Can Bird Flu Research Be Put Back in Pandora's Box?

Controversy erupted at the intersection of science and terrorism barely 10 days ago, and already the dispute has mutated.

On Dec. 20, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity requested that two respected scientific journals — Science, based in Washington, D.C., and Nature, based in London — omit certain details from two research papers before publishing them.

This was not an ideology-driven attempt to censor legitimate scientific findings, as was done during the administration of President George W. Bush. Rather, the board worried that terrorists might be able to use the information to create biological weapons of fearsome potency.

Given the stakes — and the board's record of not interfering with scientific work — its request seems sensible. The question now is how to apply stricter and smarter security to the research projects, both of which involve avian influenza — bird flu.

Science and Nature plan to publish different papers describing similar research on the avian flu virus, H5N1. Scientists working separately at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and at Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam in the Netherlands have produced a genetically altered strain of the virus that, unlike the existing one, is highly contagious among people.

Since 1997, about 600 people have become sick with H5N1 influenza, which is found in poultry. Most of the cases have occurred in Southeast Asia, where 50 percent to 60 percent of those sickened have died. The Spanish flu pandemic that killed some 40 million people in 1918-1919 had a mortality rate of about 2.5 percent.

H5N1 is neither easily acquired by humans nor easily passed from one to another.

Catching it requires close contact with infected fowl; it cannot be transmitted via airborne mucus like ordinary flu. If it could, H5N1 could decimate human populations.

To avoid that, the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded research projects at universities in Wisconsin and in the Netherlands. The goal: Test how susceptible H5N1 was to genetic mutations that might give it airborne capability among mammals. Ominously, both projects produced just such mutated strains.

The advisory board's 23 voting members — all academic scientists and public health officials — spent weeks studying the research papers. They knew public health workers could use the information in the papers to identify a mutated strain early and quickly move to contain it. Other researchers could use it to work on a vaccine and better treatments.

But what if terrorists adapted the information?

Since its creation in 2004, the board never had asked scientific journals to delete material prior to publication. This time, it voted unanimously to do so.

Science and Nature will honor the board's request. Bruce Alberts, the editor of Science, told NPR's "On the Media" that editors were asked "not to include the recipe for this thing — how to produce it — and we're not to include the exact results; that is, what mutations were needed to change the virus to the form that is thought to be truly dangerous to humans."

But Alberts said the National Institutes of Health is likewise obliged to come up with a workable plan to get the information to scientists and public health officials who can prove they need it.

Scientists and officials now are arguing over whether the research was necessary at all and whether — now that the information exists — Pandora's box can be sealed. The former question is moot; the latter is crucial.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM