Dangerous knowledge?

Ray Kurzweil (entrepreneur and comp sci "celebrity") and Bill Joy (founder of Sun Microsystems) have written an op-ed piece in the New York Times in which they critize the recent release of the sequence of the 1918 H1N1 influenza virus, which accompanied the paper announcing that the sequencing - or rather, the assembly of the sequence - was finished, in Science.

Bill n' Ray decry the decision to deposit the sequence in Genbank; they say that it's worse than putting up precise instructions on how to build an atomic bomb, since you don't need plutonium or enriched uranium to unleash biological terrors. Continuing on that theme, they also suggest that we need a new Manhattan Project dedicated to developing technologies to help counter any future bioterrorist threat.

The first thing that struck me about this is: why did the New York Times publish an op-ed about genomics written by two computer scientists? (yeah, Ray Kurzweil dabbles in systems biology now, but if you check out that Edge of Computation article from a while back you'll notice that he's more of a futurist commentator than a proper researcher).

The second thing was: isn't this a fairly standard kneejerk reaction? This information could plausibly be dangerous - let's ban it! It's an old story. If it weren't for the heightened awareness (well, fear) brought about by the new avian flu scares then they'd be dismissed as conservative crackpots. There's a tradeoff between potential risk and potential benefit here - a tradeoff that was carefully considered before the sequence was published. Realistically, it's more likely that sharing the opportunity to study the virus will help prevent an impending disaster than causing a new one.

Thirdly: how do they propose to control the knowledge represented by the H1N1 sequence? They suggest getting "suitable security assurances" but is that feasible and would it be enough of a deterrent? If a motivated terrorist really wanted to get hold of the flu sequence then surely it wouldn't be that difficult to obtain it through underhand means (lying, bribing, hacking, whatever). What's a "suitable security assurance", anyway? Would you have to be vetted by the FBI? If the lab is in Pakistan, would that pose a problem?

Finally: how does all the stuff about keeping back the influenze sequence fit with the "new Manhattan Project" idea? I'm guessing that they just mean a massive funding boost rather than the US embarking on a huge new bioweapons research program, but isn't it a rather unfortunate comparison? For it to be worth the investment, what would the return have to be? Some sort of targetted ultra vaccine for any possible threat? How do you protect against pathogens that don't even exist yet?

We know that avian flu will mutate into a form capable of spreading from human to human, we just don't know how yet. Any concentrated research that goes into examing what makes some flu strains particular virulent - particularly if the relevant outbreaks have parallels to our current situation - gets the thumbs up from me. That research wouldn't be nearly so concentrated were the relevant information restricted to a chosen few.