Dangerous Notions

The genome of 1918 flu that killed tens or hundreds of millions has been published. Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy think that was pretty stupid:
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.
. . .
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.
I'm not a big fan of secret science, but this looks like an exception. This genie is out of the bottle, but more are out there, waiting. It may well be time to think about the best ways to deal with yet another possible human induced catastrophe.

Impending mortality may be making Kurzweil a little nuts, but he and Joy are bright guys.

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