Hopes rise over Pasteur crisis

to work with non-pathogens may be tempted by the availability of funds to focus on pathogens and submit grant proposals to a biodefence programme. But this too has financial implications, because dangerous organisms can be investigated only within expensive, high containment facilities. Moreover, there is considerably less existing knowledge to build upon in the case of most pathogens than exists for familiar organisms. Enserink and Kaiser cite as one instance a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Patricia Kiley is contemplating switching her work on bacterial sensing of oxygen levels from Escherichia coli, to a bioterrorism agent. Although tempted to do so in order to ‘get a shot at the current US biodefence bonanza’, she is likely to make slower progress using an organism whose physiology and genetics are less familiar than one that has been a key microbe in laboratories for decades. Anthony Fauci insists that the number of NIAID grants for nondefence bacterial physiology projects has remained fairly constant, at 120-150 annually, over the past five years. He concedes that the number may have fallen at the other relevant institute, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, though this has probably reflected tighter budgets generally. One of the prime movers behind the microbiologists’ letter is Richard Ebright, a Howard Hughes Institute investigator at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He has previously publicly criticised the proliferation of laboratories devoted to pathogens of potential interest to terrorists, because of the risks of accidental or deliberate release. Ebright believes that the same objectives could be achieved by increasing research on related but harmless organisms, and by restricting work on putative biological weapons to a few, strictly controlled centres.