Welcome to Season 2 of Entanglements. In the first episode, hosts Brooke Borel and Anna Rothschild ask: Should scientists be allowed to do gain-of-function experiments? It’s a question that has been long debated in virology and beyond — and that debate has only gotten more heated in the post-Covid era.
As always, to dig in, our hosts invited two experts with differing opinions to share their points of view in an effort to find some common ground. The point isn’t to both-sides an issue or to try to force agreement. Instead, they aim to explore the nuance and subtleties that are often overlooked in heated online forums or in debate-style media.
Their guests this week are Arturo Casadevall, the chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and Simon Wain-Hobson, an emeritus professor at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France.
Below is the full transcript of the podcast, lightly edited for clarity. New episodes drop on Wednesdays. You can also subscribe to Entanglements at Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
[Music]
Anna Rothschild: We’re back.
Welcome to a new season of Entanglements, the show where we dig into the thorniest debates in science and try to find common ground. I’m science journalist Anna Rothschild.
Brooke Borel: And I’m Brooke Borel, articles editor at Undark Magazine.
Anna Rothschild: Brooke?
Brooke Borel: Uh oh. What’s up?
Anna Rothschild: Remember last season when I did an episode on the lab leak hypothesis?
Brooke Borel: Mm. Oh God. What have you done now?
Anna Rothschild: No, it’s not as bad as you think.
Brooke Borel: You don’t know how bad I think it is.
Anna Rothschild: Well, I can tell you we are not going to go there again today.
Brooke Borel: Good.
Anna Rothschild: However, one version of the lab leak hypothesis stems from the suspicion that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing what’s called gain-of-function research.
Brooke Borel: Hmm.
Anna Rothschild: Basically, the idea goes that they were giving new functions to a virus that made it better at infecting humans, and then this souped-up virus escaped from the lab somehow. Which is, again, a hypothesis we are not going to relitigate today.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. If you want more on that, go back and listen to Episode 3, Season 1 of this very podcast.
Anna Rothschild: Indeed. But today we’re asking should scientists be allowed to do gain-of-function experiments.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. This is a juicy one because there are many scientists who say we should be doing this research in order to learn more about viruses and prevent a pandemic, right? In theory, you can make a vaccine, for example, or an antiviral to combat a microbe before it becomes a real threat. But of course, others say this research is super dangerous and we shouldn’t be taking the risk.
Anna Rothschild: Right. In fact, back in May, Trump issued an executive order heavily restricting gain-of-function research. So today we’ll be talking to two scientists who’ve been involved in the gain-of-function debate for years — since well before Covid.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. I know there have been a lot of attempts to regulate this research in the past, and this is not a new concern.
Anna Rothschild: Exactly. But one of the tough things about regulating it is how we define it. Some scientists would call the most basic uncontroversial biology experiments “gain of function” if they in any way involve changing an organism’s genetic code.
Brooke Borel: Ah ha.
Anna Rothschild: So, to avoid this confusion today, we will be talking primarily about experiments that aim to make viruses or other pathogens more virulent or transmissible.
Brooke Borel: OK. That sounds great.
Anna Rothschild: And to be even more precise, you might hear me use the term “gain-of-function research of concern” to refer to this more dangerous subset of research.
Brooke Borel: OK, that’s a mouthful.
Anna Rothschild: I know. So I will try to avoid it where possible. But definitions aside, shall we jump in?
Brooke Borel: Let’s do it.
[Music]
Anna Rothschild: Should scientists be allowed to do gain-of-function experiments?
Arturo Casadevall: Only if the information that is needed is critical for humanity and if it is done safely. I think that there are situations in which you need to know something and when you need to know something, these experiments are enormously powerful in that they can deliver you information that is clear cut and not available from other sources.
Anna Rothschild: This is Arturo Casadevall. He’s the chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. His research focuses on how fungi can cause disease.
Arturo Casadevall: Humanity is always surprised by pandemics. Always, right?
