Diary Prequel Package — page 266

respectively; however, they insist that the USG have in place a link or some mechanism that they can publish with the redacted versions of the paper that would allow legitimate scientists and Public Health officials to have access to the entire manuscript. I found out through painful probing that recommendations from NSABB  guidelines  USG policy should have been in place years ago to deal with the upstream (prior to the start of experiments) and downstream (progress reports and communication of results) issues of Dual Use Research of Concern (DURC). Problem is that the recommendations of the NSABB as to the "7 deadly sins" of DURC never got "clearance" from the multiple agencies to which NSABB officially reports (DoD, DHS, DoS, DoJ, intelligence community) in order for it to get the Public Comment in the Federal Register to give the scientific community the opportunity to weigh in on the feasibility of controlling or not such research at the same time a preserving the fundamental basis of open scientific discourse. I believe that Amy Patterson should have shown some greater strength of leadership to make sure that this process moved along, when in fact it just froze. The NSABB sent in their recommendations in 2007 (NSABB started in 2004) that should have become guidelines  USG Policy that ultimately could guide the local institutional Biosafety Committees (IBCs) to monitor this at the local level. Irony is that now the papers have been reviewed, the Fouchier paper was presented in an international meeting in Malta and multiple people have seen the data. BTW, Fouchier has been acting like a jerk in his cavalier attitude about disseminating the results. Now NSABB and the journals above all want a mechanism is a few days (to coincide with the publication dates of the papers (Jan. - Feb. 2012) that they have not been able to do in 4-5 years. All of the demagogues have weighed in. People thinking that the world is not in danger of a terrorist making a "killer virus" that spreads easily. What is at stake is the proper balance of doing microbial research that has DU potential with security issues. Of, note, I wrote an opinion piece in the Dec. 31, 2011 issue of the Washington Post on the value of the science. The security people do not understand the scientific enterprise, although I can understand their concerns. This whole thing has destroyed my Christmas Holidays. It still is not over. Divergent opinions in the scientific community ranging from 1) this work should never have been done in the first place (Ebright; Ian Lipkin) to 2) we should not restrict publication of any of the data and should just let it out (Racaniello; Peter Palese) to 3) we should publish only redacted version (which is ridiculous since the data are out already) to 4) we should destroy the virus (D.A. Henderson). Please note that the complexities of species adaptability to virus transmission and lethality is so complex that just because multiple induced mutations followed by passaging in ferrets of 1 strain of H5N1 does not mean that this virus would do the same in humans or that anyone else could replicate the experiment. Of great importance is the fact the Fouchier found out (but DID NOT submit it with his paper to Science - he wants to put it into a second paper)that if you take these 5 mutations and go back and put them into the wild-type H5N1, you do not get increased transmissibility, which proves my point (and that of Jeff Taubenberger) that transmissibility is a multi-genic process that is strongly "context-dependent". In other words, just knowing these 5 mutations may have little impact on someone's ability or not to repeat these experiments. Let me be clear, I believe that we need to now once and for all get the process going of a SOP for evaluating dual use research