Yesterday the National Academies of Sciences issued a report that recommended, “Current policies that allow scientists and the public unrestricted access to genome data on microbial pathogens should not be changed … [and] concludes that security against bioterrorism is better served by policies that facilitate, not limit, the free flow of this information.”

Some additional scrutiny is called for when the NAS recommends a single a policy recommendation that happens to be focused on satisfying the interests of those making the recommendation. Specifically, the committee making the recommendation is comprised primarily of life scientists who benefit from and are committed to open access to scientific information. As Stanley Falkow, chair of the committee that wrote the report, and professor of microbiology and immunology, Stanford University, stated in the NAS press release, “The current vitality of the life sciences depends on a free flow of data and ideas …”. Thus, there is a built-in bias among the committee to recommend that data be kept open and available. The committee based its recommendation (what it calls “the best policy choice” on p. on criteria that it determined were best for advancing science.

We should be uncomfortable when NRC committees take on an advocacy position related to science. Specifically, the NAS should not be in the business of pushing for a single policy option, particularly one that best serves the needs of its own community. Instead the NRC should carefully evaluate the pluses and minuses of a range of plausible policy alternatives, and then allow government officials to decide which course of action is in the public’s interest. NRC Committees should allow for sufficient disciplinary and other diversity to allow for such policy evaluations. The NRC has access to expertise on every area of science. But it also has access to those with expertise in policy evaluation, this report (and many others) showed no evidence that they consulted or otherwise incorporated such expertise.

As an example of the general problem consider this quote from Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a bioweapons expert at the State University of New York’s Purchase College, in this week’s Science “This is the right decision, from the standpoints of both public health and security.” First, the NAS should not be in the business of making policy decisions and, second, it is not at all clear that the NAS committee developed or applied criteria of public health or security in performing its policy evaluation.