“There’s no specific talking about select agent work in that report. We took our charge a little differently,” explains Tosteson University Professor S. James Adelstein, who chairs the committee.

Though the committee is not yet prepared to issue formal recommendations about biological-agent research at Harvard, a few clear priorities have emerged from the discussion, he said.

Committee members agree that Harvard must maintain its scholars’ abilities to pursue their academic work freely and publish their findings—in spite of the ambiguity of the government’s sensitive classification, Adelstein says.

“Some of the restrictions are fairly onerous,” says Assistant Provost for Science Policy Kathleen M. Buckley. “They are in conflict with what we define to be our basic academic values.”

All branches of the University agree that there should be no a priori restrictions on research or publication when a scholar begins a project, she said.

John H. Marburger III, who also spoke at the MIT conference last Friday, says he thinks a strict boundary between classified and non-classified research is reasonable in the physical sciences but more dangerous for research on biological subjects because of biotechnology’s potential applications toward both helpful and deleterious ends.

“The issues of classification versus non-classification in bioscience are more complicated than they were for the physical sciences,” says Marburger, who is the science advisor to President Bush and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. “It’s expensive to get knowledge, but use is very, very inexpensive.”

Biological research that cannot be maliciously appropriated by terrorist groups ought to remain available in peer review journals, he says.

“I don’t think there are any reasons to classify basic research,” he says. Instead, Marburger says it is the methods of preparing potentially harmful biological agents, known as the “craft models,” he would like to see protected.

But researchers who uncover information that could be used maliciously should know better than to publish their results, Adelstein says. In other words, scientists working outside the classified setting should be held responsible their own work by their peers, not by the government.

‘The Mother of All Systems Problems’

But ambiguous research classifications represent only one of a few concerns that the Provost’s committee is addressing—and one of several interrelated concerns that have affected Harvard and its peers nationwide over the course of the past year.

As Vest remarked at Friday’s conference, the tremendous complexity of national-security concerns and regulations demands clear and creative solutions.

“Homeland security—well, I think this is the mother of all systems problems,” Vest said. “If every there was an area that required out-of-the-box, innovative thinking, this is it.”

Even Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences—which does not even pursue the University’s most sensitive projects—has confronted national-security issues over the past month.