Some background on Bill Joy's warnings of death and doom (some more
sound than others) and his Wired Magazine article:
http://www.politechbot.com/p-01262.html
http://www.politechbot.com/p-01460.html
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html
A discussion we had last year on "biohackers" being a real threat:
http://www.politechbot.com/2004/07/27/biohackers-threat/
http://www.politechbot.com/2004/07/13/biohacking/
A Q&A I did last month with Ray Kurzweil:
http://news.com.com/2008-1082_3-5885116.html
---
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/17/opinion/17kurzweiljoy.html
...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.
We realize that calling for this genome to be "un-published" is a bit
like trying to gather the horses back into the barn. Perhaps we will be
lucky this time, and we will indeed succeed in developing defenses for
these killer flu viruses before they are needed. We should, however,
treat the genetic sequences of pathological biological viruses with no
less care than designs for nuclear weapons...
_______________________________________________
Politech mailing list
Archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
Moderated by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/)
