Science
Why scientists say we are fighting H5N1 bird flu with one hand tied behind our backs
As the H5N1 bird flu virus steamrolls its way across the globe — killing wild animals, commercial livestock and even some people — scientists and health officials fear we’re on the precipice of another global pandemic.
But when, where and how that could come to pass is hard to predict — in part, some researchers say, because of guardrails the federal government has placed around gain-of-function research.
The term describes experiments that seek to understand a virus’ potential to adapt to new hosts, spread more easily, survive longer in the environment and cause those infected to become sicker. Though many scientists view the approach as a critical tool for conducting biological research, other experts have long complained that it’s unacceptably risky — a reputation exacerbated by persistent speculation that the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic was created in gain-of-function experiments in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
That led many virologists to steer clear of the work to avoid its stigma and regulatory red tape. Some in the field say that has deprived officials of valuable information that could have helped them anticipate and prepare for H5N1’s next moves.
“Do I believe if that research was more widely accepted, we’d have a better grip on this virus and what it might do next? Or how quickly it could change? Or what that would take?” asked Richard Webby, director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds. “YES.”
Felicia Goodrum, a molecular virologist at the University of Arizona, said gain-of-function research could enable health officials to recognize worrisome H5N1 mutations and identify targets for antivirals and vaccines.
“Without it, we’re just flying in the dark,” she said.
Critics of this line of research don’t see it that way. They say the work is too dangerous, making it possible for a souped-up pathogen to escape into the environment where people have no natural immunity. Even worse, they argue, it could wind up in the hands of nefarious actors who could use it as a bioweapon.
These risks outweigh the promise of work that may not be as helpful as its supporters suggest, said Marc Lipsitch, professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
What scientists and health officials need to know to contain the outbreak, Lipsitch argues, are things like which animals are infected, which people have been exposed, how many of them caught the virus and how sick they became as a result.
“Those are basic epidemiology and veterinary questions,” Lipsitch said. “I can’t think of any route by which gain-of-function studies could have informed — much less answered — those questions.”
An animal caretaker collects a blood sample from a dairy calf vaccinated against bird flu in Ames, Iowa, in July.
(USDA Agricultural Research Service via Associated Press)
The controversy dates to 2011, when two independent research groups said they had conducted gain-of-function experiments that resulted in strains of H5N1 that could be spread via air between ferrets, a species used to model influenza’s behavior in humans.
H5N1 was first identified in wild geese in China in 1996 and soon spread among birds in Asia, jumping to people on hundreds of occasions along the way. More than half of those known infections were fatal.
The high mortality rate and geographical spread of the virus prompted then-President George W. Bush to establish a $7.1-billion program to prepare for its inevitable arrival on U.S. shores. He spearheaded the establishment of a global surveillance and preparedness network via the WHO, as well as a national one. He also directed federal funds into the stockpile of vaccines and antiviral medications, as well as millions of dollars toward laboratory research.
Amid this flood of support, Yoshihiro Kawaoka‘s team at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Ron Fouchier‘s at Erasmus University in the Netherlands simultaneously began to experiment with H5N1, introducing genetic mutations into its RNA to see what changes could transform it from a virus that passed easily between birds into one that passed efficiently between people.
Kawaoka and his colleagues combined the H5 hemagglutinin gene from the bird flu virus with genes from the 2009 H1N1 swine flu virus. Then they coaxed their hybrid to evolve in a way that allowed it to bind with mammalian cells rather than bird cells. They found that four mutations in the H5 gene were enough to create a virus capable of spreading between ferrets in neighboring cages.
Meanwhile, the researchers in Fouchier’s lab tinkered solely with H5N1. They added a handful of mutations that helped fuel previous flu pandemics, then infected their ferrets. The virus didn’t spread on its own at first, so the scientists helped it along by transferring it from the noses of infected animals to healthy ferrets. After 10 such passages, the virus had evolved to the point where it spread on its own from one ferret to another.
The studies offered valuable confirmation that the bird flu virus had the potential to spark a human pandemic, said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, an immunologist and infectious disease physician at Johns Hopkins University.
“Before those experiments were done, we did not know whether H5N1 had the biological capacity to become mammalian-transmissible,” he said.
But they also underscored the risk that scientists could accelerate the threat. “That was the original gain-of-function poster child,” Casadevall said.
Concern that information in the studies could be put to ill use prompted Kawaoka and Fouchier to voluntarily pause their work in 2012, and their papers were published only after passing a thorough safety review by the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity. Gain-of-function research resumed the following year.
Fears were revived in 2014 after federal labs mishandled samples of smallpox, anthrax and H5N1. Nobody was sickened, but it prompted a three-year freeze on federal funding for gain-of-function experiments involving particularly dangerous pathogens, until stricter oversight rules were put in place.
Plans for such experiments now go through several layers of review at a potential researcher’s institution. If the work is funded by the National Institutes of Health, additional reviews follow.
“There are a lot of regulatory hurdles to assure there’s appropriate risk mitigation,” said Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University who studies influenza viruses. “We’re all being extra careful because nobody wants to be accused of having done something unsafe.”
Biohazard suits hang in a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Ft. Detrick, Md.
(Patrick Semansky / Associated Press)
Those hurdles can delay a research project by several months or more, if they are approved at all, she said. The uncertainties have acted as a deterrent, especially for scientists in the early stages of their careers.
“It’s definitely uncomfortable to do gain-of-function research,” Goodrum said. “We’re discouraging people from entering the field.”
To some, the timing couldn’t be worse.
At least 65 people in the U.S. have been infected with H5N1 since it arrived in North America in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Most of the cases have involved workers on dairy and poultry farms, and their symptoms — including conjunctivitis and upper respiratory irritation — have tended to be mild. But in two cases, people have become severely ill, including a person in Louisiana and a teenager in Canada.
There is no evidence that the virus can spread directly from one person to another, the CDC said. Scientists expect that will change sooner or later. With flu season picking up steam, the risk is rising.
“The thing I’m most afraid of today is a recombination event between the stuff going around in cows and the seasonal flu,” Casadevall said. If both viruses infected the same mammal at the same time, their components could mix and match in a way that creates “a strain that is able to infect humans very easily, and for which we don’t have immunity.”
“That is a gain-of-function experiment being done by nature,” he added.
It’s a point that Webby suggested as well, noting that gain-of-function experiments are a whole lot safer in a sealed-off Biosafety Level 3 laboratory equipped with special ventilation systems and other precautions “than on a farm.”
But Lipsitch and others say the fact that the virus is constantly mutating and changing calls into question the relevance of gain-of-function research. A viral strain that can be concocted in a laboratory is not necessarily going to match whatever emerges in the environment.
“There’s a big element of randomness in evolution,” Lipsitch said. “The fact that an experiment goes one way in the lab doesn’t mean it will go the same way somewhere else.”
Three rod-shaped H5N1 influenza virus particles are seen in a pair of colorized transmission electron micrographs.
(CDC and NIAID)
Even if it’s a close match, Lipsitch said, there’s “compelling evidence that what you learn in one strain can be the opposite for a very closely related strain. So the generalizability is very low.”
He cited a paper that took the mutations that made H5N1 “more mammal-friendly” in Kawaoka’s and Fouchier’s experiments and applied them to a slightly different version of the virus. In that case, the researchers found “a completely different effect.”
These shortcomings make the research risks harder to justify, said Nicholas Evans, a bioethicist at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
“I think what the gain-of-function debate has yet to answer is, ‘What is the social value of these studies?’” he said.
To Evans, there appears to be very little, especially considering the lack of urgency in the government’s response.
“Saying that this particular piece of extremely niche biological research into H5N1 would have made a material difference in an outbreak that has largely been characterized by a lack of interest on behalf of public federal agricultural and public health regulators just is kind of nonsense to me,” he said.
Kawoaka declined to discuss his research, and Fouchier could not be reached.
Michael Imperiale, a virologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, said the experiments conducted by Kawaoka and Fouchier are extremely useful as blueprints of what to watch out for as the virus sweeps the globe. And he’s surprised more people aren’t talking about their value.
“No one seems to point out the fact that those gain-of-function experiments … gave us an important piece of information, which is that that virus can jump,” Imperiale said.
Other gain-of-function experiments conducted on H5N1 years ago have tipped off scientists about potential mutations that could help the real-world virus spread more easily through the air, get better at infecting cells in the mammalian respiratory tract, and become resistant to antiviral medications.
“Those experiments 10 years ago were so informative,” Lakdawala said. “It helped us be better prepared.”
But unless the scientific community stands up for the work and challenges its negative image, that won’t be the case in the future, Goodrum said. “It’s very likely that we will be less prepared for the next pandemic than we were for the last one.”
Spending on new medical research by the National Institutes of Health has fallen roughly $1 billion behind the pace of years past, delaying thousands of scientific projects and raising concerns within the agency that it may struggle to pay out the money it was allotted by Congress.
