[You Gotta Be Kidding Me]

"From an arms control perspective it appears to be particularly sensitive if a military research institution embarks on a project that aims at constructing more dangerous pathogens. "If Jeffery Taubenberger worked in a Chinese, Russian or Iranian laboratory, his work might well be seen as the 'smoking gun' of an offensive biowarfare program," says van Aken."

The problem is:......

Who says that the Chinese, Russians, Iranians, (whowever) are NOT working on this as a weapons program? It may be hypocricy to work on this, but it could be used to create antibiotics to fight it. The truth is: bioweapons are not useful, because they will also kill your side, but we could also be looking at an "Army of the Twelve Monkeys" scenario. A suicidal terrorist would love to get his creepy hands on this stuff.

[RussianConservative]

Consider number of genes in virus and number that can be recombined...chance of preempting such is nearly impossible and impractical...but if US do this and it do, it has no right to call other nations on WMD creation...where is moral high ground for attack against small nation that do exactly what you do? If nothing it spur small nation to work much harder getting WMD knowing it is in hypocriticol system.

[Cronos]

It may be hypocricy to work on this, but it could be used to create antibiotics to fight it

How could we know for certain WHAT strain is created by the Chinese, Iranis etc.? If we develop an antibody to the strain created by US, how will that help against another strain? There's no cure for the common cold virus because IT's NOT ONE virus, there are 'undreds or thousands of virii and God knows how many strains. There's absolutely NO Need to do this research and anyone else developing it would be stupid as they could never know if the antibody they develop would NOT succeed against a mutant strain of the mutant strain they create (SARS anyone?)