Public safety

U.S. oversight of risky pathogen research could be better, draft report concludes

Just a “small subset” of studies that manipulate dangerous pathogens to give them new abilities pose potentially grave risks to the public, an expert advisory group to the U.S. government concludes in a new draft report released today. But the current patchwork of U.S. policies aimed at regulating such risky experiments “is not sufficient,” and “may require supplementation,” the report concludes. And it says there are still some so-called gain of function (GOF) experiments that may never justify the risk.