I've written an essay with my views on how to balance risks & benefits in virology research: nytimes.com/2022/10/30/opi…

Important to work together to arrive at regulations that maximize benefits of valuable research w/o creating new risks from potential pandemic viruses in lab.

Instead, I hope the debate over the BU chimera can be a step towards a more open discussion that recognizes both risks and benefits, validates diverse viewpoints from both within & without science, and ultimately helps reduce risks of both lab-associated and natural outbreaks.

I don’t think we will get there if most scientists are either silent, or spend their time mocking as conspiracy theorists anyone who disagrees with them.

That may play well in the virology Twitter bubble. Probably not so much with the taxpaying public, as we’re seeing already.

My hope is we can strike a good balance that stops the riskiest research, lets the safe research continue with broad public support, and manages the margins responsibly.

Debate over BU chimera shows non-scientific public may lack technical expertise to identify what is actually riskiest research.

But it also shows public correctly assesses there are risks in this area, & that NIH and some scientists may not be considering these risks adequately.

Media firestorm makes clear there is wide concern about risky experiments w viruses. This cuts across political spectrum. It’s not just Rand Paul arguing w Fauci. Notice new Biden strategy (whitehouse.gov/wp-content/upl…) uses word “biosafety” twice as often as “zoonosis.”

Finally, I usually stick to science and avoid political/sociological commentary.

But I think the media firestorm around the BU study raises a few points in that arena that all virologists would be well advised to consider.

So one could argue some of main scientific questions in pre-print could have been better addressed by alternative methodologies that did not involve making chimera.

However, that’s not fair standard to hold authors too, as that’s not currently way biosafety is evaluated.

It is probably the case that the human virulence of human #SARSCoV2 strains is better addressed by epidemiological data that just quantifies virulence directly, rather than animal studies.

However, it’s become apparent animal models not good indicators of relative human virulence of #SARSCoV2 strains. Recall BA.5 was more pathogenic in hamsters than earlier strains (twitter.com/EricTopol/stat…), but not clear that has been borne out in human data.

A second major finding is that spike is not only determinant of virulence in human-ACE2 mice. Early strain highly virulent in these mice, chimera moderately virulent, Omicron BA.1 less virulent.

In that case, I’m not sure how well study would stand up. One finding is Omicron BA.1 spike confers lot of antibody evasion. But honestly, that is already well known, & similar experiments can be done using pseudoviruses or natural isolate sequences w/o making a chimera.

One could imagine a case where researchers on actual transmissible human pathogenic viruses also had to answer this question: Is there a safer way to obtain comparable scientific information?

This raises an interesting distinction: for human & animal experiments, scientists generally must justify benefits of research in addition to mitigating risks in order to get approval. But for biosafety, currently it’s mostly just a matter of showing it’s not too risky.