Separation of Science and State, Vol. 1

Indonesia, which has had more human cases of avian flu than any other country, has stopped sending samples of the virus to the World Health Organization, apparently because it is negotiating a contract to sell the samples to an American vaccine company.

I'd love to know the terms of the original arrangement -- and this new arrangement -- before I came down irreversibly on one side or the other. But if I were to decide in strict accordance with the Sniff Test, this one fails.


Update
It took me a couple of hours to recognize the key question here, which is this: Should a public agency take public domain information, then suppress it for private gain? Of course the answer is no. No sniff test needed.