Free Republic

An international group of scientists this week ended a year-long moratorium on controversial work to engineer potentially deadly strains of the H5N1 avian flu virus in the lab. Researchers agreed to temporarily halt the work in January 2012, after a fierce row erupted over whether it was safe to publish two papers reporting that the introduction of a handful of mutations enabled the H5N1 virus to spread efficiently between ferrets, a model of flu in mammals (see Nature http://doi.org/fxv55r; 2012). Both papers were eventually published, one in Nature1 and one in Science2. Now, in a letter simultaneously published on 23...

Germ Weapons: In Soviet Past or in the New Russia's Future? [Link to Iraq !] By JUDITH MILLER and WILLIAM J. BROAD ust as the Soviet Union was ending its confrontation with the West in the late 1980s, the military officers who ran Moscow's secretive germ warfare program ordered up new, much deadlier arms. At a remote laboratory complex in Kazakhstan, Russian scientists began animal testing of the Marburg virus, a highly contagious germ that kills by attacking every organ and tissue in the body. This secret testing, described recently by several veterans of the Soviet program, went undetected...