US Asks Journals to Censor Articles on Flu Virus

David R. Franz, a biologist who formerly headed the Army defensive biological lab at Fort Detrick, Md., is on the board and said its decision to intervene, made in the fall, was quite reasonable.

“My concern is that we don’t give amateurs — or terrorists — information that might let them do something that could really cause a lot a harm,” he said in an interview.

“It’s a wake-up call,” Dr. Franz added. “We need to make sure that our best and most responsible scientists have the information they need to prepare us for whatever we might face.”

Amy Patterson, director of the office of biotechnology activities at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Md., said the recommendations were a first.

“The board in the past has reviewed manuscripts but never before concluded that communications should be restricted in any way,” she said in a telephone interview. “These two bodies of work stress the importance of public health preparedness to monitor this virus.”

Ronald M. Atlas, a microbiologist at the University of Louisville and past president of the American Society for Microbiology, who has advised the federal government on issues of germ terrorism, said the hard part of the recommendations would be creating a way to move forward in the research with a restricted set of responsible scientists.

He said that if researchers had a better understanding of how the virus works, they could develop better ways to treat and prevent illness. “That’s why the research is done,” he said.

The government, Dr. Atlas added, “is going to struggle with how to get the information out to the right people and still have a barrier” to wide sharing and inadvertently aiding a terrorist. “That’s going to be hard.”

Given that some of the information has already been presented openly at scientific meetings, and that articles about it have been sent out to other researchers for review, experts acknowledged that it may not be possible to keep a lid on the potentially dangerous details.

“But I think there will be a culture of responsibility here,” Dr. Fauci said. “At least I hope there will.”

The establishment of the board grew out of widespread fears stemming from the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States and the ensuing strikes with deadly anthrax germs that killed or sickened 22 Americans.

The Bush administration called for wide controls on biological information that could potentially help terrorists. And the scientific community firmly resisted, arguing that the best defenses came with the open flow of information.

In 2002, Dr. Atlas, then the president-elect of the American Society for Microbiology, objected publicly to “anything that smacked of censorship.”

The federal board was established in 2004 as a compromise and is strictly advisory. It has 25 voting members appointed by the secretary of health and human services, and has 18 ex officio members from other federal agencies.

Federal officials said Tuesday that the board has discussed information controls on only three or four occasions. The first centered on the genetic sequencing of the H1N1 virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic, in which up to 100 million people died, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.

“We chose to recommend publication without any modifications,” Dr. Franz, the former head of the Army lab, recalled. “The more our good scientists know about problems, the better prepared they are to fix them.”

This fall, federal officials said, the board wrestled with the content of H5N1 papers to Science and Nature, and in late November contacted the journals about its recommendation to restrict information on the methods that the scientists used to modify the deadly virus.

“The ability of this virus to cross species lines in this manner has not previously been appreciated,” said Dr. Patterson of the National Institutes of Health. “Everyone involved in this matter wants to do the proper thing.”