Fouchier said in a statement on the university’s website

Fouchier said in a statement on the university’s website. “This process can also take place in a natural setting. We know which mutation to look for in the case of an outbreak, and we can then stop the outbreak before it is too late.”

That was the point of the experiment, of course. The research, funded by the US National Institutes of Health, was intended to discover just how likely such a mutation of the virus was. Nobody seemed to mind the fact that this involved creating exactly that virus – and, if normal scientific practice is followed, publishing the full genetic sequence of the mutated virus in a scientific journal.

Fouchier’s scientific paper has already been submitted for publication, but the US government’s National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity still has the power to order key parts of the paper to be redacted, so that terrorists cannot use the information to create their own global quick-killer virus.

But the cat is already out of the bag: there are probably several terrorist organizations, and dozens of governments, that can duplicate Fouchier’s research now that they know how he did it. As former arms control researcher Mark Wheelis of the University of California, Davis, said: “Blocking publication may provide some small increment of safety, but it will be very modest compared to the benefits of not doing the work in the first place.”  http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=250436