Dirk-Jan Visser for The New York Times

Debate Persists on Deadly Flu Made Airborne

By DENISE GRADY and DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. Published: December 26, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/science/debate-persists-on-deadly-flu-made-airborne.html

The young scientist, normally calm and measured, seemed edgy when he stopped by his bosss office.

You are not going to believe this one, he told Ron Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam. I think we have an airborne H5N1 virus. The news, delivered one afternoon last July, was chilling. It meant that Dr. Fouchiers research group had taken one of the most dangerous flu viruses ever known and made it even more dangerous by tweaking it genetically to make it more contagious. What shocked the researchers was how easy it had been, Dr. Fouchier said. Just a few mutations was all it took to make the virus go airborne. The discovery has led advisers to the United States government, which paid for the research, to urge that the details be kept secret and not published in scientific journals to prevent the work from being replicated by terrorists, hostile governments or rogue scientists. Journal editors are taking the recommendation seriously, even though they normally resist any form of censorship. Scientists, too, usually insist on their freedom to share information, but fears of terrorism have led some to say this information is too dangerous to share.

Some biosecurity experts have even said that no scientist should have been allowed to create such a deadly germ in the first place, and they warn that not just the blueprints but the virus itself could somehow leak or be stolen from the laboratory. Dr. Fouchier is cooperating with the request to withhold some data, but reluctantly. He thinks other scientists need the information. The naturally occurring A(H5N1) virus is quite lethal without genetic tinkering. It already causes an exceptionally high death rate in humans, more than 50 percent. But the virus, a type of bird flu, does not often infect people, and when it does, they almost never transmit it to one another. If, however, that were to change and bird flu were to develop the ability to spread from person to person, scientists fear that it could cause the deadliest flu pandemic in history. The experiment in Rotterdam transformed the virus into the supergerm of virologists nightmares, enabling it to spread from one animal to another through the air. The work was done in ferrets, which catch flu the same way people do and are considered the best model for studying it. This research should not have been done, said Richard H. Ebright, a chemistry professor and bioweapons expert at Rutgers University who has long opposed such research. He warned that germs that could be used as bioweapons had already been unintentionally released hundreds of times from labs in the United States and predicted that the same thing would happen with the new virus. It will inevitably escape, and within a decade, he said, though he added that security measures like restricting possession of the virus to fewer scientists and fewer laboratories would lower the chances of that happening so soon. But Dr. Fouchier and many public health experts argue that the experiment had to be done. If scientists can make the virus more transmissible in the lab, then it can also happen in nature, Dr. Fouchier said. Knowing that the risk is real should drive countries where the virus is circulating in birds to take urgent steps to eradicate it, he said. And knowing which mutations lead to transmissibility should help scientists all over the world who monitor bird flu to recognize if and when a circulating strain starts to develop pandemic potential. There are highly respected virologists who thought until a few years ago that H5N1 could never become airborne between mammals, Dr. Fouchier said. I wasnt convinced. To prove these guys wrong, we needed to make a virus that is transmissible. Other virologists differ. Dr. W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University questioned the need for the research and rejected Dr. Fouchiers contention that making a virus transmissible in the laboratory proves that it can or will happen in nature. But Richard J. Webby, a virologist at the St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital in Memphis, said Dr. Fouchiers research was useful, with the potential to answer major questions about flu viruses, like what makes them transmissible

and how some that appear to infect only animals can suddenly invade humans as well. This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: Correction: December 28, 2011 An article on Tuesday about debate over research that produced a highly contagious airborne version of the A(H5N1) avian flu virus omitted the context for a quotation by Richard H. Ebright of Rutgers University, who opposes such research. In predicting that the virus would inevitably escape, and within a decade, Dr. Ebright also described security measures that he thought would lower the chances it would be unintentionally released that quickly, including restricting its possession to fewer scientists and laboratories. Edited for formatting but not content.