This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

NSABB members defended recommendation not to publicize details of engineered virulent H5N1 strain

Berns KI. Nature. 2012;doi:10.1038/482153a.

Members of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity recently published a defense of its recommendation that details regarding the methodology behind the engineered virulent form of the H5N1 influenza virus not be made public.

Published in the journals Science and Nature, the defense statement recounted the researchers’ concerns that advances in modern technology would allow microbial genome engineering in ways that could be misused, leading to potential global pandemic.

Noting that the public release of information regarding the transmissible, virulent H5N1 strain could have severe ramifications for global biosecurity, biosafety and public health, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) concluded that the publication of the scientists’ methodology would not be responsible.

“We found the potential risk of public harm to be of unusually high magnitude. Because the NSABB found that there was significant potential for harm in fully publishing these results and that the harm exceeded the benefits of publication, we therefore recommended that the work not be fully communicated in an open forum,” NSABB members said in the statement. “This is an unprecedented recommendation for work in the life sciences, and our analysis was conducted with careful consideration both of the potential benefits of publication and of the potential harm that could occur from such a precedent.”

Follow the PediatricSuperSite.com on Twitter.