As the US public frets about the recent transmission of Ebola to two Texas healthcare workers, the US government has turned an eye on dangerous viruses that could become far more widespread if they escaped from the lab. On 17 October, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced a mandatory moratorium on research aimed at making pathogens more deadly, known as gain-of-function research. Read more
US government officials have passed two more checkpoints on the long, winding road towards a policy for dealing with risky research. That journey was forced into overdrive at the end of 2011 when a government body recommended against publishing two studies showing how a deadly form of avian influenza H5N1 could be made to pass between mammals. Read more
It has been four months since the U.S. government issued a hastily released policy for monitoring what is called dual-use research of concern (DURC), research that could pose significant risks to the public if misapplied. At a meeting in Times Square New York Monday, representatives of leading institutions that perform such research discussed their experiences fitting the new policy into their current procedures for managing research projects. Some were frustrated at the lack of definition in the policy and some expressed concern about what would be contained in an expansion of the policy that is soon to be released for public comment. Read more
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) today released a response to a sharply worded internal criticism about the handling of two controversial H5N1 avian influenza papers, one of which was published in Nature yesterday. Read more
Today in Washington D.C., US Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut revealed that his grandmother was killed by influenza during the 1918 pandemic. This was one reason he has been so interested in a pair of yet-to-be-published papers on laboratory-created H5N1 avian influenza strains that could conceivably prove many times more deadly than the 1918 flu. The other reason for his interest is that he chairs the committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, which had called a hearing to understand how decisions were made about the research’s potential use as an agent of bioterrorism. At the hearing, officials involved in making the decision to publish the research were queried about a letter that was leaked to the press two weeks ago. Read more
On 2 February, scientists and public health officials squared off in a panel discussion at the New York Academy of Sciences. Debate raged around the fate of two papers which describe a mutant strain of the avian influenza virus H5N1. The virus is capable of mammal-to-mammal transmission, which has raised concern that it might be transferable to humans. Several panelists sat down with Nature News to discuss their positions prior to the panel discussion. Read more
Last night, researchers and public health officials gathered high above New York City’s ‘Ground Zero’ in hopes of narrowing the divide within the scientific community over the fate of two papers currently in the press at Nature and Science demonstrating mammalian transmission of avian influenza H5N1. Dozens of commentaries and news stories have born out the debate as to whether or not the research should be published in full, allowing others to replicate it. Michael Osterholm, who was part of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) which unanimously recommended redaction of the papers, referred to them as, “the two most famous unpublished manuscripts in the history of life science.” … Read more
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