Free The Scientist as Rebel by Freeman J. Dyson Page A

weapons. This was a unilateral move, not requiring any international agreement or ratification by the American Senate. The development of weapons was duly stopped and the weapons were destroyed. Britain quickly followed suit. In 1972, as a result of Nixon’s initiative, an international convention was signed by the US, the UK, and the USSR, imposing a permanent prohibition of biological weapons on all three countries. Many other countries subsequently signed the convention.
    As we now know, the Soviet Union violated the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 on an extensive scale, continuing to develop new weapons and to accumulate stockpiles until its collapse in 1991. After the collapse, Russia declared its adherence to the convention and announced that the Soviet program had now finally been stopped. But many of the old Soviet research and production centers remain hidden behind walls of secrecy, and Russia has never provided the world with convincing evidence that the program is not continuing. It is quite possible that stockpiles of biological weapons continue to exist in Russia and in other countries. Nevertheless, the 1972 convention remains legally in force and most countries have signed it. Even if the convention is unverifiable and even if it is violated, we are far better off with it than without it. Without the convention, we would not have any legal ground for complaint or for preventive action whenever a biological weapons program anywhere in the world is discovered. With the convention, the danger of biological weapons is not eliminated but it is significantly reduced. Again, biologists in general and Meselson in particular deserve credit for making this happen in the real world of national politics and international rivalries.
    The last part of my reply to Bill Joy concerns remedies for thedangers that we all agree exist. Bill says, “Internationalize control of knowledge” and “Relinquish pursuit of that knowledge … so dangerous that we judge it better that [it] never be available.” Bill is advocating censorship of scientific inquiry, either by international or national authorities. I am opposed to this kind of censorship. It is often said that the risks of modern biotechnology are historically unparalleled because the consequences of letting a new living creature loose in the world may be irreversible. I think we can find a good historical parallel where a government was trying to guard against dangers that were equally irreversible.
    Three hundred and fifty-nine years ago, the poet John Milton wrote a speech with the title
Areopagitica
, addressed to the Parliament of England. He was arguing for the liberty of unlicensed printing. I am suggesting that there is an analogy between the seventeenth-century fear of moral contagion by soul-corrupting books and the twenty-first-century fear of physical contagion by pathogenic microbes. In both cases, the fear was neither groundless nor unreasonable. In 1644, when Milton was writing, England was engaged in a long and bloody civil war, and the Thirty Years’ War, which devastated Germany, had four years still to run. These seventeenth-century wars were religious wars, in which differences of doctrine played a great part. In that century, books not only corrupted souls but also mangled bodies. The risks of letting books go free into the world were rightly regarded by the English Parliament as potentially lethal as well as irreversible. Milton argued that the risks must nevertheless be accepted. I believe his message may still have value for our own times, if the word “books” is replaced by the word “experiments.” Here is Milton:
    I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors.… I know theyare as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s