Screening foreign scholars.

Abstract

While reading Jeff Mervis's article “Panel would screen foreign scholars” (News of the Week, 17 May, p. 1213), I was reminded of the U.S. government's Committee on Exchanges (COMEX). Born during the Cold War, COMEX was an interagency group of representatives from the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the intelligence community that screened Soviet and Eastern Bloc scientists wanting to visit American institutions. (I attended COMEX meetings while working on international science and technology exchanges for the State Department in the mid-1980s.) COMEX was concerned with preventing the transfer of sophisticated technologies to communist countries. Now the newly formed Interagency Panel on Advanced Science Security (IPASS) appears to have a broader mandate: to look at all foreign students and scientists—regardless of geographic or political origin—who might be interested in “sensitive topics.” That is a large task. Fortunately, IPASS will have the input of the federal science agencies (the National Science Foundation, NASA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and so forth), something that COMEX lacked, perhaps to its detriment. A 1982 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) study on scientific communication and national security noted, for example, that some COMEX members had “little acquaintance with the workings of the research community or the conduct of basic research” ([1][1], p. 95). IPASS, as its first order of business, should review this NAS study. 1. [↵][2]Panel on Scientific Communication and National Security, Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, Scientific Communication and National Security (National Academy Press, Washington, DC, 1982)(see [www.nap.edu/books/0309033322/html/][3]). [1]: #ref-1 [2]: #xref-ref-1-1 View reference 1 in text [3]: http://www.nap.edu/books/0309033322/html/