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Update: After publishing this post earlier today, I see Drudge has just put on his website another article, "Scientists to Pause Research on Deadly Strain of Bird Flu." Final paragraph:
Ron Fouchier, a virologist who conducted the research in Rotterdam, said he was surprised by how easy it was to change the virus into the very form that the world has been dreading. Now, the world must decide what to do with it.
 (Original Post): Brilliant. Isn't that's exactly what we need? Take a lethal virus not easily transmissible and genetically modify it to make it highly transmissible!
In his commentary "The Fruits of Hubris," Charles Colson writes that the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity is asking the scientific journals Science and Nature to self-censor their articles about research into the H5N1, the “bird flu” virus.
Colson writes:
Scientists in the Netherlands and the USA have succeeded in genetically-modifying the virus (which is normally not easily transmitted person-to-person) into a “highly transmissible form.”
The Advisory Board asked the journals to publish the findings, but not “experimental details and mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.” The fear, obviously, is that terrorists could use the published results in creating bio-weapons. He goes on: [my bolding] The publications Nature and Science are expected to comply with the request, which should reassure exactly nobody. Instead of being grateful that the exceptionally lethal H5N1 is difficult to pass from person to person, the researchers couldn’t resist playing god. They took a virus whose global impact was limited and turned it into the stuff of science fiction nightmares. Literally. The recent movie “Contagion” is about a virus that, like H5N1, starts in south China and eventually kills people around the world. Even more on point, the science fiction classic “Twelve Monkeys” is about a genetically-modified virus that gets loose and kills most of the human race. Now, I’m not saying that this, or anything like it, will happen with H5N1. I’m simply saying that it takes blind hubris to think that we can tinker with nature in this way — that is play God — without consequences. No amount of security can protect us from the consequences of our folly. I’m all for studying the virus. But what happened here goes way beyond that. The fact that people don’t get that testifies to the way invoking “science” trumps moral concerns these days. . . For more details, see the New York Times article U.S. Asks Journals to Cut Flu Study Facts. |