Why some labs work on making viruses deadlier — and why they should stop

[Mayacaman]

Why some labs work on making viruses deadlier
— and why they should stop

The pandemic should make us question the value of gain-of-function research.

By Kelsey Piper May 1, 2020

Earlier this week, Newsweek and the Washington Post reported that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab near the site of the first coronavirus cases in the world, had been studying bat coronaviruses.

The Newsweek report revealed an alarming tidbit: The Wuhan lab at the center of the controversy had for years been engaged in gain-of-function research. What exactly is it? It’s a line of research where scientists take viruses and study how they might be modified to become deadlier or more transmissible. Why would they do this? Scientists who engage in such research say it helps them figure out which viruses threaten people so they can design countermeasures.

To be clear, the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, is definitely not a biologically engineered pathogen. It was not released on purpose, and it is likely to have been the result of accidental transmission through human contact with wild animals, like almost all disease outbreaks in history have been.

But the emerging reports about the lab in Wuhan are making many people aware for the first time that gain-of-function research happens at all. I wouldn’t blame you if your response to this news is this: The government gives grants to researchers to make potentially pandemic viruses deadlier and to make them transmissible more easily between people? Why are we doing that?

The increased attention to gain-of-function research is a good thing. This kind of highly controversial research — banned under the Obama administration after safety incidents demonstrated that lab containment is rarely airtight — began again under the Trump administration, and many scientists and public health researchers think it’s a really bad idea. Our brush with the horrors of a pandemic might force us to reconsider the warnings those experts have been sounding for years.

The US stopped funding gain-of-function research. Then it started again.

In 2019, Science magazine broke the news that the US government resumed funding two controversial experiments to make the bird flu more transmissible.

The two experiments had been on hold since 2012 amid a fierce debate in the virology community about gain-of-function research. In 2014, the US government, under the Obama administration, declared a moratorium on such research.

That year was a bad one on the biohazard front.In June 2014, as many as 75 scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were exposed to anthrax. A few weeks later, Food andDrug Administration officials ran across 16 forgotten vials of smallpoxin storage.

Meanwhile, the “largest, most severe, and most complex” Ebola outbreak in history was raging across West Africa, and the first patient to be diagnosed in the US had just been announced.

It was in that context that scientists and biosecurity experts found themselves embroiled in a debate about gain-of-function research. The scientists who do this kind of research argue that we can better anticipate deadly diseases by making diseases deadlier in the lab. But many people at the time and since have become increasingly convinced that the potential research benefits — which look limited — just don’t outweigh the risks of kicking off the next deadly pandemic ourselves.

While internally divided, the US government came down on the side of caution at the time. It announced a moratorium on funding gain-of-function research — putting potentially dangerous experiments on hold so the world could discuss the risks this research entailed.

But in 2017, the government under the Trump administration released new guidelines for gain-of-function research, signaling an end to the blanket moratorium. And the news from 2019 suggests that dangerous projects are proceeding.

Experts in biosecurity are concerned the field is heading toward a mistake that could kill innocent people. They argue that, to move ahead with research like this, there should be a transparent process with global stakeholders at the table. After all, if anything goes wrong, the mess we’ll face will certainly be a global one.

Should we really be doing this kind of research?

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