Anna Rothschild: This is the potential of gain-of-function research: To make sure no microbe catches us by surprise. Arturo gave me a hypothetical example where humanity might decide to do an experiment like this.
Arturo Casadevall: Let’s imagine a future situation where there is a plant virus that is spreading and has gotten into insects and the insects are getting sick. And it’s made this jump and you are worried that this is going to disseminate into other animals and maybe potentially humans. How would you address that issue?
You may want to look at it in the laboratory to see if it can be adapted, for example, to growing in cells of other animals. Doing that would be a gain-of-function experiment of concern, because you’re basically already extending the range of the virus. Now, I’m not advocating doing this. I’m just doing it as a thought experiment and giving you a situation where you may want to know the potential of this virus to spread among animals — and, potentially, humans.
Anna Rothschild: Arturo became part of this public debate when some early gain-of-function research was done in 2011. Two scientists — Ron Fouchier and Yoshihiro Kawaoka, who were working at separate institutions — gave new properties to the bird flu virus, H5N1. At the time, there had been reports around the world of bird flu infecting people.
Arturo Casadevall: So here you have what is called a highly pathogenic influenza virus. And at the time it was not known whether, in fact — the fact that we had never had a pandemic with one of these was because it didn’t have the capacity to spread between mammals, people to people. And the reason that it was very controversial was because they had given a property to the virus that had now allowed it to become mammalian transmissible.
Anna Rothschild: Brooke, I just want to clarify, Fouchier and Kawaoka did these experiments in ferrets, not in people.
Brooke Borel: Gotcha. Yes. But ferrets are mammals, like us.
Anna Rothschild: Mm-hmm.
Brooke Borel: So I’m guessing that their immune systems are more similar to ours than a chicken’s, right?
Anna Rothschild: Yes.
Brooke Borel: So it’s a big step closer to us.
Anna Rothschild: Mm-hmm. Precisely.
Brooke Borel: And just to make sure I understand, these papers showed that bird flu could, in theory, evolve in nature to spread from one mammal to another. And again, in theory, cause an epidemic or pandemic.
Anna Rothschild: Yes. So that was the intent of this research, to be like: Hey, this has the potential to cause a pandemic. We should keep an eye on this.
Brooke Borel: Right.
Anna Rothschild: But these studies caused a huge kerfuffle in the scientific community, and at the time, Arturo was on the National Science Advisory Board for biosecurity. Its goal is to advise the government on safety and security issues related to biomedical research, and it was started in 2005 in the wake of — do you remember the anthrax mailings that happened after 9/11?
Brooke Borel: Yeah, for sure. Someone working at a government biodefense lab mailed anthrax to U.S. senators and the media. And if I recall, a few people died.
Anna Rothschild: Yes, they did. So, it was started after that and Arturo was one of the board’s original members, and in 2011, they were asked to review these two papers — the Fouchier and Kawaoka papers — and decide what to do with them.
Arturo Casadevall: You could say that even though we talked a lot about major experiments of concern, it wasn’t till the board was given those papers that it had a huge “aha moment.”
Anna Rothschild: What was the sort of debate that you guys were weighing at the time on the board?
Arturo Casadevall: So the original debate was about biosecurity, not about biosafety. Will these papers give a formula to somebody to make the changes in the virus to make it a biological weapon? That was kind of the big concern at the time. Since then, the debate has switched. People are more worried now about biosafety: laboratory escape of a virus and things like that.
Brooke Borel: It’s interesting that the major concerns have sort of shifted.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. Times change, fears change.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, totally. OK, so what did the board ultimately decide?
Anna Rothschild: So the board initially recommended that the papers only be published in a redacted form. But after the World Health Organization gathered a committee of experts from around the world to discuss this issue, and then the authors made some edits to their papers, the board eventually recommended that the papers be published.
Brooke Borel: OK. Why?
