Should a New Recipe for Engineered Bird Flu, Potent Enough to Kill Millions, Be Published?
H5N1 Virion A transmission electron micrograph reveals the structure of an H5N1 avian flu virion (a single virus particle). CDC via Wikimedia Commons Inside a Dutch medical facility is a potentially devastating weapon that could kill millions: A genetically modified version of the H5N1 bird flu, engineered to be easily transmitted among ferrets. And the researchers who figured out how to do it would like to share their work with the world. It's a complicated conundrum, more so than it may seem at first blush. Biosecurity experts are now debating whether published research on the engineered flu (there are a couple papers in question) could be used as a blueprint for a bioweapon. But influenza researchers argue that virologists need every weapon they can find to fight the flu, which includes studying the ways it might spread to mammals. The National Institutes of Health funded the work. The main paper is by...