It’s a warm October evening in Washington, D.C., and some of the nation’s top biological researchers mingle in the ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel over drinks and a dinner buffet.

Eyes fall to the identification badges hanging from their necks as they circle the hall, stopping to peruse poster-board displays and talk in small circles.

They’ve come together from the labs of academia, industry, and government for “Biosecurity 2003,” a three-day conference that Harvard has sponsored as concern for the nation’s safety mounts in the wake of Sept. 11.

For a dinner party, the scene is a strange one. Representatives from biological supply companies hawk arcane apparati—airborne pathogen detectors, emergency treatment kits—from booths along the periphery of the room. Conversation topics range from the banal to the bioanthropological.

George S. Panton Jr. has traveled to Washington from Florida in order to spend a couple of hours in this milieu. As founder and president of Extreme Response, a small company that manufactures biologically resistant aquatic rescue equipment, he is trying to claim the niche market that many of the evening’s guests represent.

He wiggles something that resembles a surfboard at the passing scientists. It’s slick and neon green. Panton’s tie is neon yellow.

“The MAXx is not just another plastic backboard,” he tells anyone who will listen, chanting the slogan printed on the display behind him. He designed the floating stretcher himself, he explains, to be entirely resistant to pathogens in the case of a biological cataclysm.

For the time being, Panton is pitching to a broad consumer base. He gestures proudly toward a photograph of the MAXx sporting military camouflage.

Three years ago, Panton’s esoteric product might have met with a tepid reception at best. He would have had little reason to take the long trip for two hours in the company of professors and government officials. Three years ago, in fact, many of the people standing elbow-to-elbow at the buffet—representing three very different spheres of biological research—might not have found themselves in the same room.

The sudden importance of this peculiar device reflects an abrupt change in scientific priorities in the post-Sept. 11 world. Biological researchers in academia, industry, and government have an incentive to work together now more than ever.

This priority change originated in Washington but has had effects nationwide. At Harvard, the bottom line hasn’t been floatable backboards, but millions of dollars worth of research support.

But while the new funds are a boon to research at the world’s wealthiest university, new opportunities have proved a double-edged sword.

With new resources have come new regulations designed to keep technology from falling into the wrong hands—regulations that limit the subjects and personnel research enterprises can include.

Researchers from certain countries are effectively barred from work with “select” substances, results publishable before Sept. 11 can no longer find a place in many of the nation’s top scientific journals, and research previously considered open may now be shrouded in secrecy.

For a research community used to what has essentialy been a laissez-faire system of self-regulation, the new oversight is inherently unsettling. Many however, see in its excess something even more harmful: an attack on the value of openness intrinsic to scientific work and the intellectual culture that sustains it.