Bird-flu virus particles / Courtesy CDC
Major parts of the scientific establishment in the United States and Europe have been debating whether two papers on bioengineered bird flu should be published or censored—out of fear that the altered virus could be used by terrorists. Meanwhile, scientists in Asia, where most bird-flu deaths have occurred, say that kind of dilemma is barely on their radar.
That’s because the notion of holding back good science that could be put to criminal purpose, something known as “dual use of concern,” is not part of the scientific culture in places like China, which reported that a man died from bird flu this past weekend, the 26th human fatality in that country out of 41 confirmed infections.
“In my country, dual use isn’t widely recognized as an issue, ” said Zhi-ming Yuan, a professor and deputy director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, at a meeting at the National Institutes of Health in early December to discuss those problems. And that could pose problems in a region where biotechnology is developing at a breakneck pace, he added. “This technology is moving ahead very quickly. In the past few months, a Dutch scientist made changes to H5N1 [the bird-flu virus], making it easily transmissible through the air. Similar research on the flu is going on in my labs.”
The Dutch researchers, and another team from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, wanted to publish papers showing how the H5N1 virus could change from largely infecting poultry to a form that infects mammals, a worrisome prospect for a disease that already has a kill rate of 60 percent in the human beings who catch it from birds. (It has killed about 330 people worldwide since 2003.) In late December, the scientists, the NIH, and the two journals that wanted to publish the work—Science and Nature—took the unprecedented step of agreeing to publish the papers without details of the genetic changes, so terrorists could not use them to create a more dangerous virus.
They did this to follow recommendations made by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, a federal panel of scientists that convened the December meeting where Mr. Yuan spoke about the low level of security awareness. Other international researchers there echoed him. “Biosecurity is new in my country,” said Herawati Sudoyo, deputy director of the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology, in Jakarta, Indonesia.
And there are not a lot of people with expertise in it, added H.V. Murugkar, a senior scientist and biosafety officer at the Indian Veterinary Research Institute, in Bhopal. “We have limited personnel available for biosecurity,” he said, noting that while scientists are aware of safety issues, like containing a dangerous pathogen within a lab, security is quite different.
Many at the meeting emphasized that point, saying that security is about determining whether information can be used for ill intent, which often involves tapping the expertise of the defense and intelligence communities. But in countries like Japan, that doesn’t happen, said Masayuki Saijo, director of the department of virology at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Tokyo.
“There is no special mechanism for dual use,” he said. “Only recently have we started to discuss it at the government level.”
Yet the growth of scientific capacity and sophistication in those countries means they are producing more of that type of research, said Za Hussain Reed, assistant director for clinical research at Singapore’s Regional Emerging Diseases Intervention Center. “We attract a lot of people to Singapore because we can do this kind of work,” she said. At the same time, she said, a fair amount of government oversight and review is part of Singapore’s culture.
In contrast, Ms. Sudoyo, from Indonesia, said such arrangements would be unlikely in her country. “Frankly, the majority of scientists would not accept it” because they would be suspicious of government interference, she said.
Indeed, most scientists at the meeting worried that official regulation of their work, driven by concern about its falling into the wrong hands, would slow it down and prevent drugs and techniques to combat disease from falling into the right hands.
But there was a general sentiment that the level of self-policing had to be higher, and the willingness to reach out to security forces had to be greater. Scientists working with those kinds of microbes are creating “information that can do terrible things to the planet,” said Chan-Wha Kim, a professor in Korea University’s College of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, and president of the Asia-Pacific Biosafety Association. When it comes to the risks of this double-edged science, “researchers think ‘It’s not about me, it’s about someone else.’ Sooner or later, it will be about you.”
