Scientists in the US have sequenced the genome of the 1918 Spanish ‘flu (the one that killed tens of millions. A hell of an achievement - and if you’re a biology geek, then you can enjoy the full article here. But now some doom-mongers have condemned the risk that the terrorists might use it against us. Quote:

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.

Ah, weapons of mass destruction. Quick factoid: in 1945 the Soviets were given quite detailed plans of Fat Man, the plutonium fission bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki by the British physicist Klaus Fuchs. Despite having these plans to hand, the Soviets took longer (four years) to make their first nuclear bomb than the Americans had done from scratch (three); not only were there problems in obtaining the necessary fissile material, but the many esoteric technical skills unique to the task of fabricating such a weapon took time to accrue.

The spectre terrorists using such information to make weapons is a false one. Biological or chemical weapons are not just a matter of someone downloading a bomb recipe off the internet and making it (although that didn’t stop us from falling for the whole ricin “plot” bullshit). Laboratories and workshops, testing facilities, materials, training and skills, distribution equipment, financial resources, not to mention the will and commitment; all of these are required. Importantly, as this good counterpoint post highlights, if you have the ability and the means to fabricate the virus then you also have the ability to sequence and discover the virus yourself anyway.

This is not to say that it is impossible for terrorists to make chemical or biological weapons, but it’s very hard for them; conventional explosives and weaponry are easier to make, train with and traffic. Any counter-terror project trying to suppress WMD-related information like this is pointless; sociotechnical systems theories highlight the need for many components to come together for a technology to work (such as the ones I list above). Any sort of approach at preventing proliferation must target not just raw how-to information but all these other aspects that are needed to bring a technology to fruition.

In the case of sequencing the ‘flu virus, by publishing the genome they open it up to research and investigation by scientists around the world, rather than the usual close-knit community of the authors’ known contacts (cf. Linus’s law in software development). The possible benefits (nothing is guaranteed, after all) of the widening of research this allows, if H5N1 does go ape-shit and start killing us all off in six months’ time, far outweighs the minor to negligible security risk that letting it fall in “the wrong hands” creates.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 20th, 2005 at 00:46:19 and is filed under General.