...IF I CAN'T SEE IT, IT CAN'T SEE ME...:

Proponents say this research is essential for developing new therapies and vaccines and understanding how viruses cause pandemics.

Although the changes to the virus also appeared to make it less virulent -- none of the ferrets infected with the viruses through the air died -- the finding confirmed that H5N1 poses a pandemic threat; it also created an international uproar, and many scientists were divided over the experiments. Some expressed support. Fauci, for instance, during a press conference marking publication of the Fouchier paper, acknowledged the possibility that a scientist working with an altered virus might become infected, causing an outbreak or even a pandemic.

Still, the benefits of "stimulating thought and pursuing ways to understand better the transmissibility, adaptation, pathogenicity" of H5N1, he added, "far outweigh the risk." Others accused Fouchier and Kawoaka of being reckless, prompting the two virologists and their colleagues to agree to a temporary moratorium on the research.

Then in 2014, in the wake of a series of biosafety incidents involving microbiology experiments at U.S. government facilities, including one in which samples of a relatively benign avian flu virus were inadvertently contaminated with H5N1 by influenza researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NIH announced a pause on new funding for gain-of-function studies. According to the U.S government's phrasing, the pause was specifically directed at "gain-of-function research projects that reasonably may be anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome], and SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] viruses such that the resulting virus" is either more deadly or better able to spread in mammals.

In all, 18 laboratories were affected. Their new grant funding was frozen, and researchers in these labs were asked to put their gain-of-function work on hold while a team of experts undertook what became a three-year effort to craft new federal oversight policies.

During this time, however, and with Fauci's approval, the NIAID continued to supply funding to the Wuhan investigators, who were trying to predict where the next coronavirus outbreak might come from. During his July spat with Fauci, Paul singled out a 2017 research paper co-authored by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit group through which the NIAID money was channeled. (EcoHealth's press officer, Robert Kessler, declined to make anyone available for an interview, and said in an email: "We've not conducted gain-of-function research, so aren't really good authorities to speak on the subject.")

In the most basic sense, gain-of-function research refers to the introduction of a mutation that enhances a gene's functional properties -- farmers have arguably practiced it for thousands of years through plant breeding.

Over the course of the five-year project, the investigators took fecal samples from cave bats in Yunnan, China, about 1,000 miles southwest of Wuhan, and isolated close relatives of the coronavirus that causes SARS. Then, using a method called reverse genetics, they attached surface "spike" proteins from those newly identified microbes to a different SARS-like coronavirus called WIV1. (Coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, use their spikes to attach to other cells and initiate an infection, but for these experiments the researchers used an engineered form of WIV1 that lacked spike proteins of its own).

Daszak and the Wuhan team wanted to know if these lab creations -- called chimeras -- could infect human airway cells. As it turned out, several could, which suggested that natural coronaviruses outfitted with the the same spikes used in making the chimeras might also be able to infect people. This information, the team concluded presciently, "highlights the necessity of preparedness for future emergence of SARS-like diseases."

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