In its March 12 issue, The New Yorker published Michael Specter's article asking: Should Ron Fouchier Publish His Bird Flu Research? You'll have to subscribe to the online version or buy a hard copy to read the whole article; I suggest that you take the trouble. Specter provides a lucid and even-handed account of the debate. Here's an excerpt from the abstract:
ANNALS OF MEDICINE about the creation of a highly contagious form of the H5N1 (bird flu) virus by Dutch scientists. To ignite a pandemic, even the most lethal virus would need to meet three conditions: it would have to be one that humans hadn’t confronted before, so that they didn’t have antibodies; it would have to kill them; and it would have to spread easily. H5N1 meets the first two criteria but not the third. Flu viruses mutate rapidly, but over time they tend to weaken. Researchers hoped that this would be the case with H5N1.
Nonetheless, for the past decade the threat of an airborne bird flu lingered ominously in the dark imaginings of scientists around the world. Then, last September, the threat became real.
