If you've invented a perpetual motion machine, you really should tell people about it. After all, your little finding overturns the fundamental laws of physics.
Disclosing the details will polish your reputation, and might even advance your research. More than that, it satisfies society's fundamental need for openness in science.
"You've got to explain how you did it and let them try and duplicate what you've done," said Steven Aftergood, project director for the Federation of American Scientists. "Openness permits us to discover errors and it also enables the cross-fertilization of ideas. It's very much part of science."
Not everyone takes that view, however. The private corporations that increasingly foot the bill for university research often demand silence from scientists, claiming proprietary control over the results. And the US government has held onto its secrecy fetish despite the end of the Cold War.
Striking a new balance among sometimes opposing forces is the reason US scientists are gathering Monday for a colloquium on the Massachusetts Instititute of Technology campus. Their purpose: to contemplate change in the way scientific secrets are kept.
Hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and MIT, the conference's stars include Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York) and ex-CIA Director John Deutch.
Former chairman of a commission on secrecy, Moynihan is sponsor of the Government Secrecy Reform Act. In his pitch for the bill, Moynihan said, "Information needing protection does not always receive it, while innocuous information is classified and remains classified."
Amy Crumpton, program associate for the AAAS, said conference researchers will delve into deeper issues of scientific secrecy. "We wanted to explore some of the things that have implications for scientific freedom and things like the way universities are going about doing their research."
Rhode Island environmental and occupational health scientist David Kern worked for an employer that demanded he not publish his discovery of a new type of lung disease, which he discovered when he set out to diagnose a mysterious sickness among the company's employees. His findings, which eventually went public, will be examined at the colloquium.
"Those kinds of contracts are conflicting with the professional ethics duties," Crumpton said. "(Scientists) are not just supposed to sit on them."
The conference address changes in a secrecy syndrome that is rife with examples of abuse and deeply affects the public, said Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists' project on secrecy and government.
"One of the most outstanding things I've read about in terms of science and secrecy is the move to patent genetic research, and to patent certain kinds of crop seeds, for example. Farmers could end up in a situation that they don't even own the seeds that they have cultivated," Aftergood said. "The bottom line is, who controls the information, and are their interests consistent with public interests?
"There are all kinds of peculiar situations that are waiting to emerge," he said. "To my knowledge, it hasn't gotten the attention it deserves and I think this conference is really a timely undertaking."
Harold Relyea, author of Silencing Science: National Security Controls and Scientific Communication, said he isn't overly worried about scientific secrecy in what he views as a remarkably open environment.
While some Cold War-era legislative code remains in place, Relyea said the recent example of the alleged Chinese espionage case involving nuclear secrets leaked from Los Alamos National Laboratories shows that scientists are not strongly censored.
"There is a freer atmosphere under the current administration than there had been under Reagan and Bush for the free flow of scholarly exchange," said Relyea. "I don't think the situation -- in terms of control -- has to change. What is pivotal is the way the controls are applied."
