The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

Few areas of biology are as controversial as gain-of-function (GOF) research. Put simply, gain-of-function experiments deliberately engineer pathogens to be more lethal or infectious, or both. In nature, viruses usually trade off lethality for transmissibility. The more transmissible a virus, the less lethal it often is. But there is no absolute reason this must be so. One way of understanding how it might happen—that is, how viruses might become more lethal and transmissible at the same time—and how we might combat that is to, well, make it happen. That’s where gain-of-function research comes in. Researchers investigate disease incubation times, or how they evade vaccine resistance, or maybe how they can spread asymptomatically through a population. Work like this has been undertaken on diseases including Ebola, influenzas like H1N1, and measles. Such research efforts are generally credible and well intentioned. Work with an avian flu in Holland and the United States around a decade ago is a good example. This disease had shockingly high mortality rates but luckily was very difficult to catch. Researchers wanted to understand how that picture might change, how this disease could morph into a more transmissible form, and used ferrets to see how this might occur. In other words they made a deadly disease in principle easier to catch.

Teaching Viruses New Tricks: The Gain-of-Function Dilemma