THE editorial “Surfing for a Satan bug” (Â鶹´«Ã½, 20 July, p 5) provided a truly chilling read. It questioned whether putting huge quantities of genetic information on public databases gives bioterrorists an easy route to construct hideous bugs. Science minister David Sainsbury tells me that it’s an area ministers and government officials are now monitoring closely.
And so they should, for as the article pointed out, the genome sequence for deadly Ebola is no more difficult to download than that for the peanut mottle. If no action is taken, the complete genome of the deadly 1918 influenza virus could…
