Yeah, although you really do have to be practical about it. I'd trust that the review board weighed the right pros and cons. I mean, at some point you have to consider how obvious the research is, which I guess would correspond to the engineering techniques. Those techniques are probably gonna be really really in depth, since it's biotech, but it's not like the genome-comparisons of people/animal hopping viruses haven't been made before in detail...
It's not my field, I left Bioengineering for Biostatistics after my Masters (I'm all bumbly in the lab), but it seems like this would just be introducing specific point mutations for cellular attachment/endocytosis? Or just switching the code for the external protein with that of a human-attacking virus? Actually I'm not sure if that's all that's needed. That's the obvious part, and I might be off. I'm really oversimplifying. Anyone doing this kind of work right now?
I'm just saying, if someone came up totally out of the blue with a people-killa based on a totally fringe tech, and then decided to immediately publish it, I'd go ahead and call that irresponsible. But to publish stuff that's pretty well studied anyway and could easily happen naturally? Then again you could probably argue that even in the unforeseen tech case the collective scientific public might do a better job coming up with countermeasures than the government, and the more esoteric the tech the more difficult it is for a lone crazy to replicate it. Meh, I'll trust the board, since in this case they're probably looking to cover their butts pretty well since it's so well publicized.