In the post-9/11 world there is an urgent the need for Americans to understand the Muslim world, and vice versa. Yet precisely when they should be visiting Muslim countries, Americans are kept at home by fears of terrorism. War zones aside, those fears are overblown. It is time their government and their media helped would-be American travelers gain a more realistic understanding of the typically minor risk of anti-U.S. violence that awaits them in the Muslim world.

Recently my wife and I spent a week strolling the streets of Beirut and traveling by bus in its hinterland. The trip was a fool's amusement in the scary light of official and media images of the Middle East as a dangerous place. Yet everywhere we went we felt welcomed.

I own a t-shirt that spells out "CANADA" in large letters beneath a maple leaf. Before leaving California I thought, only half-facetiously, of bringing it along. I'm glad I left it behind. The Lebanese we met were hospitable not hostile.

I am not advising naivete; Lebanon's horrific civil war in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s destroyed much of this city. Washington intervened. More than 200 American soldiers died in a building shrunk to rubble, apparently by Hezbollah -- a self-described Party of Allah that the U.S. still considers a terrorist organization. Beirut became a synonym for mayhem.

Echoes of Beirut's frightening reputation were heard this year in a series of bombings that killed nearly two dozen Lebanese, including Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in February, scholar-journalist Samir Kassir in May, and opposition politician George Hawi on 21 June, only two days after we had left the country.

An American visitor's initial impressions of Beirut today are ambiguous. Inspiring confidence are the relaxed atmosphere at the new, ultra-modern, and just-renamed Rafiq Hariri Airport and, seen through taxi windows, the attractively renovated downtown area. But then one's taxi skirts the burned-out hulk of the St. George Hotel and, alongside it, behind police tape and armed guards, the twisted carcasses of cars -- detritus from Hariri's assassination.

This juxtaposition of alarm and assurance has become the unnerving natural condition of American travel to and in Muslim or mostly Muslim countries. Survey research shows approval of the United States among the world's billion-plus followers of Islam near an all-time low. The U.S. is viewed unfavorably by 58 percent of Lebanese, according to a just-released Pew Research Center opinion poll. Lebanon and other Muslim-majority societies account for more than half of the 29 countries to which the State Department discourages American travel. Yet in these mainly Muslim destinations the odds that a prudent American tourist will become a casualty of terrorism remain infinitesimal.

I went to Lebanon to do research, to lecture at the American University of Beirut, and to help celebrate the 100th anniversary of my high-school alma mater, the American Community School. For decades, Arab sons and daughters have vied for entry into these and comparable institutions elsewhere in the Middle East, including the American University in Cairo. In Lebanon, in the upland village of Deir al Qamar, I found a small photo shop whose owner had proudly posted a sign identifying himself as a "U.S.A. GRADUATE, BOSTON."

These signs of American popularity must seem incomprehensible to Americans fearful of Muslim wrath. But what really makes no sense is the apocalyptic vision of the Muslim world that America's media tend to purvey, a vision that encourages would-be travelers to stay in Indiana and skip Indonesia.

Overseas Muslims in my experience have a split-level view of America. Most of them dislike -- some detest -- U.S. policy while simultaneously admiring the freedom and openness that Americans, at their best, represent. Many Americans feel the same way. Meanwhile, security concerns have encircled U.S. embassies with enough protective barriers and identity checks to make diplomacy resemble self-imprisonment.

As relaxed interactions at the official level have become a casualty of the war on terror, people-to-people contacts have become more vital than before. The fewer Americans Muslims meet, the less contested will be the image of the U.S. as a cruel montage of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

A task force ought to brainstorm ways of overcoming unrealistic fears of travel. The Bush administration has acknowledged the need to win Muslim hearts and minds abroad. It is time to win back overfearful American hearts and minds as well.

In 1920, the Irish Republican Army reportedly considered a terrifying new weapon: typhoid-contaminated milk. Reading from an IRA memo he claimed had been captured in a recent raid, Sir Hamar Greenwood described to Parliament the ease with which "fresh and virulent cultures" could be obtained and introduced into milk served to British soldiers. Although the plot would only target the military, the memo expressed concern that the disease might spread to the general population.

Although the IRA never used this weapon, the incident illustrates that poisoning a nation's milk supply with biological agents hardly ranks as a new concept. Yet just two weeks ago, the National Academy of Sciences' journal suspended publication of an article analyzing the vulnerability of the U.S. milk supply to botulinum toxin, because the Department of Health and Human Services warned that information in the article provided a "road map for terrorists."

That approach may sound reasonable, but the effort to suppress scientific information reflects a dangerously outdated attitude. Today, information relating to microbiology is widely and instantly available, from the Internet to high school textbooks to doctoral theses. Our best defense against those who would use it as a weapon is to ensure that our own scientists have better information. That means encouraging publication.

The article in question, written by Stanford University professor Lawrence Wein and graduate student Yifan Liu, describes a theoretical terrorist who obtains a few grams of botulinum toxin on the black market and pours it into an unlocked milk tank. Transferred to giant dairy silos, the toxin contaminates a much larger supply. Because even a millionth of a gram may be enough to kill an adult, hundreds of thousands of people die. (Wein summarized the article in an op-ed he wrote for the New York Times.) The scenario is frightening, and it is meant to be -- the authors want the dairy industry and its federal regulators to take defensive action.

