<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On Oct 17, 2005, at 5:28 PM, Russell Wallace wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">On 10/17/05, <B class="gmail_sendername">The Avantguardian</B> <<A href="mailto:avantguardian2020@yahoo.com">avantguardian2020@yahoo.com</A>> wrote:<DIV><SPAN class="gmail_quote"></SPAN><BLOCKQUOTE class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Quite frankly, I don't like it. When the government<BR>stops trusting it's citizens, it stops being<BR>trustworthy. Those that do the scaremongering are<BR>essentially giving the government an excuse strip us<BR>of yet more freedoms. Thus they are the propagandists <BR>and apologists for a government that has lost sight of<BR>its part in the social contract. Banning certain forms<BR>of knowledge is a slippery slope toward<BR>totalitarianism.</BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR> There's truth in that. Now how do we avoid encouraging governments to ban certain forms of knowledge? One way is to discourage the sort of irresponsible behavior that makes people start thinking a ban is needed; publishing the 1918 flu genome would qualify as grossly irresponsible on that basis alone, quite apart from its potential use as a weapon.<BR></DIV></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Not really. With advancing tech the genome of all kinds of nasty things will be pretty easy to get. For potentially deadly bugs it could be argued that publishing the genome potentially increases the speed of anti-viral work. Having the genome of a cousin of the current scary bird flu plus some folks around who have antibodies to it is potentially useful. The published genome also makes it less likely that any government or terrorist group would attempt to sneak a weapon based on it into the field in the midst of the avian flu scare. </DIV></DIV><DIV><BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV><DIV> (Yes there is some value there in not making such things public: remember the principle of defense in depth.) I think the best way to handle this would be for the scientific community to start proving they can be trusted with this sort of information, that we don't need a legally imposed ban.<BR></DIV></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV>There is no way in general to prove any such thing to every paranoia level. Decide if you want an open society or not and engineer to make that work the best you can.</DIV><DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"></BLOCKQUOTE><BR></DIV><DIV>- samantha</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><BR></BODY></HTML>