foreign students who have gone home for holidays or for family emergencies and have been unable to get back to the U.S. Some reports have said that the problem may be a backlog of security checks that has swamped the FBI. Or there may be other explanations, but whatever the reason, the result is that many legitimate foreign students and visitors have been unable to get visas.

Looking at all of the issues that I have described—the handling of select agents in the laboratory, the publication of "unclassified but sensitive" information, and the complex matter of foreign students and visitors, it is clear that the climate for scientific research has been profoundly affected by the policies and programs we have put in place since September 11, 2001.

There is no question that the risks of terrorism are very real and very immediate and the need to take action to safeguard our security is great. But science is fragile. It can be hurt inadvertently by policies undertaken for good reasons but without a full understanding of their consequences. Science is essential for our security as well as for the future well-being of our country. It is vital, that as we seek to protect the nation and our scientific enterprise from our enemies, we take care to be sure that science doesn't become yet another victim of 9-11.

—Albert H. Teich

*From a 6 March presentation at The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies