Aw, it’s always really nice to hear that people are enjoying the words I fling out onto the internet!
Often both the benefits and risks of a given bit of research are pretty speculative, so evaluation of specific cases depends on one’s underlying beliefs about potential gains from openness and potential harms from new life sciences insights. My hope is that there are opportunities to limit the risks of disclosure while still getting the benefits of openness, which is why I want to sketch out some of the selective-disclosure landscape between “full secrecy by default” (paranoid?) and “full openness by default” (reckless?).
This article evaluates the scientific and commercial rationales for the synthesis of horsepox virus. I find that the claimed benefits of using horsepox virus as a smallpox vaccine rest on a weak scientific foundation and an even weaker business case that this project will lead to a licensed medical countermeasure. The combination of questionable benefits and known risks of this dual use research raises serious questions about the wisdom of undertaking research that could be used to recreate variola virus.
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The putative benefit to synthesizing horsepox virus for use as a smallpox vaccine rests on four assumptions made by Tonix: that the modern-day smallpox vaccine based on vaccinia virus is directly descended from horsepox virus, that ancestral horsepox virus is a safer candidate for a human vaccine than derived vaccinia virus, that current smallpox vaccines are not safe enough, and that there is a significant demand for a new smallpox vaccine. All four of these scientific and commercial claims need to be true to fully realize the expected benefit of synthesizing horsepox virus. I argue that there are serious doubts that all of these assumptions are valid, raising important questions about the wisdom of synthesizing this virus given the risks posed by pioneering a technique that could be used to recreate variola virus.
Aw, it’s always really nice to hear that people are enjoying the words I fling out onto the internet!
Often both the benefits and risks of a given bit of research are pretty speculative, so evaluation of specific cases depends on one’s underlying beliefs about potential gains from openness and potential harms from new life sciences insights. My hope is that there are opportunities to limit the risks of disclosure while still getting the benefits of openness, which is why I want to sketch out some of the selective-disclosure landscape between “full secrecy by default” (paranoid?) and “full openness by default” (reckless?).
If you’re like to read a strong argument against openness in one particular contentious case, I recommend Gregory Koblentz’s 2018 paper A Critical Analysis of the Scientific and Commercial Rationales for the De Novo Synthesis of Horsepox Virus. From the paper: