Making Avian Influenza As Contagious as Seasonal Flu

In September, a team of Dutch virologists announced that they had created a strain of the avian influenza (H5N1) that, at least in lab animals, was as contagious as the seasonal flu. (A team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has obtained similar results.) Unlike the seasonal flu, however, H5N1 has a mortality rate of around 60 percent. To put this figure in perspective, the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 had a mortality rate of around 10%, killing 50 million of the 500 million infected globally. The head Dutch researcher called the mutant strain "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make." (The New York Times also carries an interesting interview with the researcher.) It only took a small number of mutations to create the highly contagious H5N1 strain, and one of the key steps in the process was simple: infecting and transmitting H5N1 within a group of laboratory animals until a highly contagious airborne strain emerged. The researchers submitted their findings to leading scientific journals, including Nature and Science. In response, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, a government advisory board overseen by the National Institutes of Health, for the first time in its history asked the journals this week not to publish "the methodological and other details that could enable replication of the experiments by those who would seek to do harm." The worry is that the techniques used by the researchers are simple enough that, in the wrong hands, detailed information about the experiments could facilitate the creation of a bioweapon. The Board role is purely advisory; it does not have the authority to prevent the scientific journals publishing the information. Although Science has stated that it is taking the Board's request "very seriously," the ultimate decision lies with the journals themselves. This episode raises three questions. First, should the research ever have been conducted? Research of the type conducted carries two main risks. The first is the virus's escaping the laboratory. The second is that someone will recreate the virus to use as a bioterrorism weapon. Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at Berkeley who argues that the media coverage about the H5N1 research is overblown, thinks that the former is much more worrying than the latter, for two reasons. First, because it's impossible to control the virus once it's released and no way (yet) to protect one's self or territory from it, it's not a useful weapon for those with political goals -- for example, nations and separatist terrorist groups. (The same does not apply for groups with a more apocolyptic orientation. I certainly wouldn't want Aun Shinrikyo, for example, to be able to create the mutant H5N1 strain.) Second, it would only take one mistake to release the virus out of the laboratories. Writing last week about the H5N1 research, Foreign Policy noted the global proliferation of high-security biological research laboratories. As the number of these laboratories increases, it becomes more difficult to track who is doing what research where and whether they are doing it with the appropriate precautions. Given these risks, it seems fair to say that the H5N1 research would only have been worth doing if there were substantial benefits to be had from the knowledge acquired. Putting aside the knowledge-for-the-sake-of-knowledge justification, Eisen argues that, because of how the mutant H5N1 strain was created (in a small group of laboratory animals of a particular species), the research doesn't actually tell us much about H5N1 mutations in the wild. One might respond that the research is really meant as a proof-of-concept for a particularly dangerous type of bioweapon. But this runs up against the argument made above that a highly contagious and lethal virus is a bad weapon. If Eisen is right, the H5N1 experiment has huge downside risk and very little upside potential. The second question is whether the information should be made public? On one side are the general scientific values of transparency and the free flow of information. Thus, in the virology context, we've had the entire genome of the original H5N1 virus as well as the 1918 flu sequenced and made publicly available. And there is of course the slippery slope concern once anyone -- whether the government or the scientific community itself -- starts censoring. On the other side is the worry about the information's getting into the wrong hands. Even if you think that such a virus would be a useful weapon, however, it's possible that most of the useful information -- for example, the broad outlines of the researchers' method -- is already in the public domain, given the September announcement as well as the recent high level of media coverage. And even if every scientific journal refused to publish the detailed H5N1 findings, there's nothing, as the head Dutch researcher noted, to stop the various teams that have made the discoveries from publishing the information themselves on the internet. The third question is who should decide whether and to what extent to make the information public? To me, this is possibly the most interesting question but also the hardest one to answer. Those who oppose giving the government the power to censor scientific journals have a legitimate fear of the politicization of scientific research as well as a chilling effect on free inquiry, not to mention the obvious  First Amendment concerns. But the current system, which leaves ultimate discretion in the hands of journal editors who may have no training in or appreciation for national security issues, can't be the final answer either. (Ben discussed this and related issues in a Brookings paper last year.) Finally, if you're not yet sufficiently freaked out, I highly recommend the recent Stephen Soderbergh film Contagion, a terrific portrayal of a global pandemic similar to the mutant H5N1 strain (although the story has the virus arising out of a chance mutation in nature rather than a lab). A nice illustration of how blurry the line is between natural and manmade threats occurs near the beginning of the movie, when a CDC official, played by Laurence Fishburne, responds to a question about whether the virus could be a weaponized version of H5N1: "Someone doesn't have to weaponize the bird flu. The birds are doing that."