The British government wants to stop publicizing the locations of U.K. labs working with genetically modified (GM) organisms. In October, the government's Health and Safety Executive (HSE) temporarily stopped releasing a list that pinpointed government, university, and commercial labs doing GM research on grounds that terrorists might use the list to locate ready sources of virulent superbugs. And last month, the HSE proposed to permanently strike labs working with potential bioweapons from the public list. If parliament agrees, the agency would release a sanitized version in January.
Observers disagree on whether the censorship is a good idea. "Any other position would be irresponsible," says Tom Loeffler of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, a grant-giving body. But because "GM organisms currently pose little more threat than existing ones," delisting the labs does little to improve security, says Alastair Hay, a bioweapons expert at the University of Leeds. Clever readers, he adds, can discover out what labs are doing by trolling through journals.
