Is some research so dangerous it shouldn't be done at all?
In an unusual move, an international coalition of flu researchers agreed last week to a hiatus on work surrounding a highly contagious, mammal-adapted version of the avian influenza virus. Research on transmissible H5N1 flu will halt, and two manuscripts describing how to modify the virus won’t be published, at least not yet.
The voluntary pause came a few weeks after an American advisory panel recommended censoring the research in the name of security. So it raises an interesting question — is some research just too dangerous to pursue? Not just for the scientists conducting it, but for the public in a post-9/11 world?
Voluntarily pausing science in the name of safety and public solace is certainly not common, but then neither is a potentially groundbreaking study into the mechanisms that could make bird flu more potent and more deadly. The decision, announced in Science and Nature, indicates influenza researchers want to quell public fears, but they also don’t want to censor their work.
Dr. Nancy Cox, chief of the Influenza Division at the Centers for Disease Control, said flu researchers will confer during the hiatus about how to proceed, including making modifications to security procedures or the biosafety requirements for labs doing this work. Flu is dangerous, but it’s not nearly as deadly as some of the other pathogens CDC studies, she noted.
“If you think of Ebola and Marburg, and some other pathogens with a high lethality, which are worked on in the lab and for which there aren’t antivirals and there aren’t vaccines, influenza falls into a little bit different category,” she said.
One of the two main labs at the center of this debate does not have a Biosafety Level 4 facility, the highest security level reserved for the most deadly pathogens. Issues like that will be a topic of discussion during the 60-day break.
“(The hiatus) is unusual, but because there was so much concern about the work, it was an appropriate action on the part of the laboratories that are involved in this type of research,” Cox said.
It does have some precedent, however, in a 1975 conference in which scientists agreed to pause research on recombinant DNA. That meeting, known as the Asilomar Conference, was organized to quell public concern, but also to allow scientists to agree among themselves about how best to proceed. At the time, recombinant DNA technology — the process of taking DNA from one organism, and recombining it with DNA from another — was still brand-new and researchers were still uncertain about the risks.
“There are always concerns about misuse of the products of research,” said Jeffrey Kahn, deputy director of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. “Think about nanotechnology as another example, or genetically modified food. We like the benefits of these new technologies, but we always worry about he misuse, the misapplication, or the unintended consequences. The trick is, how do we oversee and prevent problematic outcomes, while still realizing the benefits of the technology?”
The flu moratorium stems from two separate studies prepared by scientists in the U.S. and the Netherlands (the latter having been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health) investigating how the avian influenza virus could mutate and become transmissible among mammals, including us. The main paper is by virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who engineered the genome of H5N1 to make a version that easily spreads among ferrets, the closest animal model of the human response to flu. After 10 virus generations, the mutated virus became airborne, infecting healthy ferrets who were housed near a sick one. The work was important because it disproves a previous assumption that avian flu could not easily adapt to mammals, requiring drastic changes to the virus’ genetic makeup that would render it unable to reproduce.
In a manuscript prepared last year, Fouchier describes his methods and processes, hoping to shed light on the ways in which the virus could mutate naturally. A separate paper by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Tokyo had similar results. The papers could help virologists look for vaccines or antiviral treatments. But some observers fear the work could create an extremely potent bioweapon, should the mutated virus escape from the lab — or should the work be replicated by someone with ill intentions. Interestingly, the moratorium letter (online here) does not address the latter concern, focusing instead on lab procedures.
“We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release,” the letter reads.
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Science, Feature, Rebecca Boyle, bird flu, cdc,censorship, h5n1 avian flu, H5N1 strain,influenza, pandemic flu, scientific papers,worldwide moratorium“It’s much easier to ask what you can do to prevent physical risks from manifesting, than what you can do to prevent knowledge risks,” he said. “The only surefire way is to not disseminate the knowledge at all.”
But no one really wants that, said Kahn, who noted the public health value of understanding how H5N1 works.
“It’s really important to know that for the purpose of planning and preparedness, but it has all these potential risks associated with it,” he said. “If there weren’t any good scientific reason to do it, or good policy, we’d say, ‘It’s just mad scientist stuff.’ But it isn’t.”
Most researchers agree that after the moratorium, the work must go on.
