Sublime

Among the other proponents of gain-of-function research was one Anthony Fauci. In December 2011, he was the lead author—along with Dr. Francis Collins, the head of the NIH—of a Washington Post opinion piece headlined “A Flu Virus Risk Worth Taking.”

As Tizard points out, we’re constantly moving genes around the world, usually in the form of entire genomes. This is how chestnut blight arrived in North America in the first place; it was carried in on Asian chestnut trees, imported from Japan. If we can correct for our earlier tragic mistake by shifting just one more gene around, don’t we owe it

Modern genetic techniques were instrumental for understanding the fundamentals of the virus and ascertaining where it spread. The first step was mapping the virus’s genome—a more manageable task for a virus than for more complex organisms. The genome of every virus contains instructions for just a handful of proteins, and since viruses work by taki