Ferret Flu

[Hieronymus]

So lately, there's been considerable controversy over a couple of scientific papers dealing with influenza.  Avian flu is normally much more deadly than normal flu, but harder to catch and much harder to spread from person to person.  In order to study how the virus might mutate to infect humans more easily, some researchers deliberately built themselves a new flu using bits of avian flu, but they induced mutations which allowed the virus to infect and spread between ferrets (for various reasons, a flu virus capable of infecting ferrets is likely to infect us).  The powers that be decided that this research was dangerous because someone could hypothetically use these papers as a guide to create a more dangerous form of avian flu, and they asked the authors to censor their work.  This request sparked a controversy over free access to so-called "dual use" research - research that could be used either to help humanity or to harm it.

Months of debate later, one of those papers has been published in full.

So, thoughts?  Do the risks of publishing outweigh the possible benefits?  Can we extrapolate this to other dual-use research?

This is of particular interest to me, because while I don't work with influenza directly, I am in the field of biodefense.  My own opinion is that in this case, a dangerous mutation of avian flu is statistically probable in the future, and this paper will help us prepare for it; while I don't intend to dismiss the risk of bioterrorism, the odds that this paper will contribute to it are low.

[deezelboy]

They've done the research - they kinda have to publish now IMHO.

Publishing at least opens up the possibility of crowd-sourcing any cure to this variant rather than leaving it in the hands of one research team, which at least has the possibility of reducing the problem if it arises naturally, or escapes from their lab, or is synthesised by terrorists.

Not publishing, and you've essentially got your own bioweapons programme, salted with fair measures of plausible denial. The US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity has the research, and prevents anybody else from seeing it. That's way more scary than the possibility of terrorists utilising it.

Can we extrapolate this to other dual-use research?

Have you seen this?

Indeed, the WHO Advisory Group of Independent Experts that reviews the smallpox research programme noted this year that DNA sequencing, cloning and gene synthesis could now allow de novo synthesis of the entire Variola virus genome and creation of a live virus, using publicly available sequence information, at a cost of about US$200,000 or less.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v481/n7381/full/481257a.html#/david-l-heymann-we-will-always-need-vaccines

Scary stuff.