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CCC comments on A brief history of ethically concerned scientists - Less Wrong
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There are several ways to nullify, or even reverse progress:
There would have to be extremely good reason to try one of the top two; since they involve not only removing results, but actually poison the well for future researchers.
Casting doubt on a research track is probably easier said than done, no? To use a ridiculous hypothetical example: "Cold fusion" has been the punchline of jokes to 99.9% of scientists ever since the 1989 experiment garnered a ton of publicity without an ounce of replicability, yet Wikipedia suggests that the remaining 0.1% decades later still includes a few serious research teams and a few million dollars of funding. If Pons & Fleischmann were secretly trying to steer the world away from some real results by discrediting the field with embarrassing false results, it seems like a very risky gamble that still hasn't fully paid off.
The fact that I had to resort to a ridiculous hypothetical example there shows an unavoidable problem with this article, by the way: no history of successful ethical concern about scientific publication can exist, since almost by definition any success won't make it into history. All we get to hear about is unconcern and failed concern.
Of course, no-one has found any dangerous results; so if that's what they were trying to hide, perhaps by leaving a false trail, then they've succeeded admirably, sending future researchers up the wrong path.
In real life, I'm pretty sure that nobody has found any dangerous results because there aren't any dangerous results to find. This doesn't mean that creating scandals successfully reduces the amount of scientific interest in a topic, it just means that in this case there wasn't anything to be interested in.
I am reading Kaj Sotala's latest paper "Responses to Catastrophic AGI Risk: A Survey" and I was struck by this thread regarding ethically concerned scientists. MIRI is following this option by enthusiastically pursuing FAI (slightly different avenue of research) and trying to persuade and convince others to do the same.
EDIT: My apologies -- I removed the second part of my comment proactively because it dealt with hypothetical violence of radical ethically motivated scientists.
It's debatable whether Heisenberg did the former, causing the mistaken experiment results that led the Nazi atomic program to conclude that a bomb wasn't viable. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_(play) for scientific entertainment (there's a good BBC movie about this starring Daniel Craig as Werner Heisenberg)