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Science, Censorship and Subsidy
By admin | January 1, 1970
by John Perry
Our topic today is science and censorship. The case of smallpox provides an interesting case-study.
Smallpox, once a main scourge of mankind, was eradicated through the efforts of the World Health Organization and others. Stocks of the virus were retained by the U.S. The U.S. and the Soviet Union retained stocks of the virus in Atlanta and Siberia.
Now, however, the smallpox genome has been sequenced and is on the web. In the words of Antointe Danchin, Director of the HKU-Pasteur Research Center in Hong Kong:
We thought we had eradicated smallpox, but now that its sequence is on ethe Web, it is more of a threat than ever, freely available for anyone to download and manipulate it. And the damage has been permanently done, all becasue of the vanity of soem irresponsible scientists…("Not Every Truth is Good," European Molecular Biology Organization Reports, 2002)
This seems, prima facie, like a terrible […]
Original post by John Perry
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