“We’re writing for the provost, we’re not writing for a bully pulpit,” he says. “It’s an understated Harvard document.”

But Bloom suggests that Harvard should have been willing to err on the side of overstatement. He explains he thinks academia in general—as well as Harvard as an institution—has not been vocal enough in its consideration of questions that have risen in the wake of the government’s new demands on research.

“I have heard a fairly deafening silence, at least at my end of the river,” he says. He says he understands that a single institution—even one as influential as Harvard—carries little clout on its own.

“I’m acutely aware of the limitations of one faculty or one institution,” he says. “The PATRIOT Act and the Bioterrorism Act are laws of the United States, and as a dean rather than as an individual, I have to comply with the law,” he says.

Even so, Bloom says the response from the higher-education community as a whole could be stronger. “I would like to see a greater thrust of all the universities to modify the PATRIOT Act.”

According to Bloom, governmental regulations on research are unnecessary because social and professional constraints built into the research process—pieces of what he calls “a social compact for designing knowledge and receiving knowledge”—are already more effective in preventing subversive use of information than any federal oversight could hope to be.

“The public knows what our higher calling and responsibilities are, and it’s the social constraints, to me, that are the most powerful,” he says.

These constraints—and the education that sustains them—are nowhere more powerful than in a thriving research university, he adds.

“Everyone who goes to Harvard and goes into science understands what scientific integrity is about,” he says.

But not everyone thinks the implications of science in a post-Sept. 11 environment are so straightforward.

James T. Kvach, chief scientist in the Defense Intelligence Agency of the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center, says that, while the country is unified in its effort to achieve as much security as possible, agreeing upon a standard of success—and a route toward achieving it—has no easy answer.

“It comes down to, as a society, how much risk we’re willing to accept. How much risk am I capable of managing?” he says. “In my mind, what should be made available is as much as possible, [but] I don’t know where that line is.”

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