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In Our Efforts to Prevent the Next Pandemic Are We Going to Cause It?
Research into the deadliest viruses on Earth could open the door to bioterrorism on a scale we can scarcely imagine.
Do you think some knowledge should be off-limits? That some knowledge, spread far and wide enough, would simply cause more harm than good?
Imagine, for instance, it was possible to create a nuclear weapon out of easily accessible products. Then, imagine that tens or hundreds of thousands of people had the technical ability to create one. And imagine the instructions for creating such a device were online for anyone to find.
Given the destruction that some people wish to wreak on this world, who thinks it wise to give them the ability to do so on a massive scale?
Wouldn’t it have been more desirable to never have discovered how to create such a device in the first place? Isn’t this the kind of knowledge we should try to avoid finding? And, if it is found, shouldn’t we avoid advertising its existence?
What if I told you that a program of research being run out of the United States aims to uncover just such knowledge? Not with nuclear weapons, but with the deadliest viruses on Earth.
