Thank you for your thoughts, I agree that this is tricky—but I believe we should at the very least have some discussions on this. The scenario I think about is based on the following reasoning (and targets not yet known pathogens): a) we are conducting research to identify new potential pandemic pathogens, b) DNA synthesis capabilities + other molecular biology capabilities required to synthesise viruses are becoming more accessible, we cannot count on all orders being properly screened, c) only a small number of labs (~20?) actually work on a given potential pandemic pathogen plus some public health folks, definitely not more than 1000s of people, therefore at least 1 to 2 order of magnitude fewer individuals than all those capable of synthesizing the potential pandemic pathogen (this obviously changes once a potential pandemic pathogen enters humans and becomes a pandemic pathogen, then genome definitely needs to be public), d) can we have those few people apply to access the genomes from established databases similar to how people apply to access patient data?
Thank you for your thoughts, I agree that this is tricky—but I believe we should at the very least have some discussions on this. The scenario I think about is based on the following reasoning (and targets not yet known pathogens): a) we are conducting research to identify new potential pandemic pathogens, b) DNA synthesis capabilities + other molecular biology capabilities required to synthesise viruses are becoming more accessible, we cannot count on all orders being properly screened, c) only a small number of labs (~20?) actually work on a given potential pandemic pathogen plus some public health folks, definitely not more than 1000s of people, therefore at least 1 to 2 order of magnitude fewer individuals than all those capable of synthesizing the potential pandemic pathogen (this obviously changes once a potential pandemic pathogen enters humans and becomes a pandemic pathogen, then genome definitely needs to be public), d) can we have those few people apply to access the genomes from established databases similar to how people apply to access patient data?