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DNA Sequence Withheld From New Botulism Paper
New submitter rex.clts writes "In the IT security world, it is common practice to withhold specifics when announcing a newly discovered software vulnerability. The exact details regarding a buffer overflow or race condition are typically kept secret until a patch is available, to slow the proliferation of exploits against the hole. For the first time, this practice has been extended to medical publishing. A new form of Botulism has been identified, but its DNA sequence (the genetic code that makes up the toxin) has been withheld, until an antidote has been found. It seems that censorship in the name of "security" is spreading (with DHS involved this comes as no surprise.) Is this the right move?"
When has with holding information 'ever' been the right move?
Considering that there is no antidote for regular botulism, my guess is that this "censorship" is doomed to failure.
Unlike software patches, which may take days or weeks, it looks like it could be years for this. While I'm not a big supporter of giving ammunition to terrorists (just for example), I doubt very much this secrecy will get very far. It usually doesn't. So it looks like a false sense of security ("security theater") to me.
Good call! Wouldn't want those highly advanced scientists at al-Qaeda to reproduce it at the gene level or anything.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
"When has with holding information 'ever' been the right move?"
Says the anonymous coward.
How small is your penis and what are your email and password?
So a quick edit.
See, isn't that much more hysterical? Now you need to learn HOW TO USE THE CAP LOCK KEY.
Why is Snark Required?
What antitoxins are there? Because they seem to be withheld as well. The only "cure" I personally know to heal people and animals that ingested the bacteria is to keep feeding them sugar water with added salts so you can flush the bacteria out of their digestive tract without dehydrating them. They need constant care and attention and possibly artificial respiration and such for days or weeks, until the poison wears off and they get control of their muscles again.
There are plenty of other toxins and bacteria that are known, easily obtainable and at least as big a threat as Botulism. One more won't really matter on a grand scale of things. If you want people to suffer horrible diseases you already have plenty to choose from. By not allowing a new sports car to get on the road "because it's fast and it could kill people if they had a collision with it" you're not suddenly making the streets any safer than they are. Withholding this information won't make people immune to all other harm, or add a significant new threat to the world. I'm all for keeping dangerous knowledge a secret, but this is ridiculous.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
How is this different than a software vulnerability and security through obscurity, etc.?
I think to begin with, most software vulnerabilities aren't exploited to cause immediate death of (most likely) innocents. There's also no 'fix' for this (e.g. no software update to everybody's genome, but maybe a vaccine can be developed).
Similar to some other horrible chem/bio/nuke weapon formulas, yes, it should be properly redacted.
yeah since the regular botox is so hard to get.... ....
if the new strand stays active in air, powder laying around for longer then I guess it's a problem.
otherwise it just sounds like they're keeping the toy for themselves.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Well... normal C. botulinum is BSL-2, but it's plausible that this is BSL-3 or even 4 since no vaccine is available yet. If it is BSL-4, even just temporarily, then there are only a handful of labs in the world that can actually work on it. and about 30% of them are in the US, so the information can be shared without much security risk and still be well-analysed. I would guess they'd be making the sequences available upon request to anyone they deemed trustworthy.
If it's only BSL-3, there are something like two thousand such labs in the US alone, and it's definitely a bottleneck, but I doubt most of those groups would actually care. It's not like revealing the details of a remote execution vulnerability in OpenSSH causes every software developer in the world to offer a hand to fix it!
(Also, points for the Excession sig. A lot of people disfavour it over the others, but it's probably my favourite Culture book.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
It's a national security threat. There are antitoxins to regular botulism.
This guy is right, by keeping the DNA Sequence out of the paper it prevent ye-random-crazy from having a go at synthesizing some. On the other hand, it doesn't stop research into cures, because any legitimate researchers can just email or phone the guy.
For those of you who haven't been in academia; part of your job is knowing who the leading guys in your field are. This new stuff is nasty, so it makes sense to secure it behind a 'have I heard of this guy' and 'what has he done lately' check, if only to make sure you don't have an accidental outbreak.
Nope, wrong. If any suitably qualified lab wants to do research on it, all they have to do is call up the authors and ask. If they're actually capable of doing the research they'll get all the withheld information the next day.
So much ignorance here! Here's a working scientist's opinion:
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/10/16/holding_back_experimental_details_with_reason.php
And Derek Lowe is about as libertarian as scientists get.
Al Queda (boogeymen) could do this with normal botulism and still be effective if what you were stating was practical or if they had any idea how.
Major cities don't keep botulism antidote stockpiles large enough for their entire city nearby, and it stands to reason that if an attack was so trivial, they'd hit many targets at once like they did with airplanes.
That is, withholding or not, we'd be screwed. And there are far more effective ways to cause harm than this if they started being bioterrorists (like reengineering the Spanish Flu from selectively breeding one of several strainst of zoonotic flu floating around).
No, this information was withheld to give the originating scientists lots of time to make more discoveries and papers without competition from peers.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
With the DNA sequence published, anyone with a simple bacteriological lab can produce it.
Not at all. You would need a lab capable of building genes and inserting them into an organism, and there are only a few of those on the entire planet (most of them governmental). If you want to selectively breed the microbe for increased toxicity you can do that in your garage right now and the DNA sequence would be minimal if any help.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
When I first embarked on my undergrad degree in biotech back in 2000, it took a fair amount of work to identify and replicate or insert a sequence of bases into a given segment of DNA. Now it can easily be done in a morning (OK, an afternoon if you're a late riser). Sooner or later the information will become available, but common sense would say that allowing a bit of time to prepare defenses isn't a bad idea.
You and the previous few generations of comments are both correct and wrong.
The comment 3-up is wrong that anyone can do it: even with the sequence, it would be extremely difficult for even top-level professionals to do it from scratch.
The comment 2-up is wrong to say that it's hard, because if you can get the DNA construct then it's extremely easy. This deserves clarification: nearly everyone here (Slashdot audience, not molecular biologists) is going to assume that there's a magic black box that will turn a sequence into a real physical DNA construct, and they are mistaken. Data/sequence to DNA construct, absent of anything else, is extremely hard.
You are correct about nearly everything, except that it is not simple to just buy big sections of DNA. If you want 5-20 bases, that's not a problem. But this protein is ~450 bases long. You can't just order something like that, and "stitching it together" is possible but would probably take years to get right, even for a pro.
But the idea behind your comment is still valid, because this gene will not be a from-scratch, random sequence. It's going to be 95+% identical to existing sequences, so instead of splicing together 60 synthetic sequences (purchased from a company), you only need to splice together maybe 2-4 big pieces. Those pieces could be purchased, or possibly isolated if you can get the bacteria.