Jay Bhattacharya is now the National Institutes of Health ( NIH) director, and one of his first priorities is to do something that the last three administrations have been unable to accomplish.
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Bhattacharya must employ impenetrable, bound rules on researchers who want to play” Mad Professor” and experiment with what’s known as “gain of work” study.
Gain-of-function study is modifying a disease at the molecular level to make it “more worthy of doing something, such as replicating more effectively, infecting a wider range of species, or becoming more transmittable”.
Small version: it makes a poor insect worse.
Gain-of-function study has a position in science as long as tight settings are placed on researchers and the laboratories where the research is conducted. The benefits of crafting effective medicines and vaccines to counter what character throws at us have been proven before using gain-of-function study.
The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was probably the result of a gain-of-function study initiative that escaped into the wild. The outcome was the COVID-19 crisis that contributed to six million deaths around the world.
The Obama and second Trump administrations tried to restrict and area guardrails around gain-of-function tests. But they kept hitting a brick wall at the NIH with executive Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who were both great pods of gain-of-function study.
It appears that Fauci kept changing the concept of gain-of-function analysis. Biden’s forgive has given him exemption for lying to Congress and for his unpardonable role for the pandemic.
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At this point, Bhattacharya is stuck. The new requirements the Biden administration drew up had been paused until the Trump presidency can create its own laws, which may include banning gain-of-function study immediately.
In May 2024, the Biden administration issued a new regulatory framework that clarified when research funding organizations like the NIH needed to forward research propositions involving the development of possible pandemic-causing bacteria up the network for impartial department-level risk-benefit assessment.
That framework is supposed to go into effect on May 6. But back in January, the White House paused implementation of any pending regulations from the last administration, which include its pandemic research regulations.
The new regulations will thus remain stalled unless, and until, the White House decides otherwise.
The Trump administration is considering pausing all gain-of-function research until proper safeguards can be developed. Also, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky. ) has reintroduced a bill to create an “independent Life Sciences Research Security Board within the executive branch”. The board would have to sign off on any proposed gain-of-function research.
Last year, when Paul’s bill passed out of committee, Bhattacharya praised it, saying it was a “great step forward toward the goal of protecting the American people from scientists conducting the kinds of dangerous experiments that likely led to the COVID pandemic”.
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In recent weeks, Fauci and Collins have come under renewed, mainstream scrutiny for suppressing the early debate about whether its funding of risky pandemic research in Wuhan, China, could have caused the pandemic.
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University and arch-critic of gain-of-function research, argues that the change in personnel at NIH is just as important as any change in the executive regulations on gain-of-function research.
” The difference is if you have an NIH director who has a serious interest in this subject and wishes to reflect the public interest rather than his own interest and the interest of a very small set of high-risk researchers”, he says.
Fauci and Collins will never be held fully responsible. They’ll never see the inside of a criminal courtroom. But in the court of public opinion, they can be held accountable for letting loose a virus on the world that killed millions.  ,
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