WASHINGTON, Jan 9: The US government may be worried that enemies are plotting a biological attack, but it should not react by muzzling researchers and classifying their findings as secret, some scientists agreed on Thursday.

While certain biotechnology researchers may need to be discreet about what they publish, a wide-ranging crackdown on the publication of information would do more harm than good, said the experts, who included President George W. Bush’s science adviser.

Scientific research can benefit humanity only if its traditions of free information sharing and open questioning of research findings are allowed to continue, the experts said at a conference organized by the National Academies of Science.

“Science is inherently a social activity,” John Marburger, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, told the conference.

Several experts said they feared national security officials were seeking to stifle this.

“The political climate that we are in is leading toward imposing security regulations that, while they would provide precious little security, would seriously impair the progress and conduct of science,” said John Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“I fear that we are leaning the wrong way in the understandable fear we have after Sept. 11. We have a security community today that wants to put blanket restrictions on all scientists,” he told the conference.

Ron Atlas, president of the American Society of Microbiology, said national security is best served by encouraging the free flow of information. “The best defense against anthrax or any other infectious disease is information,” he said.

But scientists must be careful not to publish information “that could serve as a cookbook for bioterrorism” and should themselves determine what is ethical to publish, said Atlas. “We cannot rely on the government to do this for us.”

For years, bioterrorism experts have warned that the United States is vulnerable to biological attack, noting that information on how to make germ weapons is often freely available on the Internet.

Even benign information can be misused, such as techniques used in crop-dusting that can be applied to spreading germs.

These fears took on new urgency after the October 2001 anthrax letter attacks in which five people died.

Several speakers at the conference urged that leaders in science sit down and talk with national security officials to outline what information it would make sense to keep confidential.

“Rational and well-conceived restrictions do remain necessary,” said Mitch Wallerstein, a former assistant secretary of defense now at the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago.

Wallerstein said universities should be more careful about who they admit and grant access to research, while the government should look more carefully at who is granted visas.

Scientists are accustomed to publishing their findings as quickly as they can, so that colleagues can double-check and test them. But Wallerstein said a “modest delay” for reviewing potentially sensitive information would not be inappropriate.—Reuters