Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

by David Quammen

The core issue over gain-of-function research is whether it creates what policy people call potential pandemic pathogens (PPP, another baleful string of letters for your mental toolbox). A potential pandemic pathogen is a bug that’s highly transmissible, capable of uncontrollable spread among humans, and could cause widespread illness and death. By that definition, the first milestone of PPP work in the twenty-first century came in 2005, when a team of researchers from the U.S. CDC and elsewhere reconstructed the 1918 influenza virus. They did that by assembling its genome from old autopsy specimens and some frozen lung tissue of a victim buried in the Alaska permafrost, then activating that into a live virus by reverse genetics, expressing the viral genome in cultured cells. This was controversial. One scientist called it “a recipe for disaster.” The researchers defended their work on grounds that reviving the virus and studying it in a secure lab not only illuminated why that virus had been so deadly but also led toward important insights about influenza viruses generally, with relevance to vaccine development, antiviral treatments, and prediction of virulence in other viruses.