From Martin Rees: "Biotechnology is advancing rapidly, and by 2020 there will be thousands - even millions - of people with the capability to cause a catastrophic biological disaster. My concern is not only organized terrorist groups, but individual weirdos with the mindset of the people who now design computer viruses. Even if all nations impose effective regulations on potentially dangerous technologies, the chance of an active enforcement seems to me as small as in the case of the drug laws.
We can ask of any innovation whether its potential is so scary that we should be inhibited in pressing on with it, or at least impose some constraints. Nanotechnology, for instance, is likely to transform medicine, computers, surveillance, and other practical areas, but it might advance to a stage at which a replicator, with its associated dangers, became technically feasible. There would then be the risk, as there now is with biotechnology, of a catastrophic 'release' (or that the technique could be used as a 'suicide weapon').
To put effective brakes on a field of research would require international consensus. If one country alone imposed regulations, the most dynamic researchers and enterprising companies would simply move to another country, something that is happening already in stem cell research. And even if all governments agreed to halt research in a particular field, the chances of effective enforcement are slim.
Even if all the world's scientific academics agreed that some specific lines of inquiry had a disquieting 'downside' and all countries, in unison, imposed a formal prohibition, then how effectively could it be enforced? An international moratorium could certainly slow down particular lines of research, even if they couldn't be stopped completely. When experiments are disallowed for ethical reasons, enforcement with ninety-nine percent effectiveness, or even just ninety percent, is far better than having no prohibition at all; but when experiments are exceedingly risky, enforcement would need to be close to one hundred percent effective to be reassuring: even one release of a lethal virus could be catastrophic, as could a nanotechnology disaster.
Despite all the efforts of law enforcers, millions of people use illicit drugs; thousands peddle them. In view of the failure to control drug smuggling or homicides, it is unrealistic to expect that when the genie is out of the bottle, we can ever be fully secure against bioerror and bioterror: risk would still remain that could not be eliminated except by measures that are themselves unpalatable, such as intrusive universal surveillance."