Potential Bioweapon Kept Secret

摘要

Sometimes, transparency in science must take a back seat to security concerns. That's what the editors of The Journal of Infectious Diseases decided in the case of two papers reporting the discovery of a new type of botulinum toxin. Fearing that that information could be exploited by terrorists seeking bioweapons, the editors and the authors of the papers, published online last week, decided that it was prudent not to publish the sequence of the bacterial gene that produces the protein, named Botulinum Toxin H.