COMMENTARY: The case against ‘gain-of-function’ experiments: A reply to Fouchier & Kawaoka
Over at CIDRAP, Marc Lipsitch and Alison P. Galvani have responded to critics— specifically, Ron Fouchier and Yoshihiro Kawaoka—of their recent study in PLoS Medicine. It is a thorough rebuttal of the offhand dismissal that Lipsitch and Galvani have met from Fouchier and Kawaoka and the virology community more generally.
This is a fantastic addition to the dual-use debate. Too often, stock answers given for the benefits of dual-use are put forward without sustained analysis: things like “will help us make new vaccines,” “will help us with disease surveillance,” or “will raise awareness.” Lipsitch and Galvani have drawn up roadmap of challenges that advocates of gain-of-function studies—specifically those that deal with influenza—must confront in order to the justify public health benefit of their work. We should hold researchers and funding agencies accountable to this kind of burden of proof when it comes to dual-use research.
Dual-use flow chart. Logical structure of the potential lifesaving benefits of PPP experiments, required intermediate steps to achieve those benefits (blue boxes), and key obstacles to achieving those steps highlighted in our original paper (red text). Courtesy Marc Lipsitch, 2014.
Lipsitch and Galvani’s response is also important because it critically addresses the narrative that Fouchier and Kawaoka have woven around their research. This narrative has been bolstered by the researcher’s expertise in virology, but doesn’t meet the standards of biosecurity, science policy, public health, or bioethics analysis. It’s good to see Lipsitch and Galvani push back, and point to inconsistencies in the type of authority that Fouchier and Kawaoka wield.
UPDATE 06/19/14, 16:32: as I posted this, it occurred to me that the diagram Lipsitch and Galvani provide, while useful, is incomplete. That is, Lipsitch and Galvani have—correctly, I believe—illustrated the problems dual-use advocates must respond in the domain the authors occupy. These are challenges in fields like virology, biology, and epidemiology.
There are other challenges, however, that we could add to this diagram—public health and bioethical, for a start. It’d be a great, interdisciplinary activity to visualize a more complete ecosystem of challenges that face dual-use research, with an eye to presenting avenues forward that address multiple and conflicting perspectives.
The Broken Spoke 