Infected author and BU biomedical engineering and international health researcher Muhammad Zaman.

Infectious Diseases

How Can We Ensure Science Is a Force for Good?

BU researcher Muhammad Zaman’s new book, Infected, urges scientists to recognize past mistakes and be vigilant in ensuring research is used for good

Muhammad Zaman’s latest book, Infected: How Power, Politics, and Privilege Use Science Against the World’s Most Vulnerable (New Press, 2025), opens with an episode from the Obama administration’s efforts to capture Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Sometime around early 2011, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) recruited a local doctor to start a free vaccination campaign to inoculate the children of a Pakistani city—where they suspected the Al Qaeda leader was living—against hepatitis B, an infectious disease prevalent in the region.

The vaccination campaign was a ploy. It was a cover for the CIA’s real goal: to obtain DNA samples from bin Laden’s children in order to confirm the Al Qaeda leader’s presence in the area. The effort ultimately failed—but the public health fallout was swift and long-lasting. 

As Zaman, director of Boston University’s Center on Forced Displacement, outlines, a strong anti-science sentiment took hold after details of the operation leaked to the public. In 2011, Pakistan had been on track to eradicate polio. That changed following the fake campaign: by 2014, more than 75 percent of the world’s polio cases were found in Pakistan. 

The historical episode is one of several that Zaman discusses in Infected, exploring how science—particularly when it comes to infectious diseases—can be weaponized to the detriment of vulnerable populations, often with devastating and long-lasting consequences. 

Who Has Most to Lose

Infected is almost seven years in the making, Zaman says. He started writing well before COVID-19 struck, shutting down the world and putting a harsh spotlight on the scientific process. He calls the book a “living document” of how his thoughts evolved throughout lockdown and beyond.

“We’ve assumed, inaccurately, that science is only the driver of good—but it is a tool that can also be used for harm,” says Zaman, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor and a College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering, whose research is focused on improving health outcomes in refugee populations. (He was recently recognized by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine for his efforts to find scientific solutions for increasing displaced persons’ access to healthcare.) “I’ve long been interested in the weaponization of good science, or the politicization of research for political purposes,” he says.

But the book isn’t meant to be anti-science, either. “To be able to build trust, we need to recognize what hasn’t worked,” Zaman says. “My goal is to provide better guardrails for us to understand the challenges with science: to understand that this is something that can be, and has been, used to inflict harm on unsuspecting people.”

Zaman identifies three ways science can cause harm: through rhetoric, research, or application. The episodes he uses as examples cover infectious diseases–related incidents from around the world and throughout history, from the great plagues of the Middle Ages all the way to the COVID-19 pandemic.

For example: many will be familiar with the Tuskegee syphilis study. From 1932 to 1972, Black male patients with syphilis in Tuskegee, Ala., were left untreated so federal researchers could study the effects of the venereal disease. But readers may be less familiar with parallel US studies in Guatemala during the 1940s, which Zaman recounts in an early chapter. 

By World War II, syphilis and gonorrhea were taking a considerable toll on the US military. Researchers from the US National Research Council sought to test a new preventive treatment for gonorrhea, for potential use on military members. However, their methods called for specific test populations: ones they could infect with the venereal disease without causing a public outcry. 

The researchers looked to Guatemala, where prostitution was legal. For several years, Guatemalan men and women, including sex workers, psychiatric patients, and prisoners, were infected with gonorrhea in order to study the disease’s spread and the treatment’s effectiveness. It is unclear whether the research subjects ever received treatment for their gonorrhea—or if they were informed that they had the disease at all. And, just like the CIA’s failed vaccination mission decades later, the studies ultimately didn’t yield useful results.

The episode is a clear demonstration of harm through research—and of who loses when science is weaponized, Zaman says. Too often, populations with the least amount of power and resources bear the brunt of bad science.

Understanding Research’s Potential for Good—and Bad

Much has changed over the centuries in how we respond to infectious diseases. For one, science itself has evolved: our understanding of what causes disease, and how it transmits, is eons ahead of the theories that reigned throughout history. The treatments we have today, too, are nothing short of miraculous.

And yet many factors remain the same. Infection still has tremendous implications for how we live. As Zaman explains in Infected, the social distancing of COVID-19 is an evolution of Italian quarantine practices from the Middle Ages, when ships were required to sit at anchor for 40 days before passengers and cargo could disembark into a port city. (“Quarantine” comes from the medieval Latin word quarantena, meaning 40 days.) We may have social media and FaceTime now, but that isolation is still an inherently lonely experience. 

We’re also still guilty of playing the blame game. The need to look for meaning in the face of disaster—to find someone or something to attribute it to—is among the oldest human urges. As Zaman details, racism often manifests when diseases spread: syphilis, for example, has alternately been known as “the Polish disease,” “the French disease,” and “the German disease,” among numerous other nationality-based epithets. So, too, did we see COVID-19 racialized and used as justification for hate crimes against Asian-Americans during the pandemic. 

Zaman hopes Infected serves as a reminder to all in the science community not to repeat past mistakes. The episodes of medical malpractice that he details are dark spots on a field dedicated to making new discoveries and changing lives for the better.

“Like with any challenge that society faces, just because one particular episode ends doesn’t mean one doesn’t have to be vigilant going forward,” Zaman says. “My message to myself and to readers is that science, research, and infectious disease scholarship are all areas that can have extraordinary impact; with that, they require being on guard against weaponization at all times.”