A new botulinum toxin poses a security risk because available treatments don’t work for it.
Last year, researchers too greedy for academic prestige ignored warnings from advisory boards and went ahead and published information on how to engineer a human transmissible bird flu (H5N1) pandemic. What were they supposed to do? Science Magazine agreed to publish them.
This year, two researchers in California discovered a deadly, incurable form of botulinum toxin — but realized on their own they shouldn’t publish the genetic sequence. Thanks for being common-sense heros guys!
See on www.npr.org
