Getting ahead of nature has its risks.
By Martin Hoyt
Disease prevention is an integral part of our public health sphere and has been at the forefront of our national conversation on health. It is why Americans have led the charge in eliminating diseases like polio and smallpox and is one of the reasons we joined the World Health Organization (WHO). What most Americans were not signing up for, however, was the intentional creation of deadly diseases to create vaccines ahead of the curve.
That’s what we got with gain-of-function research – the forced evolution of dangerous diseases to determine how to combat them before they naturally develop. The controversial research, which had been banned for years, was unbanned in 2017 and modifies organisms like viruses and bacteria to study the effects on their biological functions. For…