The national academy's suspension of the article reflects an increasing concern that publication of sensitive data can provide terrorists with a how-to manual, but it also brings to the fore an increasing anxiety in the scientific community that curbing the dissemination of research may impair our ability to counter biological threats. This dilemma reached national prominence in fall 2001, when 9/11 and the anthrax mailings drew attention to another controversial article. This one came from a team of Australian scientists.

Approximately every four years, Australia suffers a mouse infestation. In 1998, scientists in Canberra began examining the feasibility of using a highly contagious disease, mousepox, to alter the rodents' ability to reproduce. Their experiments yielded surprising results. Researchers working with mice naturally resistant to the disease found that combining a gene from the rodent's immune system (interleukin-4) with the pox virus and inserting the pathogen into the animals killed them -- all of them. Plus 60 percent of the mice not naturally resistant who had been vaccinated against mousepox.

In February 2001 the American SocietyforMicrobiologists' (ASM) Journal of Virology reported the findings. Alarm ensued. The mousepox virus is closely related to smallpox -- one of the most dangerous pathogens known to humans. And the rudimentary nature of the experiment demonstrated how even basic, inexpensive microbiology can yield devastating results.

When the anthrax attacks burst into the news seven months later, the mousepox case became a lightning rod for deep-seated fears about biological weapons. The Economist reported rumors about the White House pressuring American microbiology journals to restrict publication of similar pieces. Samuel Kaplan, chair of the ASM publications board, convened a meeting of the editors in chief of the ASM's nine primary journals and two review journals. Hoping to head off government censorship, the organization -- while affirming its earlier decision -- ordered its peer reviewers to take national security and the society's code of ethics into account.

Not only publications came under pressure, but research itself. In spring 2002 the newly formed Department of Homeland Security developed an information-security policy to prevent certain foreign nationals from gaining access to a range of experimental data. New federal regulations required that particular universities and laboratories submit to unannounced inspections, register their supplies and obtain security clearances. Legislation required that all genetic engineering experiments be cleared by the government.

On the mousepox front, however, important developments were transpiring. Because the Australian research had entered the public domain, scientists around the world began working on the problem. In November 2003, St. Louis University announced an effective medical defense against a pathogen similar to -- but even more deadly than -- the one created in Australia. This result would undoubtedly not have been achieved, or at least not as quickly, without the attention drawn by the ASM article.

The dissemination of nuclear technology presents an obvious comparison. The 1946 Atomic Energy Act classifies nuclear information "from birth." Strong arguments can be made in favor of such restrictions: The science involved in the construction of the bomb was complex and its application primarily limited to weapons. A short-term monopoly was possible. Secrecy bought the United States time to establish an international nonproliferation regime. And little public good would have been achieved by making the information widely available.

Biological information and the issues surrounding it are different. It is not possible to establish even a limited monopoly over microbiology. The field is too fundamental to the improvement of global public health, and too central to the development of important industries such as pharmaceuticals and plastics, to be isolated. Moreover, the list of diseases that pose a threat ranges from high-end bugs, like smallpox, to common viruses, such as influenza. Where does one draw the line for national security?

Experience suggests that the government errs on the side of caution. In 1951, the Invention Secrecy Act gave the government the authority to suppress any design it deemed detrimental to national defense. Certain areas of research-- atomic energy and cryptography -- consistently fell within its purview. But the state also placed secrecy orders on aspects of cold fusion, space technology, radar missile systems, citizens band radio voice scramblers, optical engineering and vacuum technology. Such caution, in the microbiology realm, may yield devastating results. It is not in the national interest to stunt research into biological threats.

In fact, the more likely menace comes from naturally occurring diseases. In 1918 a natural outbreak of the flu infected one-fifth of the world's population and 25 percent of the United States'. Within two years it killed more than 650,000 Americans, resulting in a 10-year drop in average lifespan. Despite constant research into emerging strains, the American Lung Association estimates that the flu and related complications kill 36,000 Americans each year. Another 5,000 die annually from food-borne pathogens -- an extraordinarily large number of which have no known cure. The science involved in responding to these diseases is incremental, meaning that small steps taken by individual laboratories around the world need to be shared for larger progress to be made.

The idea that scientific freedom strengthens national security is not new. In the early 1980s, a joint Panel on Scientific Communication and National Security concluded security by secrecywasuntenable. Its report called instead for security by accomplishment -- ensuring strength through advancing research. Ironically, one of the three major institutions participating was the National Academy of Sciences -- the body that suspended publication of the milk article earlier this month.

The government has a vested interest in creating a public conversation about ways in which our society is vulnerable to attack. Citizens are entitled to know when their milk, their water, their bridges, their hospitals lack security precautions. If discussion of these issues is censored, the state and private industry come under less pressure to alter behavior; indeed, powerful private interests may actively lobby against having to install expensive protections. And failure to act may be deadly.

