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

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/17/opinion/17kurzweiljoy.html?hp

New York/Region Opinions
OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS

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.
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.

Ray Kurzweil,an inventor, is theauthor of "The Singularity is Near: When
Humans Transcend Biology." Bill Joy,founder and former chief scientist
of Sun Microsystems, is a partner at a venture-capital firm.

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