Instead of canceling grants en masse, as the N.I.H. did in the first year of this Trump presidency, it is now vetting them before approval with a “computational text analysis tool” that scans for terms including “racism,” “gender” and “vaccination refusal,” according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
That tool was meant to formalize a campaign against “woke science” that was initiated last year by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency.
But the screening system is now exacerbating a slowdown in research spending: The N.I.H. awarded only about 1,900 new and competitive grants from October to late March, less than half the number it tended to give out by that point in the fiscal year during the Biden administration, an analysis by The Times showed.
The heaviest damage to the grantmaking apparatus was done by the protracted government shutdown in the fall, which delayed grant review meetings by months. The N.I.H. has struggled to catch up, and delays are affecting fields far beyond those ostensibly targeted by the administration’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion.
As of late March, for example, the National Cancer Institute had earmarked only about $72 million for new and competitive research grants, less than one-third of the nearly $250 million it had agreed to spend by that point in a typical fiscal year during the Biden administration, according to The Times’s analysis.
“It means that people get fired because there is uncertainty about whether the grant will come through,” said Dr. Joshua Gordon, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. “It means budgets get busted. It means research projects get stalled.”
However alarming the canceled grants and spending delays were last year, Dr. Gordon said, “I’m more worried this year.”
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the N.I.H. and is led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has become involved this year in flagging certain grant awards and stopping their release, according to emails reviewed by The Times.
Mr. Kennedy faced sharp criticism from Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike over N.I.H. spending delays in congressional hearings this week. He is set to appear at two more hearings on Wednesday.
The N.I.H. has fallen behind in part because it lost thousands of workers last year to layoffs and early retirements. In some branches of the agency, what workers remain can barely keep up with renewing existing grants, much less awarding new ones.
One N.I.H. institute has less than half of the workers needed to vet grants for legal and financial compliance, employees were told at a recent meeting, notes from which were reviewed by The Times.
Under the most dire projections, the institute could leave $500 million of congressionally appropriated funding on the table because of difficulties processing grants, N.I.H. officials said at that meeting. They were temporarily deploying career scientists to what were effectively business roles to speed up grant awards.
The N.I.H. director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, has said that he is trying to root out ideologically motivated and insufficiently rigorous science. Conservatives accuse the N.I.H. of having fostered such research during the Obama and Biden presidencies by, for example, encouraging grant proposals on sexual- and gender-minority groups.
“Scientists will no longer have to mouth D.E.I. shibboleths to garner funding,” Dr. Bhattacharya and his top deputy wrote in an online article in December, the day before the N.I.H. outlined the new screening process to its employees.
Andrew Nixon, a health department spokesman, blamed the spending shortfall on “the Democrat-led shutdown,” which he said “delayed N.I.H.’s ability to issue grants” at the start of the fiscal year. Since then, he said, “timelines have returned to typical funding patterns.”
He added that the agency “uses a variety of review tools to ensure alignment with agency priorities” and that it was working to hire additional employees. “The N.I.H. intends to obligate all appropriated funds, as directed by Congress,” he said.
To understand why spending has slowed so dramatically at the N.I.H., the world’s premier funder of medical research, The Times interviewed 10 agency employees and reviewed internal documents, including spreadsheets of grants flagged by the screening tool and the list of roughly 235 terms it searches for.
The employees spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
The documents painted a picture of an agency whose leaders were seeking to exert greater control over scientific spending by, among other things, deciding whether certain grants were compatible with agency priorities. But in clamping down on the funding process, the N.I.H. created new choke points, leaving some proposals in limbo for days or weeks.
That has frustrated some senior N.I.H. officials, one of whom lamented in an email seen by The Times that it was taking too long to rework grant proposals. The official asked his staff to simply strip the proposals of disfavored terms instead.
The delays have also angered lawmakers. Congress sets the country’s medical research spending levels, even as the administration has leeway to prioritize types of studies. And despite Mr. Trump’s proposing major cuts last year, Congress preserved the N.I.H. budget at roughly $47 billion for 2026.
“It is very frustrating to understand that this administration can circumvent dollars that were designated for our scientists,” said Senator Angela Alsobrooks, Democrat of Maryland.
Congress’s budget buoyed American scientists. By late 2025, many believed that they had weathered the worst of Trump-era funding problems. The N.I.H. spent aggressively toward the end of the last fiscal year, overcoming earlier blockages and delays.
The Supreme Court also let stand a lower court’s ruling that the policy behind the cancellation of more than $780 million in N.I.H. grants was probably unlawful, a victory for groups that had argued the terminations were arbitrary and capricious.