Anna Rothschild: They said that the papers in their edited form didn’t immediately enable someone to make a dangerous bioweapon. And according to Arturo, there were also some legal concerns as well. And I just want to say right now, I am wildly oversimplifying this whole story.
Brooke Borel: Right.
Anna Rothschild: We could honestly make an entire multi-part podcast about this. And there are people, to this day, who are still extremely angry about how these decisions were made. But I think for now we should just look at the impact of this research.
Brooke Borel: Well, those experiments were proven to be right. H5N1 has evolved to spread from mammal to mammal.
Anna Rothschild: Mm-hmm.
Brooke Borel: And it’s being passed between cows in the U.S. Though, you know, worldwide, while humans have gotten sick, it’s generally not spreading from person to person.
Anna Rothschild: That’s exactly right. And I wanted to get Arturo’s opinion on the impact of this research.
Anna Rothschild: Would you say that those experiments have helped us prepare for the potential of a human outbreak?
Arturo Casadevall: So even that question is controversial. Some people feel that they weren’t worth the effort. Personally, after 2012, we knew that this virus had the potential to disseminate among mammals, and we saw that happen with the ongoing global outbreak of H5N1, which has gotten into several mammalian species — most notably here in the United States into cow herds.
It is clearly spreading from one cow to another. So we had that information as to whether it was used to prevent it. You know, I can’t comment on that. I don’t know, but I think the experiments did heighten the concern about the virus.
Anna Rothschild: Was there research that was done in the wake of those experiments that you think has helped keep us safer?
Arturo Casadevall: Yeah, I think that continued work on the basic mechanism of viral replication, how viruses defeat immune systems, is information that is potentially actionable by humanity.
Anna Rothschild: Do you think that any pandemics have been prevented because of gain-of-function research of concern?
Arturo Casadevall: No.
Anna Rothschild: OK.
Arturo Casadevall: No, I don’t think that you can point to a benefit like that.
Anna Rothschild: Basically, Arturo sees this research as a tool — one that may not yet have paid off in all the way scientists hoped, but which shouldn’t be off the table if society demands it.
Anna Rothschild: How do you personally approach the philosophical questions of doing this research and sort of weigh the risk versus the value?
Arturo Casadevall: I think of humanity first. Not me, not my colleague, not the field. Does humanity need this information? Whether it is to make a new drug, to make a new vaccine, to know whether this stuff is a threat? And if the answer is no, then I don’t think it should be done. If the answer is yes, then I think once you go to the next level, which is consensus, safety, containment, minimize the risk, do everything you can.
Anna Rothschild: Clearly Arturo is not saying we should do this research willy-nilly, but he’s concerned about what happens if we regulate it too strictly
Arturo Casadevall: Historically, the findings of, for example, that led scientists to DNA involve getting a bacteria known as pneumococcus to get its virulence back. So if you look at the history of science, experiments like this have made tremendous contributions to the development of 20th-century science. But we weren’t talking about viruses with pandemic potential. We were talking about experiments that were done in the lab in which you show that an organism that had lost virulence, you can regain virulence.
Anna Rothschild: But to your point, none of those would actually be considered research of concern.
Arturo Casadevall: Well, enhancing the virulence of a microbe is considered a research concern. And I know that I’m going out here on a limb, but a very careful reading of some of those experiments, they basically increase the virulence of a microbe.
Anna Rothschild: Arturo acknowledges that in these experiments, the bacteria in question started out harmful, were then made benign, and were finally given back their original harmful qualities. So the researchers weren’t exactly giving new functions to the microbes.
Arturo Casadevall: But still, if you take an, almost a legal approach to what was done, some of those could have fallen into that, had that regulatory framework existed 89 years ago.
Anna Rothschild: So Brooke, Arturo and some colleagues wrote a paper in 2023 called “The Epistemic Value of Gain of Function Experiments.”
Brooke Borel: OK.
