I hope that fear of terrorism will not lead to the suppression of valuable research about engineering the H5N1 virus
A few months ago, Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier made what he hoped would be a low-key announcement at a conference on influenza in Malta. After a series of painstaking experiments, Fouchier announced he had achieved the holy grail of influenza research: engineering the H5N1 bird flu virus so that it could pass easily between mammals. The "airborne" virus had been created, Fouchier explained, not by using sophisticated, lab-based genetic technology but by the relatively low-tech method of passaging H5N1 repeatedly through ferrets.
The significance of the discovery was not lost on the assembled delegates. If ferrets could be infected this way, then so could humans. Fouchier had realised the World Health Organisation's worst nightmare.
However, that might have been the end of the story were it not for a resourceful journalist at Science, who – seeing a potential headline – tracked Fouchier down to his lab at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam in November and got him to explain in more detail precisely how his team had created "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make".
In so doing, Fouchier crossed an invisible border, triggering biosecurity alarms at the highest echelons of the US government and, in the process, alerting the Daily Mail's news desk, who wasted no time in ramping up the fears about an inadvertent laboratory release of the "Armageddon virus". The latest twist came this week, with the announcement that officials at the Orwellian-sounding US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) had taken the unprecedented step of asking Fouchier and another team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who have also succeeded in engineering the virus, not to publish all the details of how they did it.
In fact, this is not the first time that biosecurity chiefs have gone apeshit over Frankenstein-style experiments on viruses. In 2005, there were similar fits of hysterics when US scientists succeeded in resurrecting the "Spanish flu" virus, the bug responsible for the deadliest pandemic in history, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide in 1918. On that occasion, the NSABB also insisted on reviewing the research, before relenting at the eleventh hour and deciding that the merits of publication outweighed the risks of releasing potentially dangerous knowledge.
In 2005, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the mailing of weaponised anthrax to members of Congress – a plot that was eventually blamed on a disgruntled US anthrax researcher – were still fresh in memory. Today, the backdrop is the 2009 swine flu pandemic and fears that al-Qaida operatives in north Africa may be experimenting with pathogens like the bubonic plague, the bacteria responsible for the devastating Black Death of the 14th century.
To conspiracy theorists, it will come as no surprise that scientists have been fiddling with deadly viruses or that they justify such research on the grounds that it could speed up the manufacture of life-saving vaccines. The clue is to be found in who funds their research: why, vaccine manufacturers, of course – hence the Indonesian health minister Siti Fadilah Supari's risible claim in 2009 that swine flu may have been engineered in the lab with the aim of boosting the profits of western pharmaceutical companies.
In fact, the sudden emergence of H1N1 swine flu in Mexico took everyone – the scientific community included – by surprise, and it is in an effort to keep one step ahead of nature that Fouchier and others have been quietly experimenting with H5N1. Although the virus has caused fewer than 600 cases in humans since it emerged in Asia in 1997, 70% of those cases have proven fatal. In other words, should it become airborne it could set off a human apocalypse that could make the recent culling of poultry in Egypt and elsewhere look like, well, chicken-feed.
That is not to say that the NSABB shouldn't take its time and properly weigh the dangers of publication. In the end, however, I hope they come down on the side of the free flow of scientific information. Until now, many scientists had doubted H5N1's ability to trigger a pandemic, believing that in adapting to a human host it would lose its virulence.
Based on past experience, some scientists also argued that flu pandemics were only caused by H1, H2 or H3 viruses – not by H5s. Fouchier's study shows that both those assumptions are probably wrong. Indeed, any influenza virus that has been able to pass between ferrets has also been transmissable among humans.
The second reason why publication is in the public interest is that knowing the exact mutations that make the virus transmissable also allows scientists to hunt for them in the field and take more aggressive control measures. And it enables researchers to test H5N1 vaccines against the mutated strains.
Of course there is a danger that this information could also be exploited by terrorists. However, if history teaches us anything, it is that the greatest bioterrorist is nature and that when it comes to influenza it is better to be fore-armed.