The 1918 Flu Virus Genome Published: WMD Blueprint?


The following is an editorial by Ray Kurzweil, futurist and a remarkable
thinker, and Bill Joy, one of the founders of Sun, known in tech circles as
"the other Bill". Both are brilliant men with a track record of peering in
to the future and accurately seeing the consequences of present-day actions
and trends, and both have the technical and financial resources to research
any topic and back up their assertions with solid science.

Their thesis is that publishing the genome to the 1918 influenza virus,
which killed an estimated fifty million people, is tantamount to publishing
the complete plans to a nuclear weapon And perhaps even more dangerous, as
they contend it is easier to reproduce the virus given the genome's
blueprint than it is to acquire the materials needed to build a nuclear
weapon, and its release could potentially kill far more victims than a
single atomic weapon.


Bo Raxo
--
"In the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw at a minimum,
true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying,
incompetence and corruption." General Anthony Zinni (ret.), Bush
administration Special Envoy to the Middle East, May 21 2004, on 60 Minutes


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/17/opinion/17kurzweiljoy.html?ex=1287201600&en=29351015130c0ebf&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Recipe for Destruction
By RAY KURZWEIL and BILL JOY
Published: October 17, 2005
AFTER a decade of painstaking research, federal and university scientists
have reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus that killed 50 million people
worldwide. Like the flu viruses now raising alarm bells in Asia, the 1918
virus was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans, the scientists
reported. To shed light on how the virus evolved, the United States
Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of the
1918 influenza virus on the Internet in the GenBank database.

This is extremely foolish. The genome is essentially the design of a weapon
of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing
precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence
for the flu virus is even more dangerous.

First, it would be easier to create and release this highly destructive
virus from the genetic data than it would be to build and detonate an atomic
bomb given only its design, as you don't need rare raw materials like
plutonium or enriched uranium. Synthesizing the virus from scratch would be
difficult, but far from impossible. An easier approach would be to modify a
conventional flu virus with the eight unique and now published genes of the
1918 killer virus.

Second, release of the virus would be far worse than an atomic bomb.
Analyses have shown that the detonation of an atomic bomb in an American
city could kill as many as one million people. Release of a highly
communicable and deadly biological virus could kill tens of millions, with
some estimates in the hundreds of millions.

A Science staff writer, Jocelyn Kaiser, said, "Both the authors and
Science's editors acknowledge concerns that terrorists could, in theory, use
the information to reconstruct the 1918 flu virus." And yet the journal
required that the full genome sequence be made available on the GenBank
database as a condition for publishing the paper.

Proponents of publishing this data point out that valuable insights have
been gained from the virus's recreation. These insights could help
scientists across the world detect and defend against future pandemics,
including avian flu.

There are other approaches, however, to sharing the scientifically useful
information. Specific insights - for example, that a key mutation noted in
one gene may in part explain the virus's unusual virulence - could be
published without disclosing the complete genetic recipe. The precise genome
could potentially be shared with scientists with suitable security
assurances.

We urgently need international agreements by scientific organizations to
limit such publications and an international dialogue on the best approach
to preventing recipes for weapons of mass destruction from falling into the
wrong hands. Part of that discussion should concern the appropriate role of
governments, scientists and their scientific societies, and industry.

We also need a new Manhattan Project to develop specific defenses against
new biological viral threats, natural or human made. There are promising new
technologies, like RNA interference, that could be harnessed. We need to put
more stones on the defensive side of the scale.

[...]



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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Re-Creation of 1918-19 Virus Suggests Bigger Bird-Flu Threat
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