Anna Rothschild: In it, they discussed the contributions that the broader field of gain-of-function research has made to society. To emphasize that regulating these experiments is slippery.
Brooke Borel: Right. What research might inadvertently get canned if we ban the more dangerous subset of gain-of-function research?
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, exactly. But my next guest does not have these same concerns. He writes a series of essays called “On Reading” about gain-of-function research, and he spent an entire post critiquing Arturo’s article.
Brooke Borel: OK.
[Music]
Simon Wain-Hobson: Gain of function is a term that’s gone back 50, 60 years. What is at stake is not the classical sense of gain of function. What is at stake is: Should scientists be making new viruses, new human viruses, or should they be heating up existing human viruses and making them more transmissible, more dangerous? That is very clear focus. If the question is making new viruses, making existing viruses more dangerous, the answer is no in capital letters.
Anna Rothschild: This is Simon Wain-Hobson. He’s an emeritus professor at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. He spent his career doing virology research.
Simon Wain-Hobson: I cut my teeth on Hep B. And then Montagnier, he discovered the AIDS virus and needed some young hungry researcher to do the molecular genetics and I, of course, jumped at the opportunity to work on a totally unknown virus. And so I worked on HIV for 27 years. So I went from HIV to cancer and then retired three years ago. But the gain of function thing, I got into it at the very end of 2011 and I’ve been banging away at it since then.
Anna Rothschild: Remember, 2011 was the year that those two bird flu experiments became public knowledge. At the time, Simon critiqued the process for deciding whether to publish these papers.
Simon Wain-Hobson: The flu people said, we know what we’re doing, we will handle it. And as soon as I heard that, I said to myself: “This is dangerous for virology. Virology in private is best done by virologists, but there are occasionally times when science becomes public and if you don’t engage with the public, then you’re going to have problems.”
Anna Rothschild: On top of that, he had doubts when other scientists said that this research would help us prevent a pandemic. I asked him about that.
Anna Rothschild: One of their claims at the time was that this will help us preemptively make vaccines against viruses with pandemic potential, right?
Simon Wain-Hobson: That’s, that’s nonsense. Predicting the next pandemic is a dream. You see in nature, there are all sorts of crazy things going on, and nature does not function like an engineer. In biology, you have strange things happen. I’ll give you an example.
Anna Rothschild: Here, Simon pointed to his face.
Simon Wain-Hobson: There’s a nerve that goes from just under the, the chin goes under the collarbone and comes to another point in the chin. Now with giraffes, as the neck got longer, that nerve got longer.
Anna Rothschild: This is a nerve that starts in the head and ends at the voice box — two spots that are pretty close together. Simon’s point is that if biology were more like engineering giraffes would’ve figured out a shorter route for this nerve to travel. And he thinks that this is the mistake the gain of function proponents have been making: Assuming that viruses will evolve in predictable, efficient ways.
Simon Wain-Hobson: And these people were looking at it in the can-do sort of engineer point of view, which shows you that they didn’t understand evolutionary virology or biology. So that is proof in itself that they didn’t know what they were getting into.
Anna Rothschild: Today, Simon’s a member of the group Biosafety Now, an organization that pushes to ban gain-of-function experiments that pose a pandemic risk. The group has had a number of big wins recently. Two Trump appointees — the director of the NIH and the commissioner of the FDA — are former Biosafety Now board members. They both stepped down from their positions on the board when they accepted their government roles. And then of course there’s Trump’s executive order. I asked Simon about that.
Anna Rothschild: Can you explain what’s different, new about this executive order? How this now changes the game for gain-of-function experiments?
Simon Wain-Hobson: Yes. We mentioned earlier that there was this ambiguity of gain of function. And I have maintained, and other people have said, that the dangerous part represents a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of biology. It represents probably not 0.01 percent of all virology funded in the world today. So if it was not funded, it wouldn’t be a loss to scientific inquiry. First point.
