If you’ve been resting easy since the federal government put a ban in place on research into ways to make some viruses more deadly — viruses that are well-suited to creating pandemics — then your time is up.
The government on Tuesday lifted a three-year moratorium on funding for so-called “gain-of-function experiments,” clearing the way for scientists to conduct new experiments on SARS, MERS, influenza, and other viruses like Ebola.
The ban was put in place in October 2014 after researchers in Wisconsin and the Netherlands announced that they had found a way to make the H5N1 bird flu virus more deadly in mammals, triggering a debate on whether those findings could be published in detail without putting the public at risk.
Earlier that year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also acknowledged that researchers in its labs had been accidentally exposed to anthrax and had mishandled a deadly bird flu that was mistakenly shipped to the Department of Agriculture.
Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said the new policy didn’t represent a significant shift, since the NIH has continued to assess and fund some gain-of-function experiments even during the moratorium. Such studies will continue to be vetted by a federal panel before they can receive funding.
But the decision to lift the moratorium did not sit well with scientists who have long warned of the risks of such research—and questioned its benefits.
“I am not persuaded that the work is of greater potential benefit than potential harm,” said molecular biologist Richard Ebright of Rutgers University, who has argued that U.S. labs working with dangerous pathogens regularly suffer serious biosafety lapses. Experiments to create enhanced viruses, he and others argue, could lead to the pathogens’ accidental release, most likely by a lab worker becoming infected unknowingly and then walking out the door.
Collins emphasized that only a small number of facilities would qualify to conduct this kind of research, and that the findings would be key to better understanding how viruses mutate and in developing new vaccines.
Some scientists said the new policy takes a step in the right direction by formalizing the process of determining which experiments should received funding, but they agreed with Ebright in that any good coming from lifting the moratorium is muted by the potential impact.
“A human is better at spreading viruses than an aerosol” that might breach a lab’s physical containment, said epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who has calculated that the risk of a lab-acquired infection sparking a pandemic is greater than recognized. “The engineering is not what I’m worried about. Accident after accident has been the result of human mistakes.”