Fink Committee

Concerns expressed over these experiments in the media and the political system (mostly in the United States) led the National Academies of Science to establish a committee to investigate ways to prevent S T advances from being misused for hostile purposes. The so-called Fink Committee issued a set of recommendations to address... 

With a view to the second recommendation concerning restrictions in the publication of problematic research a number of journal editors had imposed restrictions on themselves already before the publication of the Fink Committee s report in January 2003 a group of 32 journal editors agreed on guidelines related to Scientific Publication and Security. After first being published in Science, the statement also appeared in February in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in Nature.80 The authors of the statement ... 

In one country at least this awareness-raising is beginning in earnest. As previously noted, the United States National Academies, in response to growing concerns about the misuse of modern biology, set up a committee under the chairmanship of Gerald Fink to examine the issues involved. The committee report, Biotechnology Research in an Age of Terrorism Confronting the Dual-Use Dilemma,15 in part identified seven classes of experiments that it felt required prior review. The classes were those which ... 

The several hypotheses on the mode of action of ochratoxin A as a carcinogen and the related evidence have been discussed elsewhere (see, for example, reviews by Fink-Gremmels, 2005 Walker Larsen, 2005 Rached et al., 2007). These hypotheses will be discussed in section 9, in light of the additional evidence obtained since the Committee s previous review in 2001. 

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