Free The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman J. Dyson

weapons of mass destruction.…
    (2) Create an international body to publicly examine the dangers and ethical issues of new technology.…
    (3) Use stricter notions of liability, forcing companies to take responsibility for consequences through a private-sector mechanism—insurance.…
    (4) Internationalize control of knowledge and technologies that have great potential but are judged too dangerous to be made commercially available.…
    (5) Relinquish pursuit of that knowledge and development of those technologies so dangerous that we judge it better that they never be available. I too believe in the pursuit of knowledge and development of technologies; yet, we already have seen cases, such as biological weapons, where relinquishment is the obvious wise choice.
    Next comes my response to Bill. I agreed that the dangers he described are real, but I disagreed with some details of his argument, and I disagreed strongly with his remedies. I began by speaking about the history of biological weapons and gene-splicing experiments, and the successes and failures of efforts to regulate them. Bill ignores the long history of effective action by the international biological community to regulate and prohibit dangerous technologies. Gene-splicing experiments began in many countries when the technique of sticking pieces of DNA together was discovered in 1975. Two leading biologists, Maxine Singer and Paul Berg, issued a call for a moratorium on all such experiments until the dangers could be carefully assessed. There were obvious dangers to public health, for example if genes for deadly toxins could be inserted into bacteria that arenormally endemic in human populations. Biologists all over the world quickly agreed to the moratorium, and experiments were halted everywhere for ten months. During the ten months, two international conferences were held to work out the guidelines for permissible and forbidden experiments. The guidelines established rules of physical and biological containment for permitted experiments involving various degrees of risk. The most dangerous experiments were forbidden outright. These guidelines were adopted voluntarily by the biologists and have been observed ever since, with changes made from time to time in response to new discoveries. As a result, no serious health hazards have arisen from the experiments in twenty-five years. This is a shining example of responsible citizenship, showing that it is possible for scientists to protect the public from injury while preserving the freedom of science.
    The history of biological weapons is a more complicated story. The United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union all had large programs to develop and stockpile biological weapons during and after the Second World War. But these were low-key efforts compared with the programs to develop nuclear weapons. Unlike the well-known physicists who pushed the nuclear bomb programs ahead with great enthusiasm, the biologists never pushed hard for biological weapons. The great majority of biologists had nothing to do with weapons. The few biologists who were involved with the weapons program were mostly opposed to it.
    The strongest of the opponents in the United States was Matthew Meselson, who had the good luck to be a neighbor and friend of Henry Kissinger in 1968 when Nixon became president. Kissinger became national security adviser to President Nixon. Meselson seized the opportunity to convince Kissinger, and Kissinger convinced Nixon, that the American biological weapons program was far more dangerous to the United States than to any possible enemy. On the one hand, it was difficult to imagine any circumstances in which theUnited States would wish to use these weapons, and on the other hand, it was easy to imagine circumstances in which some of the weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists.
    So Nixon in 1969 boldly declared that the United States was dismantling the entire program and destroying the stockpile of