Publish or Perish

There exists a popular saying in academia: publish or perish, which may seem ironic given the following.  

I've written about the peer-review publication process before, because in its present form it is problematically vital to academic careers and forward progress and riddled with procedural and ethical problems.  As a result of some of these considerations, one story in particular this week on NPR's health/science blog caught my attention -- and it wasn't because of the headline, "Bird Flu Research Rattles Bioterrorism Field."

Nell Greenfieldboyce reports that research out of the Netherlands has discovered a series of just five mutations to the bird flu (H5N1) virus which renders it dramatically more contagious, and thus much more dangerous than the virus which exists naturally today.  It's fairly obvious that methodological knowledge resulting in a more virulent and deadly virus is dangerous -- particularly when bioterrorism is considered.  The work was presented at a virology conference in Malta, after which major ethical and safety concerns over publication of this research were raised.  Bioterrorism experts in Pittsburgh argue that the work should not be published, for fear of inappropriate application of such findings.  Dr. Thomas Inglesby says, "It's just a bad idea for scientists to turn a lethal virus into a lethal and highly contagious virus. And it's a second bad idea for them to publish how they did it so others can copy it."

One result of a global biomedical research field is that there exists no single regulatory body to dictate publication ethics in cases like these.  Instead, there is an amalgam of various institutional, professional, local, state, national and international governmental and  regulatory bodies which come together to dictate first ethical laboratory practices, allocation of research monies, and finally what happens with research-driven revelations.  Writes Greenfieldboyce:

"Scientists say they do think hard about these issues. Princeton's Lynn Enquist, editor in chief of the Journal of Virology, says he and his colleagues carefully considered whether to publish a flu study submitted to the journal that appears in the December issue. 

"You have to say, 'Is there more benefit than there is risk?' and that was our judgment on this one, that that was indeed the case," says Enquist.

In that experiment, researchers had taken a bird flu gene and put it in the swine flu virus that started spreading between people a couple of years ago. Mice infected with this lab-created virus got very, very sick."

 What I find most interesting about all of this is the arbitrary line which separates "more benefit" and "more risk."  The article continues:

"But Enquist says, this altered virus didn't spread easily. And he points out that this kind of virus combination could happen as bird flu circulates out in nature.

"Scientists in the United States and all around the world are very curious as to how this thing is going to evolve because we have to be prepared for it," says Enquist. "The public would expect us to be prepared."

As part of that effort to get ready, scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been doing work to see how bird flu could adapt to humans. This month, in a different journal called Virology, they described how they created two new versions of the bird flu virus that could spread between ferrets in a limited way."

Preparation for future spontaneous viral genome mutations is critical to mounting any sort of inoculation or public health response -- two research areas which rely heavily on information collected and published globally by various laboratories and field projects.  I'm also incredulous that such research isn't already performed on a regular basis by the Department of Defense (the largest provider of R & D dollars in the U.S.) and its international counterparts.  After all, weaponized disease (think anthrax, small pox) already exist.  

Ultimately, I think these are questions that, as the microbiology field advances further and sophisticated laboratory methodology becomes more and more accessible, the world of Science will have to grapple with more.  If it's decided that studies such as these are inappropriate for publication, there is then a need to create secure infrastructure to distribute such knowledge to laboratories elsewhere, and a need for researchers to be credited outside of the publication arena.