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.
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.
Couple of years back, I think in this book, there was a section talking about the problem; at a symposium some Australian virologists put up a display on how they'd modified the DNA of a mousepox virus and turned it into a 100% killer. One of the people attending looked it over and just about had a stroke at both the implications for other viruses and that they'd posted this up where ANYONE walking by could read it.
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