By Garrett Receveur

When I initially thought of what I was going to write in this column, my mind flashed to the obvious topic of Mitt Romney, the winner of the Iowa caucus by a slim eight vote margin. Indeed, when I was driving home after school one Friday, I had already started drafting a Mitt Romney column in my head.

I had my radio tuned in to 107.7 The Eagle for the early part of my drive but, on a whim, I tuned my radio to NPR’s station, hoping to hear more information about the upcoming New Hampshire and South Carolina caucuses. However, being a new listener to NPR, I was surprised to hear what I did.

Every Friday, as I found out, NPR airs a two-hour special called “Science Friday.” On that particular Friday, NPR broadcast a question-and-answer session featuring two scientists. One of these scientists specialized in microbiology whereas the other specialized in epidemiology.

Both fields are closely related, but they have clear differences. Microbiologists tend to concern themselves more with the specifics of a certain disease, including the organism that causes it. Epidemiologists, on the other hand, focus more on the spread of that disease through a human population.

The discussion that these two scientists were engaged in centered on research done over winter break about the genetic makeup of the H5N1 virus. This virus, closely related to the swine flu virus known as H1N1, is the cause of the rare but deadly avian flu.

Avian flu has infected nearly 600 people since its emergence in 1997. Of those 600, more than half have died from the disease. It’s a deadly disease but, thankfully, it rarely infects humans. That is, unless it mutates.

This is what scientists are most worried about. In an attempt to see what genes would need to mutate before it could spread easily between humans, scientists at the University of Wisconsin and the University in Rotterdam (the Netherlands) engineered a new strain of avian flu.

Scientists used ferrets, which are great models of pathogenicity (i.e. how viruses spread), to test the spread of the virus. Initially, the scientists had to physically inject the virus into a ferret. Once this ferret died, the scientists injected the blood from the dead ferret into a healthy ferret. After only 10 injections, the virus mutated to a point where it was able to spread through the air to healthy ferrets across the room.

Naturally, the scientists who conducted this study want to publish the results. That’s typical of scientific experiments and no one typically raises a fuss over this. However, the very nature of the results of this experiment turns its publication into a matter of national security.

Scientific papers typically include a section on how the scientists did the experiment. In this case, the paper would include a complete genetic code of the virus. An educated bioterrorist could, theoretically, make his own modified avian flu virus and unleash its wrath upon the world.

As a result, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity told several scientific journals, including Science and Nature to publish the paper for this study but to edit out details about how to duplicate the results.

While duplication of results is an important step in determining the validity of an experiment, there would be too much of a risk in this case. If this paper were to fall into the wrong hands, a vast majority of the world population could be done for.

Despite what others are saying, this experiment needed to be done. This experiment revealed what genes are likely to mutate on the avian flu virus in the future and thus gives scientists a head start in the race to create a vaccine.

That said, I do think that the entire paper should be released to a select few scientists in order for this information to be put to use. While I agree that the entirety of the paper should not be published in journals that practically anyone could purchase, some scientists should be allowed to scrutinize it.

In this age of increased global travel, the likelihood of a global pandemic on par with the Black Death or the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 is quite high. This coupled with unrest in the Middle East could provide the perfect environment for a bioterrorist to strike a heavy blow to modern civilization. If we allow this paper to be published in full in all the major scientific journals, we could potentially be giving him the knowledge he needs.

Just over winter break, a man in Hong Kong died from avian flu. More than likely, he picked it from being in close contact with a sick bird.

However, let us assume for the moment that the man had been infected with a strain of avian flu not much different from the one these scientists developed. Let us assume that the virus is able to be passed easily from person to person and, early on, shows the similar symptoms to milder, less lethal flus.

Let us also assume that the man spread this deadlier avian flu to a business man who happened to be traveling to Britain for a business meeting. Naturally, the man would infect everyone in the Hong Kong airport as well as everyone in the British airport. Those infected will inevitably pass the disease along to other people, perhaps an American family vacationing in Britain. The point is that this deadlier avian flu could very easily, and quickly, spread throughout the world. And all it takes is the instruction manual falling into the wrong hands.