ARGUMENT: Risky BusinessCreating Dangerous Viruses in the Lab Is a Bad Way to Guard against future Pandemics
In 2011, three top U.S. government scientists — Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Francis Collins, the head of NIH, and Gary Nabel, then a top official at Fauci’s institute – wrote that given the uncertainties regarding the emergence of new, pandemic-causing pathogens, “important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory.” Laura H. Kahn writes that “There are other less risky ways of preventing pandemics than conducting gain-of-function research on pathogens.”
In 2011, three top U.S. government scientists penned an opinion piece in the Washington Post arguing why research modifying highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) was a worthy undertaking. At the time, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was facing blowback over having funded experiments that modified the virus to be transmissible among ferrets. The scientists argued that eliciting potentially dangerous mutations in the virus was necessary to protect humanity, should those mutations evolve naturally.
“We cannot predict whether or not something will arise naturally, nor when or where it might appear. Given these uncertainties, important information and insights can come from generating a potentially dangerous virus in the laboratory,” wrote Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Francis Collins, the head of NIH, and Gary Nabel, then a top official at Fauci’s institute.
Laura H. Kahn writes in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that amid the controversy generated by this influenza research, the U.S. government implemented a “pause” on federal funding in 2014 for selected research reasonably anticipated to increase transmissibility or pathogenicity of influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses.
These were experiments that fell within a subset of scientific study called “gain-of-function” research. In 2017, the government lifted the pause and put in place a requirement that the US Department of Health and Human Services conduct a risk-benefit assessment on research that could confer these attributes to potential pandemic pathogens.
The federal government continues to fund such experimentation, but, as scientists, media, and online sleuths have delved into the origins of COVID-19, they have revealed weaknesses in past and current government oversight of projects modifying viruses. The revelations have underscored the degree to which gain-of-function research in the name of predicting pandemics is an idea that doesn’t seem to fade.
Kahn concludes:
There are other less risky ways of preventing pandemics than conducting gain-of-function research on pathogens. Many pathogens capable of causing human outbreaks originate in animals, and surveillance of wild and domestic animals for signs of illness makes sense. This is the One Health approach. With One Health, the goal is to prevent the spread of deadly zoonotic microbes into humans through improved communication and collaboration between human and veterinary medicine.
Preventing pandemics through rapid identification and response is an important goal; the One Health approach that emphasizes animal and human health and disease surveillance is the key to doing this, not risky gain-of-function research.
