University of Washington bends biosafety.

• Position: Spanish flu

Sunshine Project, July 2004. As more laboratories begin to handle genetically-recreated 1918 "Spanish" Flu [1] and similar flu strains, the chances that a lab will be the source of the next global influenza pandemic increase.

The skyrocketing biodefense budget, now exceeding that of the Manhattan Project (adjusted for inflation), is rapidly increasing research on biological weapons agents, including risky genetic engineering projects. Despite this, the Bush administration maintains that comprehensive laboratory safety and disclosure law is unnecessary, because an alleged "culture of responsibility" among institutional biosafety committees will protect Americans, and the world, from its biodefense research.

But at the University of Washington in Seattle, whose scientists are eager to handle 1918 Spanish Flu, the IBC's judgment is unsound. It has approved experiments by summarily changing the containment level of a planned lab, using inappropriate safety benchmarks, and unilaterally lowering the safety threshold required for work with the potentially pandemic virus.

In its heyday decades ago, 1918 influenza killed ten, perhaps twenty million people worldwide. The 1918 flu was recently brought back to life by scientists from the US Departments of Defense and Agriculture and private institutions including the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York. Digging through archives of medical samples and, literally, digging up the dead, the team's work resulted in the re-emergence--in the lab--of one of the most dreaded diseases in human history.

The 1918 flu was recreated at a lab at the University of Georgia. Now, flu strains with 1918 genes are cropping up in other labs across the country. There are reasons for scientists to study why the 1918 flu was so devastating. A similarly virulent strain could reappear naturally. But that doesn't necessarily justify recreating and widely distributing a very dangerous--and otherwise eradicated--bug.

Because influenza spreads so easily, as the "new" strain and its lab-created genetic cousins are sent to more facilities, the risk that the next major influenza pandemic will be man-made is on the rise. It wouldn't be the first time that an influenza lab accident made the whole world ill. [2] And, of course, scientists in other countries may repeat the US experiments, resulting in even wider proliferation of very dangerous man-made bugs.

So, then, it is logically the case that responsible labs that are handling...