According to this New York Times article, "A government advisory board is afraid that the details of certain biomedical experiments could be used by terrorists to create deadly viruses and touch off epidemics."
Apparently, the government advisory board believes that active terrorists could be studying and working at university libraries, where such medical and scientific journals would be housed and indexed. They must also not be aware that access to the online databases which index the articles from those medical and scientific journals are password protected and closed off to people who do not work or study in higher education. Either that, or this government advisory board must believe that people working or studying in academia have the potential to share this password protected information with others.
If scientific research is censored for fear of "terrorism", then how will people in the medical and scientific fields acquire knowledge about advances in their field, especially when health is concerned? Will the potential lack of complete published knowledge cause scientific study in the United States to stagnate, or cause millions of dollars to be wasted on repeated experiments? Or will there be two sets of published information--one "censored" version for the general public, and one "uncensored" version for those working in the field, which would be kept under some strong security system?
If researchers in the United States cannot have full access to the details of published research studies for fear of terrorism, this could mean that such research will be conducted in other countries, and the results sold to us in exchange for our ignorance. How would we know that what we were sold was the truth, and not in fact results of inaccurate, biased research which could harm us more than help?
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