But the Trump administration was preparing a far more systematic crackdown on what it saw as unreliable research.
In August, Dr. Bhattacharya publicly outlined the agency’s new priorities, including opposition to “research based on ideologies that promote differential treatment of people based on race or ethnicity,” a template that could be used to guide grant reviews.
Then, in December, the N.I.H. introduced its employees to the “computational text analysis tool,” allowing the agency to comb through new grant proposals and existing projects for phrases suggesting a grant “may not align with N.I.H. priorities,” a guidance document would later tell employees.
Roger Severino, a vice president of the conservative Heritage Foundation and a health official in the first Trump administration, said that weeding out such grants was necessary to rid the N.I.H. of the “politicization” of the Obama and Biden eras.
If the result was less spending on science, he said, that was only because the agency had been wasting money.
“There was a tremendous amount of bloat that grew up like barnacles on the N.I.H. research ship,” Mr. Severino said. “Those barnacles are being scraped off.”
Within some divisions of the N.I.H., the text search tool is flagging as many as half of grants, officials said, requiring staff scientists to extensively document how they will be reworked or why they already conform to agency priorities.
Flagged grants address cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, H.I.V., heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, nutrition and prenatal care, internal documents show.
In part because many of them look at the use of screenings or treatments, they sometimes include mention of “inequities” in access to care or “minority” groups who disproportionately suffer from a disease, causing the system to deem the grants not “clean.”
In one case, a biological science grant was held up for a week because the proposal had used “sex” interchangeably with “gender,” a flagged word.
American scientists already spend some 40 percent of their time on grant-related administrative tasks. Now they are being deluged by ever more paperwork, said Dr. Michael Lauer, who led external grantmaking at the N.I.H. until last year.
And because the N.I.H. is awarding grants to far fewer researchers this year, the chances of success have rarely been lower.
“This is lost time for all of us,” Dr. Lauer said. “Instead of spending their time doing science and hopefully making discoveries that will make us all healthier, they’re rewriting grant applications.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting.
Methodology
The Times analyzed N.I.H. grants data from N.I.H. RePORTER for the fiscal years 2021 through 2026. The analysis excludes awards for intramural research conducted at the N.I.H. Clinical Center. The analysis focuses on new awards (Type 1 awards) and competitive renewals (Types 2, 4 and 9).
The analysis uses data through March 2026, the most recent month comparable to prior years. Previous records suggest that the data available on RePORTER for that month, however, may still be missing up to 10 percent of awards. The analysis accounts for that possibility.
Our universe might be chock-full of cosmic wonder, but you can observe only a fraction of astronomical phenomena with the naked eye. Meteor showers, natural fireworks that streak brightly across the night sky, are one of them.
The latest observable meteor shower will be the Lyrids, which has been active since April 14 and is forecast to continue through April 30. The shower reaches its peak April 21 to 22, or Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.
According to NASA, the Lyrids are one of the oldest known meteor showers, and have been enjoyed by stargazers for nearly 3,000 years. Their bright, speedy streaks are caused by the dusty debris from a comet named Thatcher. They appear to spring from the constellation Lyra, which right now can be seen in the eastern sky at night in the Northern Hemisphere.
The moon will be about 27 percent full tonight, appearing as a thick crescent in the sky, according to the American Meteor Society.
To get a hint at when to best watch for the Lyrids, you can use this tool, which relies on data from the Global Meteor Network. It shows fireball activity levels in real time.
And while you gaze at the heavens, keep an eye out for other stray meteors streaking across the night sky. Skywatchers are reporting that the amount of fireballs is double what is usually seen by this point in the year.
Where meteor showers come from
There is a chance you might see a meteor on any given night, but you are most likely to catch one during a shower. Meteor showers are caused by Earth passing through the rubble trailing a comet or asteroid as it swings around the sun. This debris, which can be as small as a grain of sand, leaves behind a glowing stream of light as it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere.
Meteor showers occur around the same time every year and can last for days or weeks. But there is only a small window when each shower is at its peak, which happens when Earth reaches the densest part of the cosmic debris. The peak is the best time to look for a shower. From our point of view on Earth, the meteors will appear to come from the same point in the sky.
The Perseid meteor shower, for example, peaks in mid-August from the constellation Perseus. The Geminids, which occur every December, radiate from the constellation Gemini.
How to watch a meteor shower
Michelle Nichols, the director of public observing at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, recommends forgoing the use of telescopes or binoculars while watching a meteor shower.
