Virus Research of Concern
"On reading," by Simon Wain-Hobson, is a weekly discussion of scientific papers and news articles around gain of function research in virology.
Since January 2024, Dr. Wain-Hobson has written weekly essays for Biosafety Now discussing risky research in virology. You can read his entire series here.
On reading the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) document sparked a train of thought that collided with a CNN news story on the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics awarded for artificial intelligence.
The BWC in Geneva was set up 50 years ago. Article I reads: Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes…
The new USG policy document on civilian Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC) has been covered with a slant on national security and ethics (New USG DURC policy). So that we’re all agreed, the document tells us that DURC is life sciences research that… could be misapplied to do harm with no, or only minor, modification to pose a significant threat with potential consequences to public health and safety, agricultural crops and other plants, animals, the environment, materiel, or national security.
In the 12 years following the controversy sparked by the Fouchier & Kawaoka papers reporting airborne transmission between ferrets of engineered bird flu viruses, and by deduction between humans, On reading’s experience is that this duality is not on virologists’ radar. They consider their ‘job’ is to protect society. No doubt the Dual Use part is for the State Department which is the lead department within the US government for the BWC.
Let’s do a little thought experiment with the above in mind.
First, intent
• Military: the intent is to generate a biological agent that might dissuade. An assumption of course.
• Civilian: the intent is to generate bird flu viruses that are transmissible between humans by the respiratory route. The work was claimed to help predict the next pandemic and consequently the development of preventive drugs and vaccines.
Endpoints
• Military: Enhanced agents will have been tested on animals and conclusions drawn as to their danger.
• Civilian: Most virologists will accept that these GOF modified flu viruses would transmit between humans. Some might even be capable of launching a pandemic.
Visibility
• Military: To serve as a deterrent the work must be publicized. That said, the fine details would probably be under the radar and presumably on a need-to-know basis.
• Civilian: Projects will be tracked as they go through NIH study sections, feedback from the committee on GOF that keeps secret its membership as well as details about deliberations (Chilly New York times), awarded, work performed, progress reports submitted, peer reviewed by journals and, hopefully, for the authors sake’s that is, published. Online for friend and foe.
However, the impact of these viruses on humans is unknown because animal models of flu infections are far from perfect. The key experiment that would resolve this uncertainty, infecting humans, is unethical. Accordingly, both sides make deductions that are unfalsifiable.
For the military the results may be enough to serve as a deterrent. For the civilians, the heavy burden of scientific proof is not met.
Were there to be a lab accident - they must occur in military labs like civilian labs (Lab acquired infections) - and a virus got out, nobody could predict what would happen.
Why are civilians allowed to develop what is akin to agents of biological warfare and make the results available without any opprobrium, without consequences? Any criticism is met with unsubtle pushback from virologists (Deconstructing the portrait, Going places, Flights from Reason, Perilous postering, Censoring virology).
On October 8, 2024, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. Hinton, referred to as the godfather of artificial intelligence (AI), spoke about his worries in numerous interviews, one reported by CNN:
And while Hinton acknowledges that AI could transform parts of society for the better – leading to a “huge improvement in productivity” in areas like health care, for example – he also emphasized the potential for “a number of possible bad consequences, particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”
“I am worried that the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control,” he said.
This is DURC territory. The benefits here are clear although there are some big risks. Hence the need for public debate. The CNN article goes on to say that ‘Hinton isn’t the first Nobel laureate to warn about the risks of the technology that he helped pioneer.’
We learn that the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Irene Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot. In his Nobel lecture that year, Joliot concluded with a warning that future scientists would “be able to bring about transmutations of an explosive type, true chemical chain reactions.”
In his 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine lecture, Alexander Fleming said, ‘It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory.’ No civilian bacteriologist today would deliberately make any bacterium that preys on humans or animals resistant to any number of antibiotics. That said, as part of the Soviet biological weapons program they made the anthrax bacillus resistant to eight different antibiotics (The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History by Milton Leitenberg and Raymond Zilinskas). Madness.
The article moves onto Paul Berg, 1980 Nobel laureate for Medicine and his well-known concerns at the outset of the DNA cloning revolution.
The last example is gene editing. Jennifer Doudna (2020 Nobel in Medicine) is quoted thus: “Those of us closest to the science of CRISPR understand that it’s a powerful tool that can positively transform our health and world but could potentially be used nefariously,” she said. “We’ve seen that dual-use capability with other transformative technologies like nuclear power – and now with AI.”’
Which brings us neatly back to DURC. The examples given above are easy to relate to. The DURC conundrums noted by Hinton, the Joliots, Berg and Doudna did, and do need much more debate but at least there was/is duality.
Now the crunch.
For Fouchier/Kawaoka virology we come up against the burden of proof. Not only that, but there is also a myriad of technical reasons why the work can’t deliver on the claims.
For the record, this is what the virology circa 2012 was saying about their experiments. No wonder that after 12 years no benefits have emerged. Just read some of their recent papers to find out (Flu lobbying).
Bird flu engineering is not even DURC as there’s no upside. There is only risk. DURC without the DU. Or DURC which leaves Research of Concern.
We’ve had to put up with civilian work that effectively weaponizes animal viruses for humans. Why? Because nobody in power was prepared to bite the bullet. The new USG policy document has DURC written all over the place even though there are no upsides to the Fouchier/Kawaoka experiments. Drs. Fauci and Collins had a hard time arguing for any as far back as December 2011 (Chilled virology).
On reading is no aficionado of biological weapons (bw) field with its subtleties of language. Much better seek the opinions of people in the know. After explaining the DURC conundrum, the question put was ‘How close is Research of Concern to biological weapons research?’ Four members of Biosafety Now stepped up.
