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/)
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