In fairness, as things now stand, any nutcase who wanted to obtain Ebola with evil intent could do it more easily by hopping on a plane to West Africa than by reconstituting it from its genome. The threat is from the natural epidemic currently running wild, and making all relevant information freely available might help the search for cures and vaccines.
It takes a serious amount of resources to search for a cure or vaccine; they could just have easily made it available on request without limiting the amount of people who could work on it.
The real threat is in 10/20/100 years in the future, where someone with a desktop bioprinter decides to fuck up a subway station.
Requests require committees. Committees require meetings. Meetings take time.
The more red tape you put up, the harder it is for people to get to work on this.
If someone has the ability to print out a working copy of ebola in 10/20/100 years, someone else will have the ability to print out working antibodies. I'd be less concerned about some potential future risk and more concerned with getting out of the way of people who are working on Ebola research right now.
Plus, if some nut job wanted to print out some Ebola with a hypothetical bioprinter, they'd probably end up infecting themselves as well.
> Requests require committees. Committees require meetings. Meetings take time.
This is totally false. Plenty of research material is "distributed on request" where the request is just an email and the validation is just checking that the email comes from an academic domain.
It doesn't really matter if someone can print out antibodies (hypothetically). That won't help the people already killed by the ebola.
