Thank you for posting this!
Jan 21st 2012, 17:56 by J.P.
IN DECEMBER boffins around the world were taken aback by an odd request. The American government called on the world’s two leading scientific publications to censor research. As we reported at the time, Nature (a British journal) and Science (an American one) were about to publish studies by two separate teams which had been tinkering with H5N1 influenza, better known as bird flu, to produce a strain that might be able to pass through the air between humans. The authorities fretted that were the precise methods and detailed genetic data to fall into the wrong hands, the consequences would be too awful to contemplate. They therefore suggested that only the broad conclusions be made public; the specifics could be sent to vetted scientists alone.
A furore duly erupted, fanned by fears of a pandemic that would make the “Spanish flu” of 1918, which may have claimed up to 100m lives, look like a mild case of the sniffles. On January 20th the teams’ leaders, Ron Fouchier of Rotterdam’s Erasmus Medical Centre and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, bowed to public pressure. In a joint statement published in Nature and Science and signed by 37 other leading flu experts, they announced a voluntary 60-day moratorium on all similar research. The aim of the self-imposed suspension, they explained, is to give organisations and governments time “to find the best solutions for opportunities and challenges that stem from the work”.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/01/flu-research-and-biological-warfare