TWIV294
The opinions of the Cambridge Working Group (CWG) are sidelined without ceremony and are considered to represent an extremist view. Not once were arguments given as to why these people, that include eminent microbiologists such Barry Bloom of Harvard and David Relman from UCSF and President of the Infectious Disease Physicians of America, to mention just two, are barking up the wrong street. Paul Berg and Stanley Falkow, architects of the 1975 Asilomar meeting have signed on as well as highly respected virologists, bacteriologists and international lawyers.
Vincent Racaniello maintains that sufficient procedures are in place and that GOF researchers followed them. He considers that the CWG has not listened to the other sides’ arguments. Dickson Despommiers, who is a parasitologist, said that the CWG is unhappy because they haven’t been agreed with.
“The CWG is damaging science irreparably”. Lipsitch (an organizer of CWG, “doesn’t understand the amount of collateral damage” he is creating, and is simply “increasing public distrust in science”.
We learn that risk-benefit analyses are absurd as it is very difficult to quantify risk and benefits of most research. This is very revealing comment for there is huge field in risk assessment and risk management. Insurance companies and re-assurers compute risk out to 20 years or more, meaning that they take a long view. It is so mature a field that there are even risk communication consultants. See October 14, 2014.
We learn that any Asilomar type meeting must not be organized by members of the CWG. They may attend. Alan Condit, perhaps, goes on to say that the same applies to members of Scientists For Science, a web page set up by Racaniello in response to the CWG, which is accepted and leads on to a discussion of which neutral third party might play the go between.
Marc Lipsitch from Harvard Medical School is dismissed out of hand because he is an epidemiologist and presumably cannot understand virology. Yet it was the US epidemiologist Palmer Beasley who established beyond a shadow of doubt that prior hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection was linked to the onset of hepatocellular carcinoma (Beasley et al., 1981). Beasley then went on to push for extremely early vaccination of babies in Taiwan which is now the standard of care in endemic areas. He became the author of HBV immunization policies for the World Health Organization.
A parasitologist with one PubMed reference including the word “virus” is more qualified to comment on GOF virology than an epidemiologist who has 56 such references.
Dickson Despommier makes a parallel with the decommissioning nuclear plants and considers it a more important issue than the GOF. Suffice to say that in the nuclear arena, for decades the pressure has been to reduce proliferation based on the idea that the more structures there are the greater the risk of an accident. Undoubtedly there are other political motivations in this field but anti-proliferation has been a buzz word for ages. For an alternative view see Rath, 2014.
The parallel with the control of rinderpest viral stocks is revealing. Rinderpest was/is the measles virus of cattle and is only the second virus to be eradicated since 2001.
To reduce the risk of a lab accident, the FAO-OIE are calling to reduce the number of labs holding rinderpest viral stocks from 30 to around 10, which is the equivalent to reducing the number of centers handling nuclear material.
Despommier continues with the opponents of GOF research in no uncertain terms. It starts with a form of questioning: “are they some right wing group” which reminds him of the McCarthy era in that they have a jaundiced view of science…
References
Beasley RP, Hwang LY, Lin CC, Chien CS. (1981). Hepatocellular carcinoma and hepatitis B virus. A prospective study of 22 707 men in Taiwan. Lancet. 2:1129-33.
