NIH official discusses reaction to bird flu studies, development of publishing mechanism in Nature interview

Nature interviews Amy Patterson, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Science Policy, which administers the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), about the board's decision in December to advise against full publication of "two papers on avian flu (H5N1) [that] could pose a biosecurity risk if published in their entirety." Patterson discusses the efforts of the board and the "international flu community" to "develop a mechanism by which important details from the papers could be withheld from the general public while remaining accessible to public health officials and researchers studying the virus," Nature writes (Ledford, 1/11).