In the fall of 2001, just weeks after the trauma of 11 September, letters laced with powdered anthrax caused death and panic in the United States. Ever since, biological scientists have debated whether, one day, the need to keep sensitive information from aspiring bioterror-ists would force them to impose new limits on the academic openness they had long taken for granted. A decade later, that day appears to have arrived. Just before Christmas, the U.S. government announced that a biosecurity advisory board had asked two research teams to strike key details from papers in press at Science and Nature. The studies describe how researchers made the deadly H5N1 avian influenza more transmissible between mammals-possibly providing a blueprint on how to set off a flu pandemic. The researchers and the journals agreed, but only if the U.S. government comes up with a system that allows "responsible" scientists to see the deleted information, which public health experts say could be crucial to monitoring H5N1 outbreaks and developing drugs and vaccines.
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