Gain-Of-Function Research And Covid-19: Could Too Much Oversight Slow Progress?

The broader debate over gain-of-function experiments certainly did not begin with Covid-19. The current discourse largely can be traced back to 2011. In that year, virologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Erasmus Medical Center independently reported that they had genetically modified the avian influenza virus A/H5N1 to make it transmissible among ferrets. Why is this noteworthy? The A/H5N1 virus has a high mortality rate in humans. However, human-to-human transmission is limited.