The secretive 'second world' of human synthetic biology

A meeting on synthesising the human genome, convened behind closed doors at Harvard, has caused a stir. Should we worry about scientific secrecy?

Secrecy has long been a part of scientific and innovation practices. For instance, research on nuclear, biological or chemical weapons is often conducted in secret. In his excellent book on Secrecy and Science, Brian Balmer describes how the Manhattan Project epitomised the way in which scientific secrecy operates, explaining how specific sites were kept secret, but also how projects were compartmentalised, so that knowledge was exchanged only on a 'need-to-know' basis, meaning that only a very few people had any real understanding of the programme as a whole. In other words, attempts to maintain secrecy often go hand-in-hand with imperatives of efficiency, security, bureaucracy and control.

Discussions to synthesize, for the first time, a human genome should not occur in closed rooms