Terrorists will obtain knowledge. Our best option is to blunt their efforts to exploit it. That means developing, producing and stockpiling effective vaccines. It means funding research into biosensors -- devices that detect the presence of toxic substances in the environment -- and creating more effective reporting requirements for early identification of disease outbreaks. And it means strengthening our public health system.

For better or worse, the cat is out of the bag -- something brought home to me last weekend when I visited the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. One hands-on exhibit allowed children to transfer genetic material from one species to another. I watched a 4-year-old girl take a red test tube whose contents included a gene that makes certain jellyfish glow green. Using a pipette, she transferred the material to a blue test tube containing bacteria. She cooled the solution, then heated it, allowing the gene to enter the bacteria. Following instructions on a touch-screen computer, she transferred the contents to a petri dish, wrote her name on the bottom, and placed the dish in an incubator. The next day, she could log on to a Web site to view her experiment, and see her bacteria glowing a genetically modified green.

In other words, the pre-kindergartener (with a great deal of help from the museum) had conducted an experiment that echoed the Australian mousepox study. Obviously, this is not something the child could do in her basement. But just as obviously, the state of public knowledge is long past anyone's ability to censor it.

Allowing potentially harmful information to enter the public domain flies in the face of our traditional way of thinking about national security threats. But we have entered a new world. Keeping scientists from sharing information damages our ability to respond to terrorism and to natural disease, which is more likely and just as devastating. Our best hope to head off both threats may well be to stay one step ahead.

Korean Studies Program Director Gi-Wook Shin comments on U.S. unwillingness to engage North Korea, on the occasion of South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun's visit to Washington, DC.

Shin notes that South Koreans do not want military conflict on the Korean peninsula, and that the United Stease must engage North Korea in a more effective and constructive manner once the Six-Party talks are restarted.

Listen to the full story here.

After an intensive selection process, the Asia-Pacific Research Center at the Stanford Institute for International Studies has selected the 2005-2006 recipients of its Pantech Fellowships in Korean Studies for Mid-Career Professionals.

Daniel Sneider and Scott Snyder will be in residence during the 2005-2006 academic year and collaborate with the faculty and fellows in the Korean Studies Program and at APARC. The fellowships were made possible by generous gift from the Pantech Group. Professor Gi-Wook Shin, the director of the Korean Studies Program is excited to welcome the new fellows. "Considerable tension currently exists in the U.S.-Korea relationship, which is complicating the management of that alliance," he observed. "Dan Sneider and Scott Snyder are both well-established experts on U.S.-Korea relations -- and disconnects --and their work at APARC will contribute not only to our program here at Stanford, but also to the larger relationship between the two countries."

An accomplished journalist, Daniel Sneider has had a long career in reporting foreign affairs, and is currently foreign affairs writer for the San Jose Mercury News. His weekly column for that paper focuses on the Asia-Pacific, national security issues, and news analysis, and is syndicated on the Knight Ridder Tribune service, reaching about 400 newspapers. His writings have appeared in numerous other publications including The New Republic, the National Review, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, Defense News, and the Far Eastern Economic Review. He appears frequently as a commentator on National Public Radio's "Day to Day" program and on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Sneider served as Tokyo Correspondent (1985-1990) and Moscow Bureau Chief (1990-1994) for the Christian Science Monitor, and as National Foreign Editor (1998-2003) for the San Jose Mercury News. He received his B.A. from Columbia University and an M.P.A. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Sneider was a visiting fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Stanford Institute for International Studies in 1994-1995. While in residence at APARC, he will research the interaction between generational change and alliance management in Northeast Asia, with particular focus on Korea.

Based in Washington, DC, Scott Snyder is a senior associate in the international relations program at the Asia Foundation, and in the Pacific Forum of the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS). From 2000 to 2004, he lived in Seoul, South Korea as the Asia Foundation's Korea Representative. His publications include Paved With Good Intentions: The NGO Experience in North Korea (2003), co-edited with L. Gordon Flake, and Negotiating on the Edge: North Korean Negotiating Behavior (1999). Snyder received his B.A. from Rice University and an M.A. from the Regional Studies East Asia Program at Harvard University. He was the recipient of an Abe Fellowship, administered by the Social Sciences Research Council, in 1998-1999, and was a Thomas G. Watson Fellow at Yonsei University in South Korea in 1987-1988. While in residence at APARC, he will research the transformation of the Sino-South Korean relationship and its implications for the U.S.-South Korea security alliance.

In May, North Korean leaders hinted to visiting U.S scholar John W. Lewis that they're willing to resume negotiations with the United States on nuclear arms. But if those talks are revived, North Korea wants to focus on mutual steps toward a denuclearized Korean peninsula. The Bush administration has said repeatedly it doesn't want to depart from six-way nuclear talks. (Mike Shuster's full report on NPR's Morning Edition is linked below.)

Daniel Sneider writes, "There is a small crack in the otherwise closed door between the United States and North Korea. That is part of the message Stanford Professor John W. Lewis, an expert on Northeast Asian security issues, brought back this past week from a visit to China and North Korea." (Sneider's column, "Window is closing for U.S. in N. Korean nuclear talks," is linked below.)