by Nell Greenfieldboyce
November 17, 2011
from
NPR Website
H5N1 avian flu
viruses (seen in gold)
grow inside canine
kidney cells (seen in green).
Cynthia Goldsmith/CDC
Scientists and security specialists are
in the midst of a fierce debate over recent experiments on a strain
of bird flu virus that made it more contagious.
The big question:
Should the results be made public?
Critics say doing so could potentially
reveal how to make powerful new bioweapons.
The
H5N1 virus has been circulating
among birds and other animals in recent years. It's also infected
about 500 people. More than half died. But this dangerous virus has
not caused widespread human disease because, so far,
sick people haven't been very contagious.
If the virus evolves to spread as easily between people as seasonal
flu, however, it could cause a devastating global pandemic. So in an
attempt to stay ahead of H5N1, scientists have been tweaking its
genes in the lab to learn more about how this virus works, and what
it is capable of.
In September, one scientist made a stunning announcement. At
a flu conference held in Malta, he
said he'd done a lab experiment that resulted in bird flu virus
becoming highly contagious between ferrets - the animal model used
to study human flu infection.
It seemed that just five mutations did
the trick.
It's just a bad idea for scientists
to turn a lethal virus into a lethal and highly contagious
virus. And it's a second bad idea for them to publish how they
did it so others can copy it.
- Dr. Thomas Inglesby
News of the results raised red flags for
Dr. Thomas Inglesby,
a bioterrorism expert and director
of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh
Medical Center.
"It's just a bad idea for scientists
to turn a lethal virus into a lethal and highly contagious
virus. And it's a second bad idea for them to publish how they
did it so others can copy it," says Inglesby.
No science journal has published the
information yet. And Inglesby hopes none of them do.
Biology research usually has a culture of openness. Scientists
report their methods and results so others can repeat their work and
learn from it. Inglesby agrees that's the way to go the vast
majority of the time.
But not this time.
"There are some cases that I think
are worth an exception to that otherwise very important
scientific principle," he says. "I can only imagine that the
process of deliberating about the publication of these findings
is quite serious."
The researcher who presented these
findings at the science meeting is virologist
Ron Fouchier, of the Erasmus
Medical Center in the Netherlands.
NPR has learned that his work is now
under scrutiny by a committee called the National Science
Advisory Board for Biosecurity.
That's a committee of independent experts the U. S. government set
up to give advice on how to deal with biological research that's
legitimately important to science but that also could be misused. It
can make nonbinding recommendations about such things as whether the
findings should be published.
NPR asked Fouchier by email if he intended to publish the details of
his study. He replied that he preferred not to comment until the
committee made a formal decision.
Research on new and worrisome forms of influenza is a case study
showing how, a decade after 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, scientists
are still grappling with how to handle sensitive biological
research, says
John Steinbruner, director of
the Center for International and Security Studies at the
University of Maryland.
"We really do need to develop a
better oversight process and a better way of organizing global
judgments about very, very dangerous lines of research," says
Steinbruner. "And we haven't yet done it."
Scientists say they do think hard about
these issues.
Princeton's
Lynn Enquist, editor in chief
of the Journal of Virology, says he and his colleagues
carefully considered whether to publish a flu study submitted to the
journal that appears in the December issue.
"You have to say, 'Is there more
benefit than there is risk?' and that was our judgment on this
one, that that was indeed the case," says Enquist.
In that experiment, researchers had
taken a bird flu gene and put it in the swine flu virus that started
spreading between people a couple of years ago. Mice infected with
this lab-created virus got very, very sick.
But Enquist says, this altered virus didn't spread easily.
And he points out that this kind of
virus combination could happen as bird flu circulates out in nature.
"Scientists in the United States and
all around the world are very curious as to how this thing is
going to evolve because we have to be prepared for it," says
Enquist. "The public would expect us to be prepared."
As part of that effort to get ready,
scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have
been doing work to see how bird flu could adapt to humans.
This month, in a different journal
called Virology, they described how they created two new versions of
the bird flu virus that could spread between ferrets in a limited
way.
A spokesperson said no one from the CDC would be made available to
comment. And efforts to speak with officials at the National
Institutes of Health, which funds flu research, were unsuccessful.
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