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BY ANDREA M. HAMILTON Many members of the Faculty Senate chuckled when they learned that the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, passed by Congress in October 2001 in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was actually an ungainly acronym: "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism." But as Associate Dean of Research Ann Arvin, pediatrics, pointed out in her Nov. 7 report to the senate, the implications of the act for the university are anything but a laughing matter. Both the Patriot Act and the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act, signed into law June 2002, extend existing anti-terrorism and student visa laws passed in 1996. For Stanford and other research institutions, the combination of laws affects three key areas: restrictions on possession as well as transfer of so-called select agents, a list drawn up by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) of biological agents and toxins that have the potential to pose a serious threat to public health and safety; limits on the research activities of international students and other so-called "restricted persons"; and the possible creation of a new category of restricted information, so-called "sensitive but unclassified information," or "homeland security information," that is being floated by the White House. The whole issue is further complicated by the fact that the legislation was hastily -- and, some argued, sloppily -- written by politicians with little or no scientific background, while the implementation regulations have yet to be finalized. As if that weren't sobering enough, Arvin pointed out that the new laws provide for criminal penalties, both for institutions and individuals, of up to 10 years in jail. "The important point here is that this act actually criminalizes possession of select agents and has language which refers to 'except for medical or clinical purposes or for bona fide research,'" Arvin told the senate. "So here's a concern: Who defines 'bona fide research'?" Arvin added that the act prohibits "restricted persons" from possessing select agents. According to the law, that encompasses not only nationals from countries on the State Department's list of terrorism-supporting regimes -- notably Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria -- but also people indicted or convicted of a crime, dishonorably discharged from the U.S. Armed Services, fugitives from justice, unlawful users of controlled substances and even those adjudicated as "mentally defective" or who have ever been committed to a mental institution. Phyllis Gardner, molecular biology, expressed alarm, given both the large number of foreign postdoctoral students and the variety of common pathogens found in labs around campus. She added: "I am just extraordinarily worried about the civil liberties aspects of [citing] such things as mental illness or ever being hospitalized -- how can that be put forward in federal legislation? I can't believe there's not an enormous outcry in terms of prejudice. That could mean someone who was depressed as a teenager, or had an eating disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder -- these are very prevalent conditions." Associate Dean of Graduate Policy Godfrey Mungal, mechanical engineering, noted that there are some 5,000 foreign students and dependents at Stanford. Out of roughly 950 who were directly affected by the Patriot Act this quarter, the arrival of some 25 to 30 on campus was delayed by visa processing snarls. Five students were denied visas outright. Mungal also explained that the Student Exchange Visa Information System (SEVIS), created in 1996, was expanded by the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act of 2002, which mandated that the university have its SEVIS compliance system in place by Jan. 30 of next year. Among other things, this requires regularly monitoring and reporting students' enrollment status, course load and current address. Further, Mungal added, students "from selective countries, largely Middle Eastern countries, are now subjected to fingerprinting and photographing on arrival, as well as reporting to Immigration during [their] stay and upon departure." For faculty who don't work with select agents but do have foreign students, "you could come up against visa and SEVIS issues." Steven Block, biological sciences and applied physics, a noted expert on biological warfare and bioterrorism, made a special report to the senate expressing his concerns over not only the Patriot Act but also the university's response. He pointed out that the restrictions on foreign students reach far beyond those from "select countries" and affects even students from friendly countries such as Canada or Britain. "It may be that no foreigner under any circumstances can work on any of these agents." While acknowledging Stanford had begun to address the issue, Block lambasted what he saw as "the general failure of the university to educate the faculty about the implications of the Patriot Act. ... The fact of the matter is that most of the people who work with biological agents on this campus have no idea about the new laws that now suddenly make things totally illegal -- and can land you in jail for 10 years -- for things that were perfectly legal a few months ago." Block reserved his most severe criticism for the university's efforts to compile a database of every biological agent in use on campus, not just the CDC select agents. The effort, begun in mid-2001, was hastened by a government directive that went out in August of this year to all research institutions to register select agents used in research from the CDC's revised list by Sept. 10. That meant much of the database compilation was being done during the summer while many people were away from campus and unable to comment. Specifically, Block complained that the university administration has failed to precisely define what it meant by biological agent. "Is your house plant a biological agent? Your grad student?" More seriously, he added, noting professors' earlier questions, "What if you have snails or snakes in your lab that produce toxins?" Lastly, Block urged the university to create a "firewall" so that this larger list would be kept absolutely separate from the CDC-required data. "I'm worried they are all being put into basically the same database and that they will be subject to a set of the same kinds of controls and the same kinds of incursions and the same kinds of inquiries." Arvin responded that the university was only registering agents on the CDC's list. She noted that the faculty biosafety panel always has required investigators to submit protocols for review when they work with biosafety level 2 (BSL-2) agents. The intention behind creating the database was to have a master list with which to respond more efficiently whenever the CDC revised its list of select agents, as it had just done. In
an interview, Larry Gibbs, associate vice provost for environmental
health and safety and the university's point man for biosafety
compliance, emphasized that the university's database is secure and
access to it strictly limited. "I don't disagree that there are
vaguenesses in there. ... The bottom line is we have a
responsibility as an institution. We take that seriously. We have
responded to investigators; we take that seriously too." |
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Stanford Report, November 13, 2002
