Political Quotes

“I think it would be useful at this point to define gain-of-function research. I will use the written testimony of Richard Ebright, Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and laboratory director of Waksman Institute of Microbiology. In his testimony in a Senate hearing, he said that gain-of-function research is defined as ``research activities reasonably anticipated to increase a potential pandemic pathogen's transmissibility, pathogenesis, ability to overcome immune response, or ability to overcome a vaccine or drug.'' Why would you want to do this? Why would you want to do gain-of- function research? It is a seductive idea that you can take one of hundreds of thousands of viruses that exist in the animal kingdom outside of humans and try to predict, poke and prod on the virus, encourage it to be transmissible among humans so that you could then predict the next virus that might come into existence among humans, and then come up with a vaccine for it. Statistically, there is no way you are going to predict what the next natural virus is going to be. What you will do, though, in the process of this research is create a cookbook, a blueprint for the next pandemic. Part of the danger in this research lies in the fact that you are uncovering secrets that will then be published and that can be used to create a pandemic of existential proportions.…”