[Updated at 4:26 p.m. with reactions from the editor in chief of Science and the acting chairman of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity.]
An international panel of health and flu experts assembled by the United Nations health agency agreed during two days of sometimes-heated talks this week to press for the full public release of research showing how to create lethal mutant viruses.
The experts agreed that "full disclosure of the information was preferable," Keiji Fukuda, the assistant director general for health security and environment at the World Health Organization, said after leading the meeting in Geneva.
Yet the group also recognized that public fears and possible safety issues still need to be addressed, and that a voluntary moratorium on publication by the researchers should remain in place, probably for at least a few more months, Dr. Fukuda said.
The decision thereby aligns the international panel, for now, with the U.S. government's National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, which opposed the release of the studies, though the World Health Organization group made clear it ultimately wants the studies fully published.
The controversy concerns two studies of the H5N1 virus. First detected in Hong Kong in 1997, the virus is highly lethal when it manages to spread from poultry to people. But the risk for now is generally considered low because human-to-human transmission is relatively difficult. In the two studies, however, researchers describe how they created variants that might pass among human beings much more easily.
The two studies were led by Ron A.M. Fouchier, a virologist at the Erasmus Medical Center, in the Netherlands, and Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a professor of virology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Both of them want to publish their work but have agreed to refrain while experts consider the implications.
Intense Discussions
The research was driven by the need to understand how such viruses can mutate on their own into more lethal variants, and how scientists might counter those mutations before they cause pandemics that could kill millions. But concerns include the possibility of an accidental release, or the publication of information that a terrorist might use for an intentional epidemic.
The U.S. review panel, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, asked in December for the two journals that were planning to publish the studies, Science and Nature, to withhold. Both complied, and the World Health Organization set up this week's meeting to consider the next steps.
That meeting, which ended on Friday, was limited to a preliminary review by 22 experts, Dr. Fukuda told reporters in a briefing afterward. The panel conferred with the studies' authors and concluded, after two days of "very interesting and quite intense discussions," that the value of the research, and its wide and unfiltered dissemination to other scientists, outweighed the risks, he said.
In particular, Dr. Fukuda said, the basic elements of the methods used to create the more lethal variants of the flu virus are already so widely known that there is little to prevent terrorists from learning them. Dr. Fukuda also emphasized that the studies produced variants that can spread easily among mammals, and that their ability to pass among people was not necessarily similar.
Panel members nevertheless agreed to recommend the moratorium on publication be extended while public-health authorities do more to assure people of the risks and benefits, Dr. Fukuda said. The panel also recommended additional studies of the security conditions at labs conducting such experiments, while making clear they had "absolutely no hint" of any problems, he said.
The panel anticipated that such steps could be carried out on an "urgent" basis and be completed "in a matter of months," he said.
Complicated Questions and Procedures
The editor in chief of Science, Bruce Alberts, said he was willing to accept the advice of international experts on whether to publish such research, and said he didn’t expect an extended wait for a final answer from the process outlined by Dr. Fukuda.
Mr. Alberts proposed that such concerns in the future might best be resolved by forming a committee that includes national-security experts and university biologists. “If you just have scientists in the room and no security people, it’s not enough,” he said in Vancouver, British Columbia, where the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the publisher of Science, was holding its annual meeting.
The acting chairman of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, Paul S. Keim, a professor of biology at Northern Arizona University, attended the meeting in Geneva and said afterward that he was generally pleased with the outcome. It was clear, however, that any final decisions would need to involve a more diverse group of scientists, policy experts, and public-health workers, Mr. Keim said. “This type of policy decision can’t be made by the flu-research community alone,” he said.
Although Dr. Fukuda’s panel largely found its way to a consensus, Mr. Keim said one of his main objections concerned its recommendation not to publish a redacted version of the research into the mutant flu viruses.
Dr. Fukuda had described panel members as convinced that redaction would involve a forbiddingly complicated set of questions and procedures. “There turned out to be a very large number of very-complex and very-difficult-to-solve issues about how one would do that,” he said.
But Mr. Keim said that, as flu experts, most of the panel members were thinking primarily of their colleagues in the field, who probably would find little new information in a version of the proposed journal articles that excluded information that might be useful to terrorists. Redacted versions, Mr. Keim argued unsuccessfully, might nevertheless be useful for policy experts and scientists outside the immediate field.
That was also a hard-fought issue before the federal panel, Mr. Keim said. But, he added, “The moratorium extension is very welcome as it gives time to now engage a wider community than just flu researchers.”
Josh Fischman contributed to this article from Vancouver, British Columbia.
