The more public a scientific panel discussion is the more boring it tends to be. People are so polite to each other, that if you go to too many of these you start wanting the intellectual equivalent of Jerry Springer rather than Oprah Winfrey. This is not because I love fights, though I sort of do (boxing is my favorite sport after all), but because there is controversy and disagreement in nearly every area of science. In technical conferences where there are 100 people in attendance, people feel free to debate. In more public forums, they are cautious. Luckily for me, this doesn’t seem to be the case with the topic of devastating pandemic research. Last night at The New York Academy of Sciences, Ian Lipkin, of infection disease fame, and the chief science advisor on the film “Contagion”, moderated a panel to discuss the implications of the recent H5N1 controversy. It would be hard for anyone to have missed this basic issue, as the media has picked it up fairly broadly, so I won’t go into in detail here. The main issue in summary is that a group of scientists, Dr. Fouchier and coauthors, created a form of influenza in ferrets which some say has the potential to spread to humans. That is the H5N1. The paper was submitted for publication in the world’s top two journals “Science” and “Nature”, and the paper sent on to a group called the NSABB which reports biology risks to the government. Because of the seriousness of the information on how to perform this experiment was deemed too risky, the paper was not published, and a 60 day waiting period on doing any further research on H5N1 was put in place while policy can be discussed. On the panel at NYAS were members of NSABB, well know Virologists, the Editors of both Nature and Science, and others. It was world class. Most importantly it was a debate that oscillated between the practical and philoshophical scientific responsibility, public health and progress. Carl Zimmer writes about the details of the conversation here.
I am adding my two cents as I often do, as an outsider. I am a scientist, I have written peer reviewed papers, but I know practically nothing about infectious disease. Yet when I hear about censorship to protect civilisation I pay attention. Shouldn’t we trust the experts who say better safe than sorry? Also shouldn’t there be expert arbiters of the information, so that bioterrorists, or just dummies who want to try it cannot kill 500 million people, even by accident? I have come to the conclusion that there should not. This is not a case of free speech style censorship exactly, it is a case of scientific progress, and if there is anything we have been learning in recent years it is that scientific innovation is itself viral.
As I just said, I am not a biologist, even by hobby, but lately I have been working with biologists, and very good ones at that, for two reasons. The first is that I specialize in the very specific field of polymer rheology. In general this is the study of how materials flow. In my case specifically it is how small particles behave inside materials as they flow. This is usually synthetic material, but we are finding that flow in cells and mechanisms for drug delivery behave similarly and often well with the materials I study. So as a polymer rheologist I may not be inventing a cure, but I might be able to help with specific problems, which I have been doing. The other area where I have been peripherally involved in medical research is with a product the company I am CEO of, Nanotronics Imaging, is working on. We do rapid high resolution, high throughput microscopy and detection of features. This makes it possible for neuroscientists to identify neurons faster and with greater accuracy than other methods. It also helps scientists developing bioscaffolding to avoid issues of contamination. All of this is to say that someone, myself, who knows nearly nothing about biology can still contribute. My guess is that there are thousands of people like me working in either academic labs in non biological departments, scientists who work in industry or even amateurs who are involved in the DIY movement of research. All of these can be ignored at first glance, because the risk associated with particular pathogens is so great, but I don’t think they should be. I think that by modern standards most of the great discoveries were made by people outside of the established discipline they were working in. There wasn’t officially physics before Newton, just Nature Philosophy. There was not molecular biology before Watson and Crick, just biology. The list goes on and I speak of this a lot in other blogs. The point is that a system, whether it is a nanoparticle of carbon, or a virus have similar qualities, and for me the expert in the nanoparticle should have access to the virus paper to contribute, as much as the virologist. In any field we cannot become so arrogant as to think the information is so complex or dangerous that it should be guarded by a few, just because it has been those few who have guarded it before.
Eventually H5N1 will be available for everyone to see. Already the panel estimates that over 1000 people have read the paper. Someone is bound to go public with it. Because of this, it is important that we boldly go public with it not guard it as if our government with a panel of a few experts are the only ones that can share in this. It is bound to make other countries, and other scientists angry. Angry people with a deadly virus is a lot worse than well meaning scientists with a deadly virus. It is true that this will likely scare a lot of the population, but the population is easily scared. That is part of our popular cultural identity. In this case it is scarey. The thing is though, it is much scarier if all of the worlds smart people aren’t working on solutions, than it is if only a few are.
I am adding my two cents as I often do, as an outsider. I am a scientist, I have written peer reviewed papers, but I know practically nothing about infectious disease. Yet when I hear about censorship to protect civilisation I pay attention. Shouldn’t we trust the experts who say better safe than sorry? Also shouldn’t there be expert arbiters of the information, so that bioterrorists, or just dummies who want to try it cannot kill 500 million people, even by accident? I have come to the conclusion that there should not. This is not a case of free speech style censorship exactly, it is a case of scientific progress, and if there is anything we have been learning in recent years it is that scientific innovation is itself viral.
As I just said, I am not a biologist, even by hobby, but lately I have been working with biologists, and very good ones at that, for two reasons. The first is that I specialize in the very specific field of polymer rheology. In general this is the study of how materials flow. In my case specifically it is how small particles behave inside materials as they flow. This is usually synthetic material, but we are finding that flow in cells and mechanisms for drug delivery behave similarly and often well with the materials I study. So as a polymer rheologist I may not be inventing a cure, but I might be able to help with specific problems, which I have been doing. The other area where I have been peripherally involved in medical research is with a product the company I am CEO of, Nanotronics Imaging, is working on. We do rapid high resolution, high throughput microscopy and detection of features. This makes it possible for neuroscientists to identify neurons faster and with greater accuracy than other methods. It also helps scientists developing bioscaffolding to avoid issues of contamination. All of this is to say that someone, myself, who knows nearly nothing about biology can still contribute. My guess is that there are thousands of people like me working in either academic labs in non biological departments, scientists who work in industry or even amateurs who are involved in the DIY movement of research. All of these can be ignored at first glance, because the risk associated with particular pathogens is so great, but I don’t think they should be. I think that by modern standards most of the great discoveries were made by people outside of the established discipline they were working in. There wasn’t officially physics before Newton, just Nature Philosophy. There was not molecular biology before Watson and Crick, just biology. The list goes on and I speak of this a lot in other blogs. The point is that a system, whether it is a nanoparticle of carbon, or a virus have similar qualities, and for me the expert in the nanoparticle should have access to the virus paper to contribute, as much as the virologist. In any field we cannot become so arrogant as to think the information is so complex or dangerous that it should be guarded by a few, just because it has been those few who have guarded it before.
Eventually H5N1 will be available for everyone to see. Already the panel estimates that over 1000 people have read the paper. Someone is bound to go public with it. Because of this, it is important that we boldly go public with it not guard it as if our government with a panel of a few experts are the only ones that can share in this. It is bound to make other countries, and other scientists angry. Angry people with a deadly virus is a lot worse than well meaning scientists with a deadly virus. It is true that this will likely scare a lot of the population, but the population is easily scared. That is part of our popular cultural identity. In this case it is scarey. The thing is though, it is much scarier if all of the worlds smart people aren’t working on solutions, than it is if only a few are.
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