The executive order is a remarkably good document. I have read words from colleagues saying: “Oh, the wording is very vague.” Well, I’m sorry, but they’re just wanting to protest. They’re confusing their sentiments towards the Trump administration — which I can understand, and they’re, what they’re doing to science, I can understand that — and the question at hand. And they are doing science a disservice.
Anna Rothschild: For Simon, the bottom line is this.
Simon Wain-Hobson: The risk is small of a lab leak, but it’s non-zero and there are no benefits. So you have risk and you have no benefits, small risk. Therefore, you say, don’t do it. Let’s invest that money in something else.
Brooke Borel: OK they definitely have different perspectives.
Anna Rothschild: Yep.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. I’m curious to hear Simon and Arturo together.
Anna Rothschild: Mm-hmm.
Brooke Borel: So, I know they’ve sparred in print, but have they ever actually met?
Anna Rothschild: They’ve corresponded over email, but they’ve only ever actually met in person once before.
Brooke Borel: Oh really?
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. They have a mutual friend who’s another scientist who wanted them to meet and talk through their differences over this topic.
Brooke Borel: Mm.
Anna Rothschild: So about a decade ago, they met up when Arturo was in Paris. But the world has changed a lot since they last spoke face to face.
Brooke Borel: Right. Covid happened. That’s probably the biggest thing.
Anna Rothschild: Yes. And that really reignited the broader debate and made it even more combative.
Brooke Borel: OK. Well, I’m even more excited now to hear what happened when you brought these two together.
[Music]
Anna Rothschild: Arturo entered the conversation quite optimistically.
Arturo Casadevall: First thing I want to say is that I suspect that Simon and I agree on 95 percent of everything.
Anna Rothschild: I, however, was a bit skeptical. So I asked him to explain his hypothetical scenario, the one where a plant virus has started infecting insects.
Arturo Casadevall: I posed as a thought experiment. Because if you knew that this was a threat, then you may be able to better prepare. On the other hand, I’m fully aware that if you go down that route, you run the risk of somebody dropping the Petri dish or getting infected or something like that. So I think that it comes down to, to a risk assessment, but I posed it to you as a thought experiment.
Simon Wain-Hobson: My first reply is to push the example aside and just look at papers that I addressed in my last essay. They have adapted dog and feline viruses to grow on human cells. It’s done. And it’s been published. And in case of the feline virus, they did the experiment three times and they got three different constellations of mutation. This is a Japanese group by the way, and they did this in BSL-2, which I think is insufficient.
Anna Rothschild: BSL stands for biosafety level and it describes how many protective measures a lab takes. BSL-1 is the lowest and BSL-4 is the highest. And just a quick note, Undark could only verify that one of those experiments was done at BSL-2. We are not sure about the other.
Simon Wain-Hobson: But I would say now that those experiments are done, is there any information in there for public health? And I will argue there’s absolutely nothing. And if you take the author’s own words, they say they may do this, could do this, might do one day, perhaps — this sort of anything but quantitation. And quantitation is important in science. These are just making the world a more dangerous place. No one can put a probability on any of those events, not even the people who did experiments. I can’t find any use, maybe 20 years down the line, but who knows?
Anna Rothschild: Arturo, how do you respond to what Simon said?
Arturo Casadevall: So again, I begin by saying that listen carefully to Simon, I agree with 95 percent of what he’s saying. I agree that these experiments are potentially dangerous. I agree that they need to be done in BSL-3.
The one part in which I go a bit — the departure is Simon doesn’t feel that at this moment the information is very informative and he may be correct at this time. But he and I are both old enough to know the following. When I went to medical school, I was taught that retroviruses were a model for studying cancer, that they did not cause disease.
Simon has worked on retrovirus on HIV and made major contributions to that. And another example that Simon would agree to would be coronaviruses. I was told coronaviruses only cause sniffles. So what I’m getting at is that the information in those papers may not be actionable today, but I would not go as far as to say that they have no value because we don’t really know what the future has.
