PressEthic

In a New York Times op-ed today, Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy hold forth on the danger of publishing, what they call, "recipes for weapons of mass destruction." They are talking about the genome of the 1918 influenza virus. The United States Department of Health and Human Services published the full genome of this virus in the GenBank database on the internet, a move Kurtzweil and Joy feel was 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.

They go on to say that, with full access to the sequence of the virus, terrorists could potentially recreate it and wreak havoc across the globe. The danger, they say, is worse than that posed by an atomic bomb -- just in terms of the sheer numbers bioterrorism of this sort would affect.

What shocked me was a quote from a Science staff writer, Jocelyn Kaiser, saying, "Both the authors and Science's editors acknowledge concerns that terrorists could, in theory, use the information to reconstruct the 1918 flu virus."

There is a serious ethical question at the heart of this. On the one hand, those who support publishing the genome believe it's imperative to share the knowledge. On the other hand, there are those who believe this shouldn't be public knowledge -- and that part of the information is enough for the general public. And I agree with this group, which includes Kurzweil and Joy -- there has got to be a way to circulate information between scientists for the larger good of the global community without publishing technical details on the internet.

While this isn't an instance of ethics concerning the press, I think it raises a question that journalists face, too. When is information too volatile to share with the public? Is it ok to have news and not share it? I think, in some cases, it is. We are obliged to keep people informed, but the obligation shouldn't extend to situations where there's reasonable belief that the news could be used to deliberately hurt a large number of people.