You could apply the same axiom to information; it doesn’t just “want to be free”, it will find a way to escape. In other words, the more closely guarded the secret, the more strenuous will be the efforts of outlaws to obtain it. They can get it, and you may not even know they have it.

Therefore, the most logical defense against potentially dangerous information is to share it freely and actively, relying on the collective intelligence of the world community to develop (in this case) an antidote. If there’s a mad scientist out there smart enough to beat the collective scientific community to a cure, then he was probably capable of circumventing any security around the info in the first place.

You speak as if we have a choice in the matter. This is an illusion.

I’ve long suggested that the day we make munging around with the genome as easy as creating suburban GarageBand tunes, is the day we sign our own death warrants. Open Source is an amazingly powerful meme. Information does want to be free! That doesn’t mean that it should be granted its wish.

If you make an open source computer virus creation toolkit (in the interests of understanding computer viruses no doubt), next thing you know, the web is crawling with viruses cobbled together by 14 year old script kiddies.

If you make an open source bulk emailer (to run legitimate email campaigns no doubt), next thing you know, the web is crawling with unsolicited emails.

If you make a cheap device that lets you create your own designer organisms (in the interests of finding a cure for AIDS or cancer or genetically enhanced foods no doubt), next thing you know, some lonely geek with a bad sense of irony creates a highly contageous virus whose only symptom is to make everyone go sterile.

Just because information wants to be free doesn’t mean you let it out of its cage.

I lean more toward the former, but more in the sense of a more famous statement of reality: “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Someone’s going to figure it out someday — the cat’s practically half out of the bag. Secrets are fragile things, especially as time passes.

Look, for example, at Joy and Kurzweil’s nuclear weapons analogy — it should be clear to anyone that what’s frustrating most groups’ nuclear ambitions is not the lack of a workable design, but the lack of fissionable materials. Just making a big boom is relatively easy, if you have about twenty pounds of uranium. Heck, remember the Progressive case?

Likewise, not publishing the genome saves us nothing, really. Right now, it’s difficult enough to synthesize a virus that anyone stupid enough to think that the flu makes a good bioweapon is probably going to get a sample of avian flu from Asia and see what effects they can get with some clever distribution. (To any terrorists who might stumble across this, I urge you to think this through thoroughly, because it’s a really stupid idea.)

Meanwhile, having the genome available might stimulate researchers to come up with more effective defenses against not only engineered viruses, but natural ones as well.