Avian influenza A H5N1 viruses (gold)WIKIMEDIA, CDC/COURTESY OF CYNTHIA GOLDSMITH; JACQUELINE KATZ; SHERIF R. ZAKIThe legal battle between Ron Fouchier and the Dutch government is dragging on, with the scientist’s employer, Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, appealing the September district court decision that legitimized the government’s requirement that Fouchier obtain an export license to publish his work. At issue is the potential for Fouchier’s research, which involves mutating H5N1 avain flu to become transmissible between ferrets, to be used by bioterrorists.
Fouchier published his initial report on the work in a June 2012 issue of Science, but only after obtaining an export license from the Dutch government under protest. Prior to the publication, a US biosecurity panel suggested that some of the results in Fouchier’s paper and a similar study from a group at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, should be redacted to guard against misuse of the information for nefarious purposes. This recommendation sparked a worldwide moratorium on such research, but the panel later reversed course and greenlighted the full publication of the work. In April 2012, Fouchier told Nature that he would “never apply for an export permit on a scientific manuscript for publication in a journal. We do not want to create a ...
