You might not have noticed, but the influenza world has been in
a bit of an uproar since late last year, when news leaked out
that two teams of researchers had purposefully tweaked H5N1 bird
flu in the lab to potentially make it more transmissible among
human beings. (H5N1 spreads like wildfire among birds — and
usually kills them — but the virus only rarely seems to jump to
human beings, though when it does the infections are often
fatal.) The two scientists — Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University
of Wisconsin–Madison and TIME 100 honoree Ron Fouchier of
Erasmus University in the Netherlands — had submitted their
research to Nature and Science, respectively, with the
expectation of swift publication. In December, the National
Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) did something
unprecedented: they ruled that the two papers should be censored
if published, that they should be scrubbed of the complete
methods and viral mutations that the researchers studied, in
order to head off the risk that terror grou