id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-001289-qbct63p4	Lipsitch, Marc	Ethical Alternatives to Experiments with Novel Potential Pandemic Pathogens	2014-05-20		.txt	text/plain	4483	234	35	Two recent publications reporting the creation of ferret-transmissible influenza A/H5N1 viruses [1, 2] are controversial examples of research that aims to produce, sequence and characterize ''potential pandemic pathogens'' (PPPs) [3] , novel infectious agents with known or likely efficient transmission among humans, with significant virulence, and for which there is limited population immunity. N Alternative approaches would not only be safer but would also be more effective at improving surveillance and vaccine design, the two purported benefits of gain-of-function experiments to create novel, mammalian-transmissible influenza strains. A further challenge to realizing public health benefits from PPP experimentation is that the predictability of phenotype from viral sequence is complex [38, 48, 49] , as demonstrated by a recent assessment [50] of the generality of mutations that conferred human receptor binding in engineered ferret-transmissible H5N1 strains.	./cache/cord-001289-qbct63p4.txt	./txt/cord-001289-qbct63p4.txt