Making viruses more lethal - should there be oversight?

Late last year, the New York Times published an article about a CDC research moratorium being lifted. One of the questions raised in the article is about who, if anyone, should have oversight on this type of research. 

"In October 2014, all federal funding was halted on efforts to make three viruses more dangerous: the flu virus, and those causing Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).

But the new regulations apply to any pathogen that could potentially cause a pandemic. For example, they would apply to a request to create an Ebola virus transmissible through the air, said Dr. Collins.

There has been a long, fierce debate about projects — known as “gain of function” research — intended to make pathogens more deadly or more transmissible.

In 2011, an outcry arose when laboratories in Wisconsin and the Netherlands revealed that they were trying to mutate the lethal H5N1 bird flu in ways that would let it jump easily between ferrets, which are used to model human flu susceptibility.


Tensions rose in 2014 after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention accidentally exposed lab workers to anthrax and shipped a deadly flu virus to a laboratory that had asked for a benign strain."

Read more of the article here.