The Apocalypse as a Rhetorical Device in the Influenza Virus Gain-of-Function Debate

The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of the journal or of ASM. > Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society. > > -John AdamsHumans are notoriously poor at assessing future benefits and risks. Consider nuclear power, which was born from a program to develop a weapon of mass destruction. When nuclear power was developed for commercial purposes, the risk was thought to be minimal and no one anticipated the disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. On the other hand, no one initially anticipated the benefits of radioactive nucleotides and radiation in medicine, archeological dating, smoke detectors, and sterilization of food and medical devices. In the mid-1970s, scientists fretted that recombinant DNA technology would unleash a plague of new infectious diseases and convened a conference at Asilomar that put in place a self-enforced moratorium until the process was better understood (1). Four decades later, no superbugs have appeared from recombinant DNA technology, and society is reaping the rewards of the molecular biology revolution in new drugs, DNA identification, personal genomics, and pest-resistant plants. In the late 1990s, many worried about the Y2K computer bug, which it was feared would cripple computer systems and associated infrastructure such as banking, but the new millennium came and went without a ripple. Today we have falling rates of vaccine acceptance because of widely believed yet discredited associations between …