And think about it. The reason that we were able to make very rapid process in HIV was because people had been working on all these retroviruses that cause disease, cancer. And when coronavirus, SARS-1, came out, people had done a lot of work on the other coronaviruses.
By the way, the showing of cancer genes, oncogenes, required gain-of-function experiments in the 1970s. Now, they were not contagious, but they required the transfers of the genes and to show that cells could acquire malignant characteristics.
Simon Wain-Hobson: No, we, they were — no, they were exploring natural viruses. They didn’t make new ones. We’ve already got enough viruses. The problem is that novel human viruses will attract a certain type of person, and this information feeds directly into biological weapons and rogue states. The dual use aspect of this work has been pushed to one side because most people don’t know what to do.
Anna Rothschild: Dual use research is something that could benefit humanity, but could also pose a biosecurity risk. Basically, it could be used to create weapons by bad actors or rogue states, as Simon said.
Arturo Casadevall: It is very complicated because the same information that can be used for evil can be used for good. Take an example: Rocket engines. Rocket engines are delivering ballistic missiles. On the other hand, rocket engines allow you to put in satellites in orbit that can help predict the weather. That is, there’s no question that a rocket engine is a dual use instrument. Humanity is basically struggling with all of this.
So I guess one thing that Simon and I can probably agree pretty well, especially if we went out in Paris and had a bottle of wine, is this stuff is complicated.
Simon Wain-Hobson: We can agree on that now. I think with the rocket science, I get the analogy and that really is the dual use. I would say our situation with viruses is even easier because with all these viruses that are made, I don’t see any use that’s come of them so far, and I’ve been following this debate for 14 years.
Anna Rothschild: You’re saying that if you could see a huge benefit, your fear about rogue states would still be there, but you would at least feel like —
Simon Wain-Hobson: I would be on the other side. I would be with Arturo if I saw it, yes.
Brooke Borel: Hey, that’s something of an agreement.
Anna Rothschild: Sort of. They do still disagree on the fundamental value of the work though.
Brooke Borel: Sure, sure. I know that in Simon’s mind, there has been no benefit over the past 14 years.
Anna Rothschild: Mm-hmm.
Brooke Borel: And maybe that’s enough of a reason to not do these experiments, but sometimes you just don’t know how a particular study will end up being valuable. Right.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah.
Brooke Borel: Like there are plenty of examples in science like that.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. And that’s one of Arturo’s points. He brought up a 1975 conference called Asilomar, where scientists discussed what was then a new technology called recombinant DNA, and it’s where you create genetic sequences in the lab that may not be found in nature.
Arturo Casadevall: Simon would remember that when Asilomar first came out, there was a moratorium on recombinant, DNA. And the first experiments were done in the BSL-4.
Anna Rothschild: Just a quick clarification, the moratorium was on certain recombinant DNA experiments, not all of them.
Arturo Casadevall: And, and today we have insulin produced in bacteria. We have enormous numbers of biologicals because the recombinant DNA original knowledge was well managed and it has allowed a revolution in medicine.
Anna Rothschild: Right. So this is technology that we thought was going to be very dangerous.
Arturo Casadevall: That’s correct.
Anna Rothschild: People were very scared of, but then ended up having great value and we only really found that out by doing it.
Arturo Casadevall: And it’s affected all elements of society.
Brooke Borel: OK. So we know his point of view on the potential power of this research, right?
Anna Rothschild: Yes.
Brooke Borel: So what did Arturo think of the executive order?
Anna Rothschild: Yes, that is a great question and I asked him about that.
Arturo Casadevall: All these things just depends on how they’re executed. You know, and this is relatively new and it’s working itself out right now. But I hope the listeners know that at the end of the day, the disagreements that I continue to argue happen at the edges are questions of value.
You know, what is the value of something? How much risk are you willing to take? And these things are really not — you can’t argue back and forth and resolve them. But you can try to find a consensus. And I would argue that that consensus needs to involve all our parts of society.
