I just took a quick look at a website and found this:
http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/GEessays/killervirus.html
[start of extract]
1900 GMT, 10 January 2001
New Scientist Online News
A virus that kills every one of its victims, by wiping out part of
their immune system, has been accidentally created by an
Australian research team....
Defence experts are also worried about preserving the freedom
to publish medical findings while trying to stop the information
falling into the wrong hands... what are effectively blueprints for making
microorganisms more harmful regularly appear in unclassified
journals. "I can't for the life of me figure out how we are going
to deal with this," he says....
"We wanted to make it clear to the scientific
community that they should be careful, that it is not too
difficult to create severe organisms."
[end of extract]
And that was an article from 8 years ago. Government labs must have made
considerable progress since then, especially with the precision with which
their engineered viruses can be made to 'turn on': too much melanin? too little
melanin? an epicanthial fold? I don't know, but I'm sure one of the polymaths
here can tell us the state of the art; it is an important question don't you
think?
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