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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?"
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.
"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?
When has with holding information 'ever' been the right move?
That depends on the kind of withholding, the period of it and the type of information. I withhold information from the public such as my bank card's PIN, my password, and so on.
I think it's at the very least an arguable case as to whether these researchers should withhold this. By releasing it, there would be a non-zero danger that it would be used for harm with little to no positive gain. The exact value of this non-zero danger vs the value of the positive gain is what they likely thought about before making the decision.
Whether you agree or disagree with their decision, surely you must see the merit in this kind of evaluation?
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The only outcome of censorship, logically, is less of whatever it is you are trying to censor. So yes, if the objective is more science, and you would hope it would be, then you do not want the government interfering with it.
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By releasing it, there would be a non-zero danger that it would be used for harm with little to no positive gain.
If it isn't public that severely limits the number of people who can work on finding an antidote. Even if they are making the information available to "qualified professionals" it still substantially increases the barrier to finding a fix. Hell, for all we know, someone else has already seen the same strain and been working on a cure but they only speak chinese and this extra friction to figuring out if they even have the same strain is enough to keep the two groups from collaborating.
Whether you agree or disagree with their decision, surely you must see the merit in this kind of evaluation?
When the day comes that we start seeing terrorists attacking people with obscure scientific journal data instead of simple bombs then the question might be a reasonable one to ask. Until then the question itself is hype and paranoia.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It's basically no barrier. If you want to research the strain, you're going to need a sample anyways so you're going to have to correspond with the researchers in some way to get the code and the sample.
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.
If it isn't public that severely limits the number of people who can work on finding an antidote. Even if they are making the information available to "qualified professionals" it still substantially increases the barrier to finding a fix.
Perhaps this is the intent behind witholding the sequence. They want to give themselves an advantage in finding the antidote, while still publishing their research.
By witholding the sequence, which they have learned ---- they can use it to give themselves a competitive advantage towards also being the first to find the antidote: while the other researchers have to work blindly, with no genetic code to assist them in finding/isolating the new strain or work on identifying an antidote.
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.