Anna Rothschild: I have a kind of philosophical question to ask you both. What do you see as the primary goal or goals of virology?
Simon Wain-Hobson: After having spent 45 years, I think virologists are there primarily to reduce suffering and to make the lot of human individuals a little softer in what is a ruthless world of microbes. Virology is there primarily to do that.
Arturo Casadevall: I just want to say that what a delight it is to see Simon so excited, and I’d put it in a bigger, grander — the field of virology is a tremendous human accomplishment. So I think that the listeners, this is an area in which there is absolutely no disagreement, daylight between Simon and I, and I hope all of you: Virology is a tremendous human accomplishment. It needs to be celebrated, it needs to be maintained. It needs to be fertilized and keep going, because the big threats that we are facing, a lot of them are viruses.
[Music]
Anna Rothschild: Thank you both so much. This was a really fascinating conversation and I really appreciate you both taking the time.
Arturo Casadevall: Thank you Anna.
Simon Wain-Hobson: And pleasure speaking. And Arturo, lovely to speak with you.
Arturo Casadevall: Me too, Simon. Maybe we can catch up next time I’m in Paris.
Simon Wain-Hobson: Indeed.
[Music]
Brooke Borel: OK. I mean, they agreed more than I was expecting.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, I agree. I was surprised at how much they had in common.
Brooke Borel: I have to say too that I love it when we have an episode, when at the end, the two guests are like: Hey, let’s get together and talk about this more.
Anna Rothschild: I know, I know. It’s nice. Right. I will say, though, we’ll see if that really happens, because since we recorded this episode, we’ve had our first test of that executive order. So in July, the NIH suspended 40 studies across the country that they say might meet the definition of dangerous gain of function. Seventeen of those were reportedly suspended out of an abundance of caution, and there has been a lot of pushback on this decision. So I’d like you to read this quote that a Harvard epidemiologist, Mark Lipsitch, gave to the magazine Science. He has, just for a little background, been historically very critical of gain-of-function research.
Brooke Borel: OK. And he’s talking about the suspended studies here. And he says, “Only a handful plausibly meet the standard in the executive order that they ‘could result in significant societal consequences.’” And then he goes on to say, “While there are a few studies where I would want to learn more about the risks and benefits, I would predict that ending this list of studies, as a whole, will be detrimental to health security and public health.”
And he has been critical of gain-of-function research.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. I think part of what he’s reacting to is that some of the studies focus on TB, which historically has not really been seen as a pandemic — as a microbe with pandemic potential. And so some of it feels like kind of basic research into antibiotic resistance.
Brooke Borel: So maybe sweeping too much under this, like too much is getting caught up in it. What did Simon and Arturo say about all this?
Anna Rothschild: Well, Arturo said he was hesitant to comment because he didn’t know how they arrived at this list, which is fair enough. Right?
Brooke Borel: Sure.
Anna Rothschild: But Simon sent me a longer email about it, and I’m just going to read you the last two paragraphs.
Brooke Borel: OK.
Anna Rothschild: “There is one point that nobody has picked up on. Forty grants have been identified out of over 71,000. That’s 0.06%. Not many people are doing dangerous GOF research as we always said. It will not slow down research in any significant manner.
Seventeen projects were ‘suspended out of an abundance of caution.’ When you realize the risks involved could be catastrophic — a lab leak setting off a pandemic — or the results of US taxpayer research used by an adversary to generate bioweapons, an abundance of caution sounds about right. I’m on board.”
Brooke Borel: Hmm. OK.
Anna Rothschild: I know I didn’t do his British accent as much justice as I should.
Brooke Borel: That’s OK. That’s OK. I mean, that’s a really small percentage. I guess I am curious to hear like if a lot of these were targeting, say, TB research, like how much — what percentage of TB research that might be needed was targeted, right? Like I think there are different ways you could parse numbers, but it doesn’t sound like a whole lot of studies.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. In the grand scheme of things, it is small. That’s true.
