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Experimenting with a new Spanish flu is everybody’s business

The News | June 16, 2014

There may be a fatal tumour in your brain. The only way we’ll know is if I cut it open – but there’s a chance that might kill you. Shall I go ahead?

We’ve just been confronted with a question a bit like this by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They insist the only way to guard against the outbreak of a deadly flu epidemic like the Spanish flu of 1918 is to create viruses very similar to those responsible. Not to study them in the wild, mind, but to actively engineer from bird flu genes a strain that can pass in airborne droplets from one animal – or perhaps species – to another. Sure, it is dangerous. But what about the risk of doing nothing?

Not according to Sir Robert May, one of the world’s most respected epidemiologists. Publicly he has called the work “absolutely crazy”, and given May’s reputation for directness his private opinion is likely to be less polite. He’s not alone. Other researchers have challenged the claims of the Wisconsin team that their work is the only way to find out how to combat a lethal flu outbreak effectively, and that the experiments were deemed necessary and safe by experts. May even suggests that the team effectively hoodwinked the US National Institutes of Health into granting approval and funding.

Research on pathogens, particularly viruses, has become increasingly disputatious over the past decade. In 2002 a team at the State University of New York ordered pieces of synthetic DNA through the mail, from which they pasted together the genome of the polio virus. They then “booted it up” to infect mice, explaining that the work had been done to highlight the risk of how easy it was. Others accused the team of an irresponsible publicity stunt. The Wisconsin team, led by the virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka, courted controversy in 2012 when it created a mutant strain of H5N1 bird flu that could spread among mammals. Its results, and similar ones from a team in the Netherlands, were deemed too dangerous to publish by a US biosecurity panel that feared what bioterrorists might do with them.

In one sense we have been here before. Research often carries risks, whether of intentional misuse or accidents. The discovery of nuclear energy in the early 20th century, and of how to release it through nuclear fission in 1938, were arguably examples of “pure” research with perilous applications that still loom apocalyptically today. The common response of scientists is that such is the inevitable price of new knowledge.

But the dangers of biotechnology, genetics and synthetic biology are something new. For centuries we struggled to keep nasty microorganisms at bay. Even the discovery of antibiotics gave us no protection from viruses, and the emergence of HIV was a bitter reminder of that. But with the arrival of genetic manipulation in the 1970s, nature was no longer an inscrutable menace warded off with trial-and-error potions: we could fight back at the genetic level.

This new means of intervention brought a new way to foul up. Synthetic biology promises to take the battle to the next level: to move beyond tinkering with this or that resistance gene, say, and to enable full-scale engineering and design of life. We can take our nemeses apart and rebuild them from scratch.

Yet we arrive at this point relatively unprepared to deal with the moral dilemmas. The heated nature of the current debate signifies as much: scientists have never been averse to shouting at each other about the interpretation of their results, but it is rare to see them so passionately opposed on the question of whether a piece of research should be done in the first place. If even top experts can’t agree, what’s to be done?

Physical scientists are often faced with questions that can’t be answered experimentally; not, on the whole, because the experiments are too dangerous – but because they are too hard. Their usual response is to figure out what should happen in theory, and then see if the predictions can be tested in more accessible, simpler ways. But in biology it is much, much harder to make reliable theoretical predictions (or any predictions at all), because living things are so damned complicated.

We’re getting there, however, as witnessed by the development of computer models of human physiology and biochemistry for drug testing. It’s not too much to hope that one day drugs might be designed and safely trialled almost wholly on the computer, without the need for controversial animal tests or expensive human trials.

Other models might be adequate for understanding viruses, which are after all the simplest organisms known. One reason why some researchers argue that remaining smallpox stocks be destroyed is that the live virus is no longer needed for research – its genome sequence is enough. Looked at this way, making hair-raisingly lethal viruses to understand their behaviour reflects our lamentable ignorance of the theoretical principles involved.

There could be ways to make experiments safer too. Faced with fears about the quasi-artificial life forms they are starting to create, synthetic biologists say that it should be possible to build in safety measures – for example, so that the organisms can only survive on a nutrient unavailable in the wild, or will self-destruct after a few rounds of replication.

These are not fantasies, although they raise questions both about whether such fail-safe strategies give natural selection even more urgency to evade them – and whether there’s a false security in the whole engineering paradigm when applied to biology.

All the same, the questions raised by flu research can’t be defused with techno-fixes alone. Forget the new Longitude prize – here is a place where science really does need to be democratic.

One thing you can say for sure about the question posed at the outset is that the patient should have a say. If scientists are going to take these risks for our sake, as they claim, then we had better be asked for our approval.

It’s in our interests to ensure that our decision is informed and not kneejerk, and the appropriate democratic machinery requires careful construction. But the consent must be ours to give.

June 19, 2014 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment