As he walks the hallways, more than 100 closed-circuit cameras watch him. Seven more locked doors stand between him and his destination. Entering a research lab requires another card swipe and, for labs housing especially dangerous microbes, a fingerprint scan.

To keep deadly viruses from escaping, each lab uses negative air flow and dedicated exhaust systems. Workers wear full-body air-supplied suits. To test its security, Galveston ran an exercise with the Federal Bureau of Investigation simulating a would-be intruder and another, with the University of Texas, war-gaming a campus shooter. The facility passed both tests.

Galveston’s strict security underlines a little-known fact about hundreds of labs working with bacteria and viruses that could make the 1918-19 Spanish flu epidemic – when as many as 40 million people died – seem like a summer cold. Many of the precautions it takes are not required by law.

“A lock on the door is the only specified requirement,” said Rutgers University virologist Richard Ebright. “There is no explicit requirement for guards, bio-identity checks, or video monitoring like 7-Elevens have. The rules require very strict paperwork but no real physical security.”

Labs whose experiments on dangerous pathogens are funded by the U.S. government must follow specific rules to keep the microbes from escaping, but those rules are not enforceable for researchers working with private funds. Outside the country, security and safety requirements vary widely, experts say.

“It’s all subject to interpretation,” said a scientist close to the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, which monitors research that might pose a bioterrorism threat.

If a lab receiving U.S. government funding violates the guidelines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can cut off the flow of money, “but it can’t shut you down,” the scientist said. “I don’t have a lot of confidence in our biosafety right now.”

IMMEDIATE CONCERN OVER BIRD FLU RESEARCH

Questions about biosafety – keeping dangerous microbes from escaping labs – and biosecurity – keeping out bad actors intent on releasing or stealing the pathogens – are front and center for global health officials due to a growing controversy over experiments with the bird flu virus.

Scientists and government officials will meet on Thursday and Friday at the World Health Organization in Geneva to hash out the safest way to deal with the studies and address fears that lab-engineered viruses could either escape or be used as a bioterror weapon.

Last year, labs at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Erasmus MC in Rotterdam independently created mutant forms of avian influenza, known as H5N1, that can be transmitted directly among mammals. The natural strain can be caught only through close contact with infected birds.

One immediate question is what level of safety should be required for that research. So far, it has been conducted at biosafety-level 3 labs. Under U.S. guidelines, BSL-3 applies to agents that cause “serious or lethal disease” but do not ordinarily spread between people and for which treatments or preventives exist. BSL-4 applies to agents with no preventives or treatment.

The Wisconsin and Erasmus scientists received approval to conduct their experiments under BSL-3 conditions because, they argued, antiviral drugs can treat avian flu. Erasmus was subject to U.S. guidelines because its experiments were funded by the National Institutes of Health.

“The viruses generated here are sensitive to influenza antivirals” so they fit the BSL-3 criteria, said Rebecca Moritz of the University of Wisconsin’s Office of Biological Safety. There are “multiple physical barriers and the facilities are monitored at all times.”

All lab workers there wear disposable jumpsuits and powered respirators in addition to scrubs, shoes, shoe covers, and double gloves, she said. Each time scientists leave the lab, they must remove their protective equipment and shower before putting on their street clothes. Erasmus does the same.

The labs said they have emergency and security plans for a wide variety of threats. Neither would provide specifics on those security measures on the grounds the details could aid any would-be attackers.

Such precautions are not foolproof, however. According to a 2009 report by the Government Accountability Office, there were 400 accidents at BSL-3 labs in the United States in the previous decade.

Some scientists therefore argue that the experiments creating contagious H5N1 mutants should be done only at BSL-4 facilities.

“An escape would still produce the worst pandemic in history,” said Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota and a member of the NSABB, at a symposium at the New York Academy of Sciences this month.

“The risk of this agent, if in fact it can be readily transmitted between humans, is catastrophic,” he told Reuters. “Until we know how this virus actually acts in humans, I think you have no choice but to move this (research) to BSL-4.”

SPACE SUITS

BSL-4 labs, like the one in Galveston, have all the BSL-3 precautions and are also in isolated facilities with dedicated exhaust, vacuum, and other systems to prevent escape. In addition, workers must wear what are essentially space suits.

But the BSL guidelines relate to biosafety, not security.

The debate over H5N1 experiments has also raised the question of how secure BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs are. It has assumed a greater urgency as the number of known U.S. BSL-3 labs has surged from 415 in 2004 to 1,495 in 2010.

Hundreds or thousands of BSL-3 laboratories may be unknown, however, because “no federal agency is required to track the number of biocontainment labs,” found a 2011 report by the National Research Council, an arm of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

Globally, BSL-3 labs have recently been built or are under construction in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, China, Brazil, and Mexico, among others, the NRC found. Yet “many countries have few or no regulations,” the NRC concluded.

BSL-4 labs are also proliferating. A 2011 workshop in Istanbul organized by the NRC was told that there are 24 BSL-4 facilities, including in Germany, Gabon, Sweden, Russia, South Africa and Canada. The United States has six, including Le Duc’s, which is part of the University of Texas Medical Branch.

“We are now in a proliferation race for BSL-3 and 4 labs,” said Laurie Garrett, the senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “Having such a facility is a mark of national sophistication. But the spread of these labs allows the unfettered proliferation of the world’s most dangerous microbes.”

Indeed, deadly microbes have escaped high-security labs. Between 1978 and 1999, just over 1,200 people acquired infections from BSL-4 labs around the world; 22 were fatal. Since then, lab workers have been killed by Ebola and SARS, or severe acquired respiratory syndrome. Thieves tried to steal animal pathogens from an Indonesian lab in 2007, the NRC workshop was told.

GUIDELINES, NOT LAW

U.S. research on dangerous human pathogens must follow safety guidelines set by the CDC. They may or may not be followed at labs elsewhere in the world, concluded the NRC workshop.

In part, that is because BSL-3 and BSL-4 designations “have very wide interpretations,” said Ren Salerno, senior manager for cooperative threat reduction programs at Sandia National Laboratories, part of the U.S. Department of Energy.

Although U.S. government-funded research must adhere to biosafety guidelines, they “do not have the force of law,” said Ebright. “If you’re a private lab, privately funded, there is no requirement that you comply.” The CDC declined to make a spokesperson available to discuss biosafety and biosecurity.

Many labs in developing countries say they adhere to guidelines as tough as those applied to U.S. facilities. If they receive U.S. funding, lab personnel must pass an FBI security risk assessment, for instance.

In Thailand, police check the background of all staff members and require fingerprints to access freezers containing microbes.

A BSL-4 lab in Australia employs a security staff of 10. It is housed in a fenced, isolated building and has infrared cameras to detect intruders. Gabon’s BSL-4 lab is surrounded by electric fences and has a guard on duty at all times. Only three people know the code to the freezer holding Ebola.

U.S. biosecurity requirements are laid out in the 2001 Patriot Act, which says that facilities storing “select agents” – microbes and toxins that could be used as bioweapons – must develop and implement a plan to keep them secure. Such labs must also provide the government the names of everyone with access to the pathogens; none can be on a terrorism watch list.

Experts dismiss Hollywood’s nightmare scenarios such as bombing a BSL-4 lab or crashing a 737 jumbo jet into one.

“The one nice thing about pathogens is that they’ll self-destruct under intense heat,” said Salerno.

What Salerno does give credence to is either an accidental escape or a plot to steal a pathogen by lab employees acting on their own or under duress.

“As more of this kind of research occurs, and it will, especially internationally, the risks of both accidental release or potential theft and misuse will increase as well,” Salerno said. “The science is way ahead of governments’ ability to regulate the science.”

ROTTERDAM, Holland Jan. 20, 2012— — It is the stuff of science fiction: scientists tamper with a killer bird flu virus and create something much worse. But what has been created in a Rotterdam laboratory is not fiction. It is deadly real.

So deadly that the U.S. government – which funded the Rotterdam research – asked scientists to omit key details of their research when they are published to keep the formula out of the hands of bio-terrorists. And today, researchers announced a self-imposed 60-day “voluntary pause” on any research involving highly transmissible form of bird flu that they have created.

The researchers are responding to the worldwide furor that erupted after word of their work became public. There are serious public health reasons for the research and they want to lower the temperature of the discussion while they explain what they have done and why they have done it.

The lead author of today’s announcement is Dr. Ron Fouchier, a respected molecular virologist. He heads at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, that engineered a form of “aerosolized” bird flu that can easily be passed from humans to humans through the air. The genetically-altered flu is thought to be so virulent that if the vials containing it were to get out, the virus would have the potential to spread around the globe and kill hundreds of millions.

Bird flu, also known as H5N1, first surfaced 15 years ago. It has not caused mass panic because it is only transmitted to humans who have direct contact with infected birds. But when humans do contract bird flu, they are likely to die.

According to the World Health Organization of 573 confirmed bird flu cases in humans since 2003, 336 people have died. That’s a staggering 60 percent mortality rate. Nothing in history comes close to that.

ABC News was given an exclusive inside look at some of the testing facilities the Rotterdam researchers used. With Fouchier as our guide, we donned protective clothing and face masks and passed through three levels of security to see the ferrets he uses for testing.

Watch Jeffrey Kofman’s exclusive report from inside the testing facilities tonight on “World News with Diane Sawyer,” at 6:30 p.m. ET

Fouchier explained how his lab assistants exposed the ferrets to the altered virus and placed unexposed ferrets in cages nearby. All 40 ferrets died. Scientists use ferrets because they have a respiratory system much like humans, which is why the researchers believe the consequences of an airborne bird flu would be just as deadly for humans.

No visitors, however, allowed in the high secret lab at Erasmus Medical Centre where the actual experiment took place. He told us that with U.S. and Dutch expertise Erasmus spent eight years and millions of dollars building one of the most secure lab facilities in the world just for studying H5N1. They call it a BSL3 Enhanced lab – that’s Bio-Safety Level 3. The vials of enhanced bird flu are kept in a bank vault inside the lab. The lab is designed to keep the deadly virus in and intruders out.

The researchers who engineered this super-virus insist they are far from being “mad scientists” as some have suggested. They are public health specialists.

The man in charge, Fouchier is a tall, lanky molecular biologist who began his career studying HIV in Philadelphia, but switched to bird flu when the mysterious virus first surfaced in 1997.

“What scares me is that this can happen so easily,” he says, “it’s scary that it might actually happen in the field.”

And that’s the point behind research that on the surface seems insane to some. Fouchier says what he did in the lab was mutate a few genes. That happens regularly in nature.

Fouchier insists the dangerous part of this virus isn’t what he has created in the lab, it is what can happen if nature creates something similar. He says this should be a wakeup call for public health authorities around the world.

In the history of epidemics and pandemics nothing has been as lethal as the bird flu Fouchier has created. The most deadly epidemic of the last century was the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918. Virtually everyone in the world was infected. It is estimated that between 50 and 100 million people died — conservatively that means it killed 3 percent of those infected. In a globalized world of air travel and mass transit, the prospect of an airborne bird flu with a 60 percent death rate is terrifying.

At its peak in 2006 bird flu was found in 63 countries, most of them in Asia. The Bush Administration was so concerned about the potential threat to humans from an airborne mutation that it contracted labs in the U.S. and overseas to see if such a human-to-human form really could evolve. The Dutch scientists were the first to prove it is possible. A lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has independently created a similar form of the lethal virus.

Since it peaked six years ago, H5N1 bird flu has been eradicated in many countries, but it remains endemic in Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Indian, Indonesia and Vietnam. Fouchier says one of the main reasons the U.S. and other Western government were eager to see if the super-virus could be created was to push the countries where bird flu still exists to take the threat seriously.

“The urgency to eradicate bird flu in poultry markets [in those countries] was not very high,” says Fouchier, “With these experiments we tell these countries please eradicate this virus very aggressively to prevent a pandemic.”

“My first reaction was ‘Oh, my God, why did they do this?'” says Laurie Garrett, Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Second reaction was ‘Oh dear, it works!’ Meaning that nature could do the same thing – that they had proven how dangerous the virus could be. And then my final reaction was ‘we have no capacity to control this kind of work. Our treaty systems our policy systems, will not do the job.'”

Garrett wonders whether the science can be justified. “We have a whole legacy now of labs doing experiments that in the wrong hands could be very, very dangerous. I’m not real comfortable with having this virus exist – anywhere.”

But when ABC News surveyed virologists in the United State for their opinions on the value of such seemingly toxic science the overwhelming response was that Fouchier’s work is a valuable contribution to public health around the world.

“I think it’s a very good idea,” says Dr. William Schaffner, Chairman of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “We need to know more about how it is that influenza viruses that start out often in birds can transfer their capacity to make illness in humans and that essential research is going on in Rotterdam.”

Schaffner says if affected countries do not move to eradicate bird flu and public health officials are not prepared for the appearance of a highly lethal airborne strain of the bird flu virus, the consequences could be horrifying. “If we were to have a pandemic caused by this virus in nature, then we are talking about millions of people being ill around the world, hospitals overflowing with sick people, funeral homes not being able to keep up with the deaths. So we need as much scientific information as possible to avert that.”

Fouchier is scheduled to publish his findings in the journal “Science.” He has agreed to omit key details from the paper so that anyone thinking of replicating the virus will not have access to his blueprint. But he notes, the flu virus is hardly an effective form of bioterrorism. What he did is highly technical, requiring skills and equipment that are not widely available. He says nature produces much more accessible biological menaces on its own, although he is quick say he will not name them.

His bigger concern is that the outcry over his research will shut down an important branch of public health research — not just for 60 days, but for good.

“If politics were to shut down this type of research then what we should do is lie in the sun until the next pandemic hits and kills us,” he says. “That, I think, is not the attitude we should follow. Unless that is what we want we have to do this type of research. Otherwise we will be overwhelmed by Mother Nature terrorizing us in the future.”

ROTTERDAM, Holland Jan. 20, 2012— — It is the stuff of science fiction: scientists tamper with a killer bird flu virus and create something much worse. But what has been created in a Rotterdam laboratory is not fiction. It is deadly real.

So deadly that the U.S. government – which funded the Rotterdam research – asked scientists to omit key details of their research when they are published to keep the formula out of the hands of bio-terrorists. And today, researchers announced a self-imposed 60-day “voluntary pause” on any research involving highly transmissible form of bird flu that they have created.

The researchers are responding to the worldwide furor that erupted after word of their work became public. There are serious public health reasons for the research and they want to lower the temperature of the discussion while they explain what they have done and why they have done it.

The lead author of today’s announcement is Dr. Ron Fouchier, a respected molecular virologist. He heads at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, that engineered a form of “aerosolized” bird flu that can easily be passed from humans to humans through the air. The genetically-altered flu is thought to be so virulent that if the vials containing it were to get out, the virus would have the potential to spread around the globe and kill hundreds of millions.

Bird flu, also known as H5N1, first surfaced 15 years ago. It has not caused mass panic because it is only transmitted to humans who have direct contact with infected birds. But when humans do contract bird flu, they are likely to die.

According to the World Health Organization of 573 confirmed bird flu cases in humans since 2003, 336 people have died. That’s a staggering 60 percent mortality rate. Nothing in history comes close to that.

ABC News was given an exclusive inside look at some of the testing facilities the Rotterdam researchers used. With Fouchier as our guide, we donned protective clothing and face masks and passed through three levels of security to see the ferrets he uses for testing.

Watch Jeffrey Kofman’s exclusive report from inside the testing facilities tonight on “World News with Diane Sawyer,” at 6:30 p.m. ET

Fouchier explained how his lab assistants exposed the ferrets to the altered virus and placed unexposed ferrets in cages nearby. All 40 ferrets died. Scientists use ferrets because they have a respiratory system much like humans, which is why the researchers believe the consequences of an airborne bird flu would be just as deadly for humans.

No visitors, however, allowed in the high secret lab at Erasmus Medical Centre where the actual experiment took place. He told us that with U.S. and Dutch expertise Erasmus spent eight years and millions of dollars building one of the most secure lab facilities in the world just for studying H5N1. They call it a BSL3 Enhanced lab – that’s Bio-Safety Level 3. The vials of enhanced bird flu are kept in a bank vault inside the lab. The lab is designed to keep the deadly virus in and intruders out.

The researchers who engineered this super-virus insist they are far from being “mad scientists” as some have suggested. They are public health specialists.

The man in charge, Fouchier is a tall, lanky molecular biologist who began his career studying HIV in Philadelphia, but switched to bird flu when the mysterious virus first surfaced in 1997.

“What scares me is that this can happen so easily,” he says, “it’s scary that it might actually happen in the field.”

And that’s the point behind research that on the surface seems insane to some. Fouchier says what he did in the lab was mutate a few genes. That happens regularly in nature.

Fouchier insists the dangerous part of this virus isn’t what he has created in the lab, it is what can happen if nature creates something similar. He says this should be a wakeup call for public health authorities around the world.

In the history of epidemics and pandemics nothing has been as lethal as the bird flu Fouchier has created. The most deadly epidemic of the last century was the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918. Virtually everyone in the world was infected. It is estimated that between 50 and 100 million people died — conservatively that means it killed 3 percent of those infected. In a globalized world of air travel and mass transit, the prospect of an airborne bird flu with a 60 percent death rate is terrifying.

At its peak in 2006 bird flu was found in 63 countries, most of them in Asia. The Bush Administration was so concerned about the potential threat to humans from an airborne mutation that it contracted labs in the U.S. and overseas to see if such a human-to-human form really could evolve. The Dutch scientists were the first to prove it is possible. A lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has independently created a similar form of the lethal virus.

Since it peaked six years ago, H5N1 bird flu has been eradicated in many countries, but it remains endemic in Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Indian, Indonesia and Vietnam. Fouchier says one of the main reasons the U.S. and other Western government were eager to see if the super-virus could be created was to push the countries where bird flu still exists to take the threat seriously.

“The urgency to eradicate bird flu in poultry markets [in those countries] was not very high,” says Fouchier, “With these experiments we tell these countries please eradicate this virus very aggressively to prevent a pandemic.”

“My first reaction was ‘Oh, my God, why did they do this?'” says Laurie Garrett, Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Second reaction was ‘Oh dear, it works!’ Meaning that nature could do the same thing – that they had proven how dangerous the virus could be. And then my final reaction was ‘we have no capacity to control this kind of work. Our treaty systems our policy systems, will not do the job.'”

Garrett wonders whether the science can be justified. “We have a whole legacy now of labs doing experiments that in the wrong hands could be very, very dangerous. I’m not real comfortable with having this virus exist – anywhere.”

But when ABC News surveyed virologists in the United State for their opinions on the value of such seemingly toxic science the overwhelming response was that Fouchier’s work is a valuable contribution to public health around the world.

“I think it’s a very good idea,” says Dr. William Schaffner, Chairman of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “We need to know more about how it is that influenza viruses that start out often in birds can transfer their capacity to make illness in humans and that essential research is going on in Rotterdam.”

Schaffner says if affected countries do not move to eradicate bird flu and public health officials are not prepared for the appearance of a highly lethal airborne strain of the bird flu virus, the consequences could be horrifying. “If we were to have a pandemic caused by this virus in nature, then we are talking about millions of people being ill around the world, hospitals overflowing with sick people, funeral homes not being able to keep up with the deaths. So we need as much scientific information as possible to avert that.”

Fouchier is scheduled to publish his findings in the journal “Science.” He has agreed to omit key details from the paper so that anyone thinking of replicating the virus will not have access to his blueprint. But he notes, the flu virus is hardly an effective form of bioterrorism. What he did is highly technical, requiring skills and equipment that are not widely available. He says nature produces much more accessible biological menaces on its own, although he is quick say he will not name them.

His bigger concern is that the outcry over his research will shut down an important branch of public health research — not just for 60 days, but for good.

“If politics were to shut down this type of research then what we should do is lie in the sun until the next pandemic hits and kills us,” he says. “That, I think, is not the attitude we should follow. Unless that is what we want we have to do this type of research. Otherwise we will be overwhelmed by Mother Nature terrorizing us in the future.”

How likely is it that publishing the genetic sequence could help a terrorist, a rogue, or a legitimate researcher who might develop a novel vaccine or drug? “Most of us are unequivocal about the value of the research,” Fauci said. “But deciding what to do with these types of studies is complicated. At the moment, there are no official governing bodies to regulate such decisions. They rely on the good will of researchers.” Fauci and others have noted that, precisely because flu is so hard to control, the virus would be difficult to use as a weapon.

In this case, as in most other cases, the work was supported heavily by the National Institutes of Health, and it seems unlikely to proceed without U.S. government support. Scientists bicker as vigorously as any other group, but rarely about the right to share and publish the data on which their research depends. Even the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity has made clear its general support for open investigation and full publication. The scientific method and the entire edifice of institutional research depend on such openness; without it, progress would slow dramatically. As biology has become more accessible, the balance between freedom and protection has become harder to maintain. This is certainly not the last time that preventing wide dissemination of information may seem necessary. But who should make those decisions, and how? Scientists fear that any regulatory body will stifle research. In 1975, when biologists met at Asilomar, California, to discuss the potential hazards of the new field of recombinant DNA technology, the group drew up voluntary guidelines to govern their research. Those guidelines have worked well, and that meeting is often regarded as a model of coöperative regulation.

We live in a very different world now. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently gave a speech at a biological-weapons conference in Geneva in which she stressed that the threat of biological terror can no longer be ignored. “There are warning signs,” Clinton said, including “evidence in Afghanistan that . . . Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula made a call to arms for—and I quote—‘brothers with degrees in microbiology or chemistry to develop a weapon of mass destruction.’ ”

While scientists disagree sharply about whether it would be easy to replicate such a virus in a laboratory, and whether it would be worth the effort, there is no question that we are moving toward a time when work like this, and even more complex biology, will be accessible to anyone with the will to use it, a few basic chemicals, and a relatively small amount of money.

Those realities have compelled many scientists to reconsider their unilateral support of the principle of open research. “I can tell you that when I began this journey I was certainly of the view that everything should be out and science should not be interfered with,” Arturo Casadevall, the chief of infectious disease at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a member of the Advisory Board, said at a recent forum on the issue sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences. “And as the result of hundreds of hours of the deliberative process I changed my mind.” Others are even more emphatic, arguing that although the information is bound to become available, any delay is better than none. Many countries lack proper surveillance capacities, and existing vaccines are not good enough to stop influenza viruses from taking hold in the human population. By the time that public-health officials were fully aware of the swine-flu virus that originated in Mexico in 2009, for instance, it had spread across the globe.

In January, a few days before we met in Rotterdam, Fouchier had agreed to a sixty-day moratorium on the project, but only after he received a long, late-night phone call from Fauci, who convinced him that a worldwide time-out—the first since the beginning of the era of molecular biology—would allow people to cool off and enable them to explain the value of such research to the public. In mid-February, a committee of specialists, including Fouchier, met in Geneva at the W.H.O. headquarters and announced that the papers would eventually be published in full, but that a sixty-day moratorium was probably not long enough. It is not clear when or where the research will continue.

Attempts to control information or to prohibit research rarely succeed for long. As the physicist and synthetic biologist Rob Carlson has written, most notably in his 2010 book, “Biology Is Technology,” in the case of crystal methamphetamine both prohibition and efforts by the federal government to shut down production labs have failed, and in similar ways. In each case, success in cracking down on small-time dealers led to failure on a larger scale. Carlson believes that cutting the flow of H5N1 data will have the same effect. “Any attempt to secure the data would have to start with an assessment of how widely it is already distributed,” he wrote recently on his blog, Synthesis. “I have yet to meet an academic who regularly encrypts e-mail, and my suspicion is that few avail themselves of the built-in encryption on their laptops.” Carlson noted that, in addition to university computers and e-mail servers in facilities where the science originated, the information is probably stored in the computers of reviewers, on servers at Nature and Science, at the Advisory Board, and, depending on how the papers were distributed and discussed by the board’s members, possibly on their various e-mail servers and individual computers as well. “And,” Carlson wrote, “let’s not forget the various unencrypted phones and tablets all of those reviewers now carry around.”

Carlson and others argue that restricting publication would retard the progress of the research without increasing safety. With influenza viruses, speed matters. Vaccine-production methods have not changed substantially in sixty years, and it was months before a useful vaccine was widely available for the H1N1 pandemic of 2009. That virus infected more than a billion people. Future bird-flu research could help scientists learn how it is transmitted through the air, why it makes the leap from animal to man, and how specifically it binds to human cell receptors. By placing the virus into tissue culture, scientists could discover more about how it destroys cells and make a better assessment of whether current vaccines would protect us—and, if they wouldn’t, the research could guide us toward making more effective vaccines. None of these experiments are without risk, but one must also consider the risk of not carrying them out.

“We can learn a great deal about transmission of influenza virus through the air from this work, and it’s something we know very little about,” Ab Osterhaus, the leader of the Erasmus team, said. “Nobody was going to make this virus in his garage. There are so many better ways to create terror. You have to compare the risk posed by nature with the theoretical risk that a human might use this virus for harm. I take the bioterror threat very seriously. But we have to address the problems logically. And nature is much more sophisticated than anyone in any lab. Nature is going to manufacture this virus or something like it. We know that. Bioterrorists might, but nature will. Look at the past century: the 1918 flu, H.I.V., Ebola, and H1N1. The Spanish flu took months. sars maybe a couple of weeks. This is happening all the time, and we have ways to fight it. So where is the greatest risk? Is it in someone’s garage or in nature? Because you cannot prevent scientists from getting the information they need to address that risk. I understand politics and publicity. But I also understand that viruses do not care about any of that.”