“Understanding why some animal viruses jump into humans, and can be transmitted from human to human and others don’t, is one of the central questions we are trying to understand in the field of influenza,” said Cox, the CDC scientist. “There are probably multiple different pathways. Influenza is a very simple organism, but it’s also very complex in that it mutates very quickly, and with all those mutations come a danger. It’s a pathogen that really keeps those who study it on their toes.”
Ha! are you crapping me? You can download virus off the internet now. How they gonna stop it? First off take those crappy boosters vaccines and get rid of them. Genome therapy is now the answer. Stop the genes that these virus need to replicate and you stop the virus. We know it exists so please big pharma, stop being greedy, release the real cure. Everyone who reads this should be pissed as hell to know that you can turn off a gene in your body, in most cases for less then 3 days, and kill almost any CLass A pathogen or virus in your body. Including Ebola, Flu, HIV, Hepatitis and this H5N1, just to name a few.
CDC knows it, Pharmaceutical companies know it, you should know it too. Genome and Epigenome drugs are real science. Demand to know. Demand to know who Alexander Hodge who was with the CDC "IS". He was a leading genetic researcher at the CDC who left to pursue a field of research on identifying and shutting down specific genes in the human body in order to starve Viruses from proteins they needed to replicate. He found over 200 with a few of great importance to humans. Break the replication cycle of a virus and it dies. They put him at UGA to begin testing on mice then to use its primate center for 2nd level human tests. Hodge had a millionare backer behind his work. His research was right on target and cell cultures that had been introduced to these Class A pathogens were immuned to the viruses when introduced after genes had been turned off. He is offly hard to find these days, as is anything to do with his successful research. I wonder why that is?
"Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon."
Hey popsci, prove your not political and do a little research on the science mentioned above. "Will turning off a gene stop you from getting sick?"
Yes it will. Research who Alexander Hodge is, former "Top Genetic researcher with the CDC" who left to follow this line of research. His research was amazing and it worked. Now its all but vanished. Where is he and what happened to this promising cure?
At the very least then, some other genetic researcher bring it back to us and away from big pharma. You cant keep the treasure chest sealed for long.
"Do not try and bend the spoon. That's impossible. Instead... only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon."
D13, do you have sources for your argument that viruses replicate via the body's genes? Last I checked, viruses invade a host cell (not a gene, which is made up of DNA contained within the cell). So your claim is quite the bold one.
Gene sequencing and gene therapy are real things, and have real purposes -- but they are not all-purpose. Mostly, they are used to determine and treat diseases and other problems, such as cancer or even alzheimers. However, I can't think of anything gene therapy would do to treat a virus, unless you're targetting the genes of the virus rather than the human body -- but that's a whole other ball game than what you're suggesting.
Big Pharma is greedy, make no doubt. But don't make the next (il)logical jump to say that these wildly powerful treatments to ailments exist but are just being kept secret for.. well, I don't know of any good reason, because if big pharma did have a quick and easy cure for these kinds of things, it would be a cash cow.
So your argument fails that:
Big Pharma is greedy
Big Pharma makes drugs
Big Pharma makes money from its drugs
Therefore Big Pharma has the cure to everything, but is withholding it from the public in order to make money.
The conclusion does not follow from the premise (non-sequitor).
By the way, Big Pharma doesn't have a monopology on medical research. It does conduct a lot of its research, and yes, a lot of their results are held privately, but publicly funded Universities also conduct the same research -- coindidentally, the research being discussed here is being done by a University.
And just to avoid confusion, the vast, vast majority of research done by Big Pharma that's held secret, are its failures, not its successes. If Big Pharma conducts an in-house research project with underwhelming, lacking, or negative results, it often will not publish it at all. But if they have a study that suggests a positive result, you can bet 99% of the time that study will be immediately published.
That is to suggest not that Big Pharma has the cure to everything, but that much of their treatments may not be as effective as they suggest (if you REALLY want the truth, always always compare pharma's results to independent studies done by University researchers.)
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"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." - Carl Sagan
Canadian_Skeptic, please see the article here on PopSci titled, "New Genetically Modified Chickens Can't Transmit Bird Flu, Scientists Say". Doesn't cure it or even prevent the birds from dying from it but very interesting none the less.