A deadly balance

By C.H. | NEW YORK

TEMPTING fate is never wise; tempting a flu pandemic is downright foolish. Yet it is impossible for scientists to understand influenza or create vaccines without at least some risk. The question, then, is what level of risk is acceptable.

On December 20th American authorities said they had asked the world's leading scientific journals to withhold research. The request, to Science and Nature, is highly unusual. But so is the research in question. Two separate teams, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam have tinkered with H5N1, otherwise known as bird flu. The resulting strains are dramatically more dangerous.

According to the World Health Organisation, bird flu has killed more than 300 people since 2003. Its toll would certainly have been far greater had it not been for H5N1's important limitation: it is not easily transmitted to humans, or between them. But if the virus ever evolved to hop nimbly from man to man, it could wreak a pandemic.

That evolution has now occurred, helped by the researchers in Madison and Rotterdam. Each team engineered the virus so that it could be transmitted through the air from ferret to ferret (good proxies for humans). Details of both studies are still under wraps but a paper Dr Fouchier presented in September at a virology conference in Malta outlines his team's approach. He and his colleagues first tried to fiddle with the flu genome directly, introducing bespoke changes to it in an effort to create an airborne strain. When this did not work, he resorted to the low-tech method of passing the virus (albeit one with three engineered mutations) from one ferret to another a number of times, giving it an opportunity to mutate naturally. After ten generations evolution worked its (in this case black) magic: the flu had gone airborne. The nasty strain had five mutations in two genes. Each of these has, Dr Fouchier notes, already been found in nature, only in separate strains and never clumped together.

The new, deadlier flu strains exist only in labs, of course. However, the fear is that if the researchers are allowed to describe the genetic changes needed to create the new strains and the precise methods used to obtain them, then terrorists or other mischief-makers can copy the techniques. H5N1 would become the atomic bomb of biological warfare.

American officials would rather stymie such proliferation. After the attacks of September 11th, 2001, America created the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) to advise the health department. The NSABB has not asked Science and Nature to withhold the new research altogether. Rather, it has tried to strike a balance, asking the journals to publish enough information to encourage further understanding and responsible research, but not enough to allow the researchers' methods to be put to nefarious use.

Bruce Alberts, the editor of Science, which accepted Dr Fouchier's work for publication, said in a statement that the journal was considering what to do. (Dr Kawaoka submitted his to Nature.) The journal would wait for the government to suggest how the critical data might be shared with scientists confidentially. Knowledge about the new virus, Dr Alberts wrote, “could well be essential for speeding the development of new treatments to combat this lethal form of influenza.” Blunt censorship would be counterproductive.

There are other worries. Laurie Garrett at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, points out that some deadly viruses, like smallpox, are kept under countless locks and keys in highly secure laboratories. The new strains, meanwhile, are not as well protected. As such, they might be unleashed not just by terrorists, but by simple error. That is probably one risk not worth taking.

(Photo credit: Tequiua via Flickr)