Via ScienceInsider: U.S. Plans for New H5N1 Science Reviews Ruffle Researchers. Excerpt:
Researchers are giving mixed reviews to a draft U.S. government plan to subject some grant requests for studies involving the H5N1 avian influenza virus to special reviews—and perhaps even require the work to be kept secret.
Elements of the plan have been "very controversial within [the] U.S. government" committee that developed it, Amy Patterson, associate director for science policy at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, told a meeting of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) earlier this week.
Patterson unveiled the proposal—formally known as A Proposed Framework for Guiding HHS [the Department of Health and Human Services] Funding Decisions about Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza H5N1 Gain-of-Function Research—at the 27 November meeting of NSABB, which advises the U.S. government on overseeing "dual use" biological research that could be used for good and evil.
Although it would now apply to just a handful of potential studies, the framework "is going to raise a lot of questions and concerns among researchers," predicts microbiologist Ron Atlas of the University of Louisville in Kentucky who has worked on biosecurity policy issues for more than a decade for the American Society for Microbiology.
Some influenza scientists are already calling the plan "misguided," while others predict it will make it impossible to obtain NIH funding for an entire subset of potentially useful studies. Others, however, say it represents a needed "step forward" in government efforts to reduce the terrorism and public safety risks associated with H5N1 studies.
The debate is expected to get a full hearing over the next few months. NIH says that it will soon release for public comment a white paper describing the plan in detail. And it plans to present the framework for discussion at an international workshop on H5N1 research that it is holding in Bethesda from 17 to 18 December.
"We definitely want to hear what other countries are thinking about this," Patterson said.
"This is a global concern," Atlas says, and any U.S. policy "that can't be globalized is in the long run going to be ineffective."
