BSL-4 Lab Worker - Photo Credit –USAMRIID
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They say `Timing is everything’.
And given the timing of today’s announcement of a lab accident last week in Atlanta (see CDC Statement On Possible Lab Exposure To Anthrax) and the publication of lengthy reply by Marc Lipsitch & Alison P. Galvani to Fouchier & Kawaoka on the risks of GOF (Gain of Function) lab research – including accidental release - I would have to agree.
This controversy has been brewing for several years, but took off again last month when Dr. Lipsitch - Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard School of Public Health – along with Yale's Alison Galvani, published an opinion piece in PLoS Medicine on the risks involved in experimenting on potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs).
Ethical Alternatives to Experiments with Novel Potential Pandemic Pathogens
Marc Lipsitch mail, Alison P. Galvani
Published: May 20, 2014 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001646
This led to response from researchers Fouchier & Kawaoka, defending their work, published in a CIDRAP NEWS report on May 22th. What follows is a reply to that response.
There’s far too much here to synopsize, so I’ll simply post the link and CIDRAP’s preface, and invite you to read it in its entirety. After which, I’ll have a little more.
COMMENTARY: The case against 'gain-of-function' experiments: A reply to Fouchier & Kawaoka
Marc Lipsitch, DPhil, and Alison P. Galvani, PhD
Henrik5000 / iStock
Editor's note: Today's commentary was submitted to CIDRAP by the authors. They respond to critiques of their recent journal article in which they argued that there are safer and better ways to investigate influenza virus transmissibility, prevention and control than to conduct experiments that lead to the creation of more-contagious viruses.
Dr Lipsitch (mlipsitch@hsph.harvard.edu) is a professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston. Dr. Galvani (alison.galvani@yale.edu) is a professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases) and of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven, Conn.
For more background on all of this, you may wish to revisit a presentation by Dr. Marc Lipsitch on the the risks of these types of experiments from last September, while last December (see The Call For Urgent Talks On `GOF’ Research Projects), we saw a letter – signed by 56 scientists – and published both in SciAm and the journal Nature - calling for `urgent talks’ over the future course of GOF research on influenza viruses, and other pathogens.
