“I don’t like to scare people,” says microbiologist Paul Keim. “But the worst-case scenarios here are just enormous.”
Keim, who chairs the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), is reflecting on its unprecedented recommendation to censor two scientific papers describing how to make a more transmissible form of the H5N1 avian flu virus. On 20 December, the board said that although the general conclusions could be published, the papers (currently under review at Nature and Science) should not include “the methodological and other details that could enable replication of the experiments by those who would seek to do harm”.
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