Dept. of HHS Asks PNAS Not to Publish Paper

Science news reports:

In an unprecedented move, officials at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) asked the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) to pull a bioterrorism-related paper that the journal planned to publish online on 30 May. The journal took the paper off its publication schedule on 27 May and has been reviewing it internally.

The paper, by mathematician Lawrence Wein of Stanford University and graduate student Yifan Lu, models how bioterrorists could wreak havoc by slipping a small amount of botulinum toxin into the U.S. milk supply, and it spells out interventions that the government and the dairy industry could take to prevent this nightmare scenario.

Apparently the government objects to some of the details contained in the paper. This is one of those tough science/law/national defence issues--when should scientific findings NOT be published? Apparently Wien wrote and Op-Ed in the New York Times that describes his paper. PNAS could go ahead and publish the paper, scrap it, or modify it. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.