Publish and be damned. That, in a nutshell, was the prevailing mood at a meeting held on April 3rd-4th at the Royal Society in London to discuss the controversy over two papers which lay out how deadly H5N1 avian influenza, or bird flu, can be made deadlier still by engineering it to pass directly from ferret to ferret. The gaggle of virologists, ethicists, security wonks, government types and representatives of funding agencies from around the world gathered at Britain?s pre-eminent scientific academy was more split when it came to the broader question about where research into dangerous pathogens was headed.
Office of Strategic Communication