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: Now none of this policy is really set in stone yet. In September, the Office of Science and Technology Policy should put together official guidelines based on the executive order.
Brooke Borel: Mm-hmm.
Anna Rothschild: So we’ll have to see how this all pans out.
Brooke Borel: We’ll see.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah. But generally, how are you feeling about this all, Brooke?
Brooke Borel: I mean, this topic is just such a tricky one. I totally see the point of view that although there is a low risk to have a lab leak, for example, the outcome of a lab leak could be so catastrophic.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah.
Brooke Borel: So I do see the point of like, can’t we be a little extra cautious about this line of research? Right?
But also, I mean, it, it does sound like this is casting too big of a net, this executive order. If they’re targeting that many studies that on something like TB, for example, that doesn’t actually have that much of a likelihood to cause the kind of pandemics that we’re normally thinking about when we’re talking about gain-of-function research in some sort of lab escape or something. I don’t know. I feel kind of mixed about that also.
Anna Rothschild: That’s basically how I came away from this too, which is that like, I really see both sides of this and ultimately what it comes down to is how valuable is this research.
Brooke Borel: Mm-hmm.
Anna Rothschild: And I think you kind of have to be a virologist to determine whether this has value or not. But unfortunately, you know, virologists are also the ones who have something to lose if we do, you know, ban this research.
Brooke Borel: Yeah. They’re of course they’re going say, yeah, this is valuable. Because they want like grant money to—
Anna Rothschild: I mean or not. Like Simon’s done virology work for his whole career.
Brooke Borel: Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: But you know, I think that many people feel like “I work in a safe lab and what I’m doing has value” — and that sort of thing.
Brooke Borel: Mm-hmm.
Anna Rothschild: And so. I don’t know. It’s just really hard to say, and I simply don’t know enough to know how this research could be used in the future. Right.
Brooke Borel: Yeah.
Anna Rothschild: I just don’t think I can look into the future. I don’t have enough of a virology background.
Brooke Borel: I don’t think, but I also don’t think the virologists can either.
Anna Rothschild: Yeah, that’s true.
Brooke Borel: I don’t think any of us can.
Anna Rothschild: I will say in May, the Trump administration announced the development of a universal vaccine platform that they’re calling Generation Gold Standard.
Brooke Borel: What a name.
Anna Rothschild: I know, right? And I was reading a blog about it by the virologist, Angela Rassmusen, and she looked at how one of these like gold standard vaccines was made.
Brooke Borel: Uh huh.
Anna Rothschild: It turns out that in order to test that vaccine, the scientists actually used viruses made with gain-of-function research.
Brooke Borel: Ah.
Anna Rothschild: So like chimeric viruses that were made in a lab.
Brooke Borel: Would that be categorized as gain-of-function research? By some people at least?
Anna Rothschild: It would be using the products of gain-of-function research to create a vaccine, so it’s just like, it’s like they’re not doing anything new. But they’re like, well, well, we have this hanging around like.
Brooke Borel: OK
Anna Rothschild: Let’s see what happens. But anyway, again, I’m not a virologist and I, and I really don’t know the answer.
Brooke Borel: Well, let’s hear from some of our listeners. Whether or not you’re a virologist, send an email. What do you think?
Anna Rothschild: Send us an email to [email protected]. We would love to hear from you.
[Music]
Brooke Borel: And that’s it for this episode of Entanglements, brought to you by Undark Magazine, which is published by the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. Our wonderful producer and editor is Samia Bouzid. The show is fact-checked by Undark deputy Editor Jane Reza. Our production editor is Amanda Grennell. And Adriana Lacy is our audience engagement editor. Special thanks to our editor in chief, Tom Zeller Jr. I’m Brooke Borel.
Anna Rothschild: And I’m Anna Rothschild. Thanks for listening. See you next time.