Posted on 01/11/2008 3:42:24 PM PST by forkinsocket
The genetic information of organisms--as varied as goldfish and geraniums--is widely available to the global public. So are the biologic codes for many viruses, such as variola (which causes smallpox) and poliovirus. The advance of biological technologies that allow for the construction of specific genetic sequences raises the harrowing possibility that someone, somewhere would use available genetic information to unleash a biological attack. The quandary facing scientists in the life sciences is similar to the issues that confronted scientists at the dawn of the nuclear age: Can potentially dangerous knowledge be made secret? Or should it be kept widely available? Gigi Kwik Gronvall, an immunologist and senior associate at the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center; Jens Kuhn, a virologist, research scholar at Harvard University, and member of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation's Scientists Working Group; Iris Hunger, a biochemist and head of the biological arms control research group at the University of Hamburg; and Leonid F. Ryabikhin, executive secretary and coordinator of the biosecurity program of the Russian Committee of Scientists for Global Security and Arms Control, explore the dangers of keeping genetic information public.
(Excerpt) Read more at thebulletin.org ...
No. You need very clean labs in order to prepare biological weapons without causing a large outbreak. This isn't something that you can do with a chemistry set in the cave. If you're getting prepared samples from, for example, Iranian cleanrooms, well that's a different story. But to do this from scratch, not gonna happen.
The growing volumes of such information is dangerous to such things as Creation Science and Intelligent Design. These belief systems say the God is the gaps. As knowledge grows and the gaps shrink, their God also shrinks.
It is dangerous to Liberals.....finally, we will have to admit that IQ is inherited....
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