International experts, most from the influenza research world, started boarding planes Tuesday to head to the World Health Organization in Geneva for a meeting few researchers will have the chance to attend but which many will be watching from afar.
Myriad issues will be at stake in the process that the meeting will kick off: the health of a fledgling international agreement to share influenza viruses for research purposes; the type of transmission studies flu scientists are allowed to pursue and where they can do them; a potential -- and unwelcome by many -- precedent for the life sciences, the redaction of controversial H5N1 flu transmission studies.
But this gathering, organized by the World Health Organization and scheduled for Thursday and Friday, is only a start. And it is not expected to resolve the big-picture problems raised by the studies and the move by U.S. biosecurity experts to block full publication of them. Those will have to wait for a future, more inclusive meeting, the WHO has said.
In fact, this week's meeting appears to resemble an audit, with sessions devoted to tracing viruses from the source countries to the laboratories where the work was done, to a review of how the work was approved and funded through to a detailed look at the studies themselves.
"It sounds like a fact-finding mission," said Dr. D.A. Henderson, a distinguished scholar at the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
The World Health Organization is saying little about the gathering, which will take place behind closed doors. And what the organization's spokespeople have said seems aimed at dampening expectations of major breakthroughs.
"The focus is very narrow," Christy Feig, WHO's director of communications, said recently from Geneva. "There's only so much ground you can cover in two days."
The participants list includes 22 scientists and officials from Indonesia, Vietnam, France, Britain, South Africa, China, Japan, the Netherlands, the United States and Australia.
Some are scientists at the labs that provided the original H5N1 viruses while others are from the labs -- the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, Netherlands -- where the research was conducted.
Also invited is an official of the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, which gave the Rotterdam lab clearance to do work that led to creation of a mutated H5N1 virus that spread easily among ferrets and was lethal to the animals. The work done in Wisconsin also resulted in a lab-made virus that transmitted efficiently, though it was not deadly in ferrets.
The two journals, Science and Nature, will be represented as will the National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity, which moved to block full publication of the studies. Directors of the WHO's main influenza laboratories around the world are expected to attend, as is Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which funded the now controversial research.
Fauci has had no hand in organizing the meeting but has been asked to present information on how the original grant applications from the two teams were reviewed and how his agency kept abreast of the work, he said in an interview.
Fauci will also explain clearance processes the two labs went through to do work with U.S. funding on a virus designated a "select agent" by the U.S. Agriculture Department. H5N1 viruses are not currently considered a select agent by USDA's human health counterpart agency, the Centers for Disease Control. But the CDC had to inspect the labs in Madison and Rotterdam before Fauci's agency could deliver the funding.
The meeting is expected to try to address some urgent issues, which may include figuring out which portions of the studies should be held back from publication.
But it is not expected that a decision will be taken on whether future transmission studies should be permitted. Nor is this group expected to come up with a system for figuring out how to vet applications from researchers or government officials who want to see the full studies, or how to share the studies in a way that minimizes the risk if they fall into unapproved hands.
Dr. Frederick Hayden, an influenza researcher from the University of Virginia and Britain's Wellcome Trust, acknowledges the process of sorting through the issues and problems the research has given rise to may be painful in the short term, but could lead to needed change over the long term.
"My hope is that this will promote discussions that really need to take place and probably should have taken place before," said Hayden, an antivirals expert who worked for a time at the WHO.
"There's really no agreed framework to try to decide which experiments are done, who's going to do them, where they're going to be done and how the results are going to be shared. ... It's been done on an institution-by-institution or country-by-country basis. There's not been a more considered approach."
