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THIS was the biology went strategic. In the past, defence research has revolved around nuclear physicists and missile engineers. But fears of bioterror and Iraq’s alleged bioweapons have changed all that. Now biology matters to the military.

The US is leading the charge. This year it vaccinated half a million soldiers against smallpox and imposed draconian security restrictions on biologists. It allocated nearly $1 billion to Project BioShield, an ambitious effort to develop vaccines for rare diseases that might be used as weapons, and has spent or earmarked billions more on vaccine stockpiles, high-containment labs and new biodefence research.

As a reporter on the bioweapons beat, I suppose I should be revelling in all this. Yet I can’t avoid feeling that this is a lot of fuss to make about a threat that has yet to materialise – unless you count the anthrax letters of 2001, which killed just five people. Even in Iraq, which undeniably had biological weapons in the past, the alleged anthrax and smallpox weapons have failed to emerge.

Critics say we should use the money to fight real killers like TB. Certainly American doctors and nurses are unimpressed by bioterror: when the government tried to vaccinate 250,000 of them against smallpox in case of an attack, they stayed away in droves. It does not augur well for Project BioShield.

Some other products of biology-as-rocket-science are even more questionable. When a research team created super-lethal versions of mousepox and cowpox this year, they said it was to find treatments in case anyone ever develops them as weapons. If a country like Iran had tried that, it would have been accused of developing bioweapons. Many wondered if the risk – from the bugs themselves or from giving bioterrorists ideas – was worth it.

Making biology militarily sensitive has more insidious downsides. As universities take on secretive biodefence contracts, the free exchange of people and information essential to research starts to wither. And scientists are starting to censor what they publish, in response to government demands to limit the availability of data on weapons-relevant germs.

Meanwhile, biologists who work with those germs face new security laws and criminal penalties aimed at keeping them and their bugs under control. In response, many are simply abandoning work with dangerous pathogens. The exodus could grow if the worst happens to Thomas Butler, a researcher at Texas Tech who was hit with criminal charges after reporting 30 vials of plague missing.

There is something strange going on when one scientist is allowed to manufacture a super-lethal mouse plague, while another faces severe punishment for losing track of bacteria that are easily found in the wild – all in the name of a war that has yet to claim many victims.

I try to avoid conspiracy theories. But it’s hard not to notice that the big winners from this militarisation of biology will be the giant biotech and pharmaceutical companies. They never did like the openness that most biologists practise. And now they are in line for those lucrative defence contracts.