When MIT President Charles M. Vest stepped to the podium last Friday to address more than 100 researchers and one White House advisor, his mien counterbalanced a series of pat presentations by the fast-talking colleagues who flanked him. Bent over the MIT-crested lectern, he cracked a few self-deprecating jokes in a West Virginia drawl and keyed through some Powerpoint slides bearing droll titles.

But his message was clear and, in some cases, forcibly critical of existing federal policy. Governmental regulations, he said, must work to engender rather than impede the exchange of information on innovative research if science is to contribute fully to national security development.

“Some people might say I’m being too alarmist on these matters, but I don’t think so,” he told the audience of a day-long symposium titled “Homeland and Global Security: Science, Technology, and the Role of the University.”

The affable university president, known to his colleagues as “Chuck,” hardly seemed the most alarmist of the 12 panelists gathered to discuss the future of the nation’s security from international terrorism.

But Vest has been adamantly promoting a series of issues publicly since Sept. 11, when the government began to classify certain projects as “sensitive”—a vaguely defined research category sometimes used to prevent work from being published—and bar foreign researchers from certain countries from participating in sensitive or classified projects.

His concerns mirror those that have preoccupied universities nationwide, including Harvard—concerns that drive to the heart of what it means to be a research institution in a nation working to combat homeland-security threats.

A Tale of Two Committees

Last year, MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on Access to and Disclosure of Scientific Information issued a report titled “In the Public Interest” outlining how the Institute ought to carry out classified research.

The document concluded that classified research at MIT should continue to take place in off-campus facilities that could be more easily secured. It outlined research procedures intended to allow MIT to perform national-security research while upholding its standards of academic freedom.

Vest, who is a member of President Bush’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, championed this balance at the conference on Friday.

“Research thrives on openness and suffers in isolation,” he explained in his address, urging the government to take a “hands-off” approach to development, harnessing research both from universities and private industry—in effect, to shift the onus of innovation and responsibility as much as possible into the hands of research experts themselves.

Now at Harvard, a similar group of research experts is undertaking a related study. The Provost’s Committee on Biodefense Research and Regulations, assembled last August, will present a report—the result of its deliberations over the course of the year—to University Provost Steven E. Hyman next month.

Unlike MIT, Harvard does not carry out classified research. The committee’s report will instead focus on the University’s research on select biological agents—the branch of national security research that some of its schools do pursue.

The committee has concerned itself specifically with the University’s role in responding to research on so-called “special agents”—a list of 36 biological pathogens deemed a potential threat to national security.

As a result, the Provost’s Committee’s reports will cover subjects that the MIT committee did not address.

“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.

In early April, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby organized a special information and discussion meeting addressing faculty fears that the USA PATRIOT Act and related legislation threatened to stifle their academic freedom.

University President Lawrence H. Summers has also issued a statement affirming the University’s commitment to upholding its standards of academic freedom.

“It would be my pledge that the University will, in the future as in the past, uphold the commitment to academic freedom with all the vigor that we can,” Summers said in the April 8 statement.

Much of the Provost’s Committee’s report will focus on matters pertaining only to the Medical School (HMS) and the School of Public Health, the only schools to pursue research on special-agents and their components. But the Committee’s deliberations encompass concerns that have preoccupied the University as a whole.

And finding solutions for Harvard’s notoriously decentralized community, Adelstein says, represents a unique challenge.

But according to Kevin Casey, Harvard’s senior director of federal and state relations, at least some of the confusion has been cleared up by a Cold War era directive that has resurfaced in the wake of Sept. 11.

The document, issued by the Reagan administration and formally known as State Department Decision Directive 189 (CDS 198), stipulates that all research should either be classified or unclassified—with no gray areas in between.

“Condoleezza Rice and other members of the administration have affirmed that [CDS 189] remains the governing document of the administration,” he says. “What we have been working on is trying to have that affirmation sent down through the chain of command from the administration.”

Members of the administration have also posed the possibility of bringing the document up to date to address present concerns, he says.

But Harvard—and the Provost’s Committee—also face other concerns.

Research on select agents must be undertaken with a certain degree of security. The School of Public Health, the only faculty presently in possession of non-exempt special agents, has undertaken special security measures, Casey says.

The Committee is discussing how to meet the requirements for national-security research on sensitive biological agents on a campus as trafficked as Harvard’s, according to Adelstein.

Difficulty arises in establishing universal standards for research practices that are able to effectively govern all of the diverse work that goes on at each of the University’s distinct schools, says Kathleen M. Buckley, the University’s assistant provost for science policy. She describes “a very big cultural difference” between HMS and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, because of the large number of undergraduates that it includes.

Yet the breadth of issues facing the Provost’s committee only represent the tip of the national-security iceberg—a constellation of interrelated considerations that at once present the opportunity to empower and to impede the nation’s top research universities.