“You just need your eyes and, ideally, a dark sky,” she said.
That’s because meteors can shoot across large swaths of the sky, so observing equipment can limit your field of view.
Some showers are strong enough to produce up to 100 streaks an hour, according to the American Meteor Society, though you probably won’t see that many.
“Almost everybody is under a light-polluted sky,” Ms. Nichols said. “You may think you’re under a dark sky, but in reality, even in a small town, you can have bright lights nearby.”
Planetariums, local astronomy clubs or even maps like this one can help you figure out where to go to escape excessive light. The best conditions for catching a meteor shower are a clear sky with no moon or cloud cover, sometime between midnight and sunrise. (Moonlight affects visibility in the same way as light pollution, washing out fainter sources of light in the sky.) Make sure to give your eyes at least 30 minutes to adjust to seeing in the dark.
Ms. Nichols also recommends wearing layers, even during the summer. “You’re going to be sitting there for quite a while, watching,” she said. “It’s going to get chilly, even in August.”
Bring a cup of cocoa or tea for even more warmth. Then lie back, scan the sky and enjoy the show.
Where weather is least likely to affect your view
Storm systems sweep across the country in early spring, and some will be obscuring skies tonight. But there will still be plenty of areas with clear skies, particularly in parts of the central United States.
“The best spot is going to be in the Upper Midwest,” said Rich Bann, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center.
Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa will offer especially good sky-viewing weather and a beach on the Great Lakes could be a nice spot to look up at the stars.
But don’t expect to view the show from Chicago, as Illinois could see some thunderstorms. The weather will be better in the Northern and Central Plains, particularly the eastern Dakotas.
High, wispy clouds are expected over the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys and into parts of the Mid-Atlantic. But, Mr. Bann said, “you may be able to see some shooting stars through thin clouds.”
Clouds will be draped across much of the Southeast and the Northeast, though there could be some clearing in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia. Remember, the meteors could be visible all night long. If you look outside and see clouds, try again later.
Catching the spectacle will be challenging across much of the West, particularly from Washington into Northern California, where a storm system is bringing rain and snow. That system will move east overnight.
There are likely to be some pockets of clear skies at times across southern Nevada, northwest Arizona and southwest Utah, Mr. Bann said.
Amy Graff contributed reporting.
WASHINGTON — Amid growing national security concerns, the FBI said Tuesday that it has launched a broad investigation in the deaths or disappearances of at least 10 scientists and staff connected to highly sensitive research, including four from the Los Angeles area.
“The FBI is spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists. We are working with the Department of Energy, Department of War, and with our state and state and local law enforcement partners to find answers,” the agency said in a statement.
The FBI’s announcement comes after the House Oversight Committee announced that it would investigate reports of the disappearance and deaths of the scientists, sending letters seeking information from the agencies involved in the federal inquiry as well as NASA, which owns the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, where three of the missing or dead scientists worked.
“If the reports are accurate, these deaths and disappearances may represent a grave threat to U.S. national security and to U.S. personnel with access to scientific secrets,” Reps. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the committee, and Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) wrote in the letters.
President Trump told reporters last week that he had been briefed on the missing and dead scientists, which he described as “pretty serious stuff.” He said at the time that he expected answers on whether the deaths were connected “in the next week and a half.”
Michael David Hicks, who studied comets and asteroids at JPL, was the first of the scientists who disappeared or died. He died on July 30, 2023, at the age of 59. No cause of death was disclosed.
A year later, JPL physicist Frank Maiwald died at 61, with no cause of death disclosed.
Two other Los Angeles scientists are part of the string of deaths and disappearances.
On June 22, 2025, Monica Jacinto Reza, a materials scientist at JPL, disappeared while on a hike near Mt. Waterman in the San Gabriel Mountains.
On Feb. 16, Caltech astrophysicist Carl Grillmair was fatally shot on the porch of his Llano home. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department arrested Freddy Snyder, 29, in connection with the shooting. Snyder had been arrested in December on suspicion of trespassing on Grillmair’s property.
Snyder has been charged with murder.
There is no evidence at this point that the deaths and disappearances, which occurred over a span of four years, are connected.
A spokesperson for NASA, which owns JPL, said in a statement on X that the agency is “coordinating and cooperating with the relevant agencies in relation to the missing scientists.
“At this time, nothing related to NASA indicates a national security threat,” agency spokesperson Bethany Stevens wrote. “The agency is committed to transparency and will provide more information as able.”
Representatives from Caltech, which manages JPL, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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