The first quotes are from Milton Leitenberg, University of Maryland School of Public Affairs Research of concern" may or may not be bw relevant depending on the organism. If it is a dangerous pathogen, or a pandemic one, or if it isn’t but the research tries to turn it into one, it is relevant. But remember that lots of organisms that were developed for bw purposes had relatively low lethality of a few percent. They were an important part of both the US and Soviet bw programs, tularemia for example. Such pathogens were developed for incapacitating purposes, just as many chemical weapons are incapacitating agents. So in the end, perhaps most research of concern is or can be relevant to bw.
The question may be more simply answered if the question is inverted, i.e. How close is biological weapons research to Research of Concern? Then the answer is that all bw research is Research of Concern.
That has the merit of being clear.
Next up was Malcolm Dando Emeritus Professor, University of Bradford, UK. My own view is that given the convergence of many fields of science and technology that have relevance to the life sciences the best position to take is that all life science research could potentially of dual use concern. …We need scientists to be aware and educated to recognise that and to be engaged enough to help sort out what is best to be done to protect their work from misuse. Hence my concern about the lack of biosecurity education that characterises so much of the life science community.
The first sentence shows how close so much of research in the life sciences is to DURC. The last adds a sense of urgency. We’re way down the line technically yet biosecurity isn’t being taken seriously in the West.
Susan Wright, Research Scientist and Lecturer Emerita in History of Science and International Relations at the University of Michigan, pointed out that, The distinction between military and civil research in the biological sciences has been erased in the United States. The blending of these fields was initiated in the last years of the Clinton administration when, in January 1999 at the National Academy of Sciences, President Bill Clinton announced a major expansion of research in the biological sciences and public health designed to produce new biological defenses against such biological warfare agents as anthrax and smallpox. As Nobelist Joshua Lederberg, who introduced the president, explained: “The reconstruction of bio-defenses must be regarded as a branch of public health, and it is equally necessary to deal with cyclic renewals of historic natural plagues as much as with those borne of malice.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala subsequently announced that this event marked “the first time in American history in which the public health system has been integrated directly into the national security system.
Some light has recently been shed on this by an October 28, 2024 article by US Right to Know. Still, in 2009, congressional watchdogs reported that the proliferation of high security labs earlier in the decade had lacked any unifying strategic mission and that the government had never assessed the risks. …“Since no single agency is in charge of the expansion, no one is determining the aggregate risks associated with this expansion,” the Government Accountability Office report read.
Finally, Kathryn Nixdorff, Emeritus Professor of Microbiology and Genetics, Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. I have a giant problem with dual use and that vs. DURC. Even with all the attempts to define difference, I still have a problem. A project might seem of little or no safety/security problem at first might turn up to be of great concern in the end. A case in point: the old mousepox experiment.
Nevertheless, in the Fouchier/Kawaoka case, I agree completely that it has really no use, just research of concern. But I think you need to consider this case by case; I worry that most of my colleagues just don't reflect at all about the possibility that their work might have aspects of concern. They just consider their good attempts, the "U".
It’s clear that DURC is poorly defined, and discussion, and presumably oversight, is not keeping up with the development of powerful technologies. Civilian and biodefence research have been intertwined for years. The civilian scientists are in denial. They just don’t want to know. They want to keep going on with their work, blindly. Meanwhile, the world is becoming a more dangerous place as they publish their results online courtesy of taxpayers the world over.
What was the line Bill came up with the other day by the coffee machine? Ah yes, What madness rules in brainsick man.
The genesis of novel human viruses as well as engineering existing human viruses to make them more lethal or transmissible should not be permitted and not funded. Hopefully, this would galvanize attention and generate open discussion of DURC, DURC and Research of Concern and those cases in the grey area that need looking at. Otherwise, something harmful will happen.
Aside 1
Although everyone writes about risk benefit analyses, the opposite of benefit is hazard. A hazard is something that can do harm. A risk is the probability that a harm will occur.
Aside 2
A Washington Post article from October 25 of this year described how the Russians have considerably expanded a biological weapons facility at Sergiev Posad-6 NNE of Moscow that has historically fielded work on viruses. And apart from nasty natural viruses to work with, there are now numerous enhanced flu virus recipes freely available on the web, courtesy of USG.
Aside 3
From the American Society for Microbiology’s (ASM) code of ethics we learn that members are obligated to discourage any use of microbiology contrary to the welfare of humankind, including the use of microbes as biological weapons... ASM members will call to the attention of the public or the appropriate authorities misuses of microbiology or of information derived from microbiology. Fun fact, the ASM has been pro-GOF from the get-go and pushed back relentlessly on attempts to rein it in or be regulated (Deconstructing the Portrait, Going Places, Flights from Reason, Perilous Posturing), as well as demanding censorship of scientists who espouse the COVID lab leak hypothesis (Censoring Virology). Isn’t there a thingamajig about first getting you own house in order? Ah yes, that’s for others. Got it!
Aside 4
Please don’t reprimand On reading for reminding the public about this flu virus madness once again. Nature and Science published blueprints for two such agents in 2012.
Arguably the loudest megaphones in science.
Aside 5
What madness rules in brainsick man. William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 1.
Aside 6
To paraphrase Donovan, prohibited is a word I rarely use, without thinking, m-hmm. In all the drafts of this essay, the penultimate sentence called for a moratorium on this work. It was changed at the last moment following publication of a paper on Mirror Life in the December 12, 2024 issue of Science. Here a group of distinguished scientists called for the prohibition of experiments generating autonomous bacteria with Mirror Life macromolecules.
We therefore recommend that research with the goal of creating mirror bacteria not be permitted, and that funders make clear that they will not support such work.
Clarity for once. An essay will cover this publication in a few weeks.
Aside 7
All the best for the end of the year holidays and 2025.
