Drones are one example of a technology that emerged out of dual-use research.Credit: Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty
Dual-use research that leads to applications for both civilian and military or security purposes is geographically widespread and more scientifically influential than is research that has strictly civilian applications.
An analysis of data from bibliometric databases and US patent records found that 14% of 600,000 scientific papers published between 1981 and 2005 originated from dual-use research projects (see ‘Dual-use research is cited more frequently’). The study also found that dual-use research publications are cited more than their non-dual-use research counterparts. The findings were published in Science on 4 June1.
“Until now, many of the discussions and relevant studies related to the dual-use research have been largely based on the anecdotal evidence for historical cases,” says study author Seokbeom Kwon, who studies science policy at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon, South Korea.
The new analysis “is the first large scale empirical baseline to illustrate dual-use research and provides a systematic way of identifying [it] at scale,” he adds.
“There is a shared understanding in the community, particularly those working at the cutting edge of technology, that dual use is extremely widespread. And this is confirmed by the data that we see here,” says Mattias Björnmalm, secretary-general of CESAER, an association of science and technology universities, who is based in Brussels.
Source: Ref. 1
What is dual-use research?
In the analysis, Kwon identified papers that had been cited by at least two patents, which had been submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) up until 2020. He considered a paper to be dual-use research if the USPTO flagged one of the two patents that cite the paper for a security review by US federal authorities. Around 0.2% of the total papers were cited by two patents that underwent such review.
The papers cited by patents that did not require a security-sensitive review according to USPTO records were considered non-dual-use research.
However, some researchers say this definition of dual-use research is too broad. Michael Imperiale, a biosecurity policy researcher at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, says that the analysis might be “vastly overestimating the amount of dual-use research”, because “we don’t know what the national security concerns are that caused an application to be flagged”.
David Gillum, a biosafety and biosecurity researcher at Arizona State University in Tempe, agrees. “The study’s definition of dual-use research differs substantially from the concept of dual-use research of concern that is used in contemporary US policy frameworks,” he says. The latter refers to a narrower category of research with applications that can pose security risks to society and require oversight by national policies, Gillum explains.
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“Almost any advanced scientific research can have both beneficial and potentially harmful applications,” he adds. “There is a risk of conflating ordinary scientific advancement with the much smaller subset of research that presents significant biosecurity concerns.”
Kwon acknowledges that the studies included in his analysis represent “a small subset of the entire dual-use research” and more sensitive scientific discoveries might remain confidential and are not published publicly. The idea was to identify research on “sensitive matters from a national security perspective”.
Prioritizing defence
Kwon went on to analyse the affiliations of the authors of these studies and their funding. He found that dual-use research produced by or with the support of US federal agencies declined from 41% in the early 1980s to 22% by 2005.