‘People Matter’

Limitations on who may participate in sensitive research, established in the wake of Sept. 11 through the USA PATRIOT Act and Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, also requires researchers working on biological agents and toxins to undergo FBI scrutiny and forbids foreign scholars from certain nations—such as Iran, Iraq, Cuba, and North Korea—from participating in research on biological agents.

Restrictions such as these have sent shock waves through academic and research communities.

Vest said on Friday that the government should work toward eliminating any restrictions on who can participate in research. These limitations, he said, are one of several complications of the national security process meriting creative solutions.

But some would-be researchers do not make it to the United States at all.

The federally outlined Technology Alert List includes a list of study areas that could threaten national security if abused. The list is used to identify which visa applicants to isolate for further scrutiny, Casey explained.

The list itself has existed for over a decade, he said. But applications isolated for scrutiny were previously approved after 30 days if no governmental agency objected. Since Sept. 11, however, a scrutinized application must receive explicit approval for each agency in order to pass—a procedure that has slowed down visa processing tremendously, and has prevented some prospective students and scholars from arriving in the U.S. in time for their studies.

Vest referred to these backlogs as “black holes” in information processing at Friday’s conference.

“Requests from foreign students go into Washington and maybe come back someday,” he said.

And the Alert List itself encompasses an absurd number of fields, he added.

“I actually had the pleasure of telling the chair of landscape architecture that he was on the Technology Alert List and he”—Vest grinned and snapped his wrists—“jumped out of his chair.”

A Harvard student from China did not receive his visa last fall largely because he was studying urban design, Casey says.

“The U.S. must remain the destination of choice for the world’s best minds,” he says, adding that the U.S.’s Nobel laureates, entrepreneurs and technology-industry leaders have traditionally been overwhelmingly foreign-born.

“People matter. This isn’t just about technology,” Vest told the audience, composed of some of the nation’s top scientific innovators. “We must better understand the history, culture, religious, language, politics, psyche, modes of thought and world views that give rise to terrorism today.”

A Double-Edged Sword

In spite of restrictions that some fear may threaten academic freedom, however, the relationships between most U.S. research institutions and the government is far from antagonistic.

As the infrastructure of the government’s national-security programs has grown, in fact, institutions like Harvard and MIT have begun new research partnerships with governmental organizations.

“There’s a greater sense now of what some of the channels of priorities will be for new research,” Casey says.

The newly formed Department of Homeland Security wields a hefty budget of $850 million, and has begun put this funding behind various projects.

President Bush additionally proposed in his Jan. 28 State of the Union Address a program titled “Project BioShield” that would appropriate almost $6 billion not only to purchase ample countermeasures for major hazardous agents, but to fund research on biological agents through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a governmental organization devoted to biomedical innovation.

In addition to funding research on its own campus in Maryland, the NIH provides grants for “extramural” research at a number of other facilities, and HMS is one of the greatest recipients of NIH grants.

Last year, NIH hosted the first global biosecurity conference in Las Vegas, bringing together researchers, physicians, and biohazard “first responders,” and this October, HMS and the School of Public Health will collaborate for a second Bio-Security conference in Washington, D.C.

BioShield—and the influx of money it has brought to higher education—has also been a boon and enticement for several local universities.

Boston University Chancellor and acting President John Silber announced early last month that B.U. had submitted a proposal to build a new research facility with BioShield funding.

The proposed research site would be of the BSL-4-class containment—the highest degree of security available, reserved for work with the most hazardous of pathogens. B.U.’s proposed facility would be the only BSL-4 site in the Boston area.

B.U. will learn in the fall whether it receives grant funding for the project—and if approved the facility could be ready for use by 2008. But a “good number” of other local institutions have already submitted adjunct proposals expressing their plans to use the facility, according to the university’s Director of Corporate Communications Ellen Berlin.

HMS was among these institutions: a BSL-4 facility would allow HMS researchers to extend their present work on components of anthrax—a promising effort to derive an effective post-infection therapy—to work with the entire virus, according to HMS Associate Dean for Public Affairs Don Gibbons.

HMS researchers have also submitted proposals for BioShield funding for a BSL-3 laboratory—a slightly lower-security facility that would allow researchers to work with the tuberculosis and HIV viruses. Unlike the BSL-4 facility, this proposed facility would not be unique to the area, and a few already exist in the Longwood area.

Such recent relationship-building between the government and the nation’s universities represents the result of ongoing discussions about U.S. security since Sept. 11—discussions that emphasize universities’ opportunity to contribute to national security as educators and innovators.

“At some point we have to stop talking and actually do something,” Marburger told researchers who attended the conference. “We have an untapped reservoir of intellectual power in this country that needs to be tapped.”

—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.