Managing How Basic Research and National Security Interact
In the science-fiction novel The Three Body Problem, physicist Ye Wenjie develops a way to send messages to hypothetical aliens light years distant from Earth. The future impacts of her messaging, as played out in that author’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, are, to put it mildly, serious.
I thought about that novel on reading the news report NSF tests ways to improve research security without disrupting peer review by Jeffrey Mervis in the April 5 issue of Science from the AAAS.
In the science-fiction novel, Ye Wenjie is working at the ultra-high security “Red Coast” facility in China, yet she is still able to avoid direct oversight when she transmits a message into space knowing that it will reveal the earth’s location to potentially hostile extraterrestrials.
The Science report describes how the NSF is investigating ways to manage funded basic research that has potential for touching on national security concerns. The area being investigated by NSF (via 200 NSF funded research project) is quantum information science.
The challenge faced by NSF: where (and how) in the basic research cycle do you incorporate national security related controls so as not to disrupt the positive benefits of research or its dissemination? The earlier in the research cycle you impose screening controls, the higher the probability that downstream findings and their dissemination will be impacted.
Two issues for basic research funding agencies are (a) it may be impossible to increase friction at any point in the research cycle without experiencing negative downstream impacts and (b) the more "basic" the research being scrutinized, the harder it is to accurately anticipate the research impacts themselves.
Given the current porosity of both formal and informal scientific communication channels, the only way 100% control can be exerted is to completely observe and control each step of the process–an impossibility in today's world of research. Even then the possibility of “leaks” would still be non-zero.
The bottom line: there may simply be no way to prevent someone like Contact’s Ellie Arroway from distributing her findings worldwide—or to prevent someone like 3 Body Problem’s Ye Wenjie from pressing her "transmit” button.
Copyright 2024 by Dennis D. McDonald. The graphic at the top of the page was generated by Microsoft Designer in response to the prompt, “Show a humorous cartoon-like picture of a scientist being tripped up by bureacratic "red tape" imposed in response to worries about "national security." Label the red tape with the words "national security.”