Scientists have long debated the merits and risks of tinkering with viruses and bacteria, which the president claims caused the coronavirus pandemic.
President Trump signed an executive order on Monday evening to further restrict experiments on pathogens and toxins that could make them more harmful.
For over a decade, scientists have debated the risks and benefits of so-called “gain of function” research. They’ve long tinkered with viruses and bacteria to endow them with new functions like producing insulin for people with diabetes. Some researchers have modified bird flu viruses in order to figure out which mutations might be crucial for producing pandemic strains that could spread among people.
Although such experiments may have benefits, critics have maintained that the risk of an accidentally created pandemic was not worth taking. In 2014, all federal funding was halted on experiments that could make certain viruses more dangerous. The first Trump administration lifted that ban in 2017 and instituted a new procedure to review possibly dangerous research.
The debate over gain of function research sharpened during the pandemic. Mr. Trump and other elected officials have linked such research to the origin of Covid, claiming that Chinese researchers produced the coronavirus in a lab in Wuhan. At Monday’s signing ceremony, the president raised that connection again. “I think I said that from Day 1, that it leaked out,” he said. “A scientist walked outside to have lunch with a girlfriend or was together with a lot of people.”
A number of published studies point instead to a market in Wuhan as the origin of the pandemic, contending that evidence strongly suggests that wild mammals picked up a bat coronavirus and that when the animals were sold at the market, they passed the virus to people.
American intelligence agencies are divided in their assessments. The Department of Energy and the F.B.I. have endorsed the idea that the pandemic originated in the Wuhan lab. This year, the C.I.A. said that it also favored the lab leak theory but, like the Department of Energy, had “low confidence” in that assessment.
However, the National Intelligence Council and four other intelligence bodies favored the idea that the pandemic had natural origins, according to an intelligence assessment conducted in 2021.
The scrutiny led an expert panel to develop a sweeping set of changes to how the federal government oversees potentially dangerous experiments. The Biden administration adopted the changes officially last year.
Critics at the time complained that the policy was not aggressive enough. For example, it lacked an independent regulatory agency to review research proposals.
Mr. Trump’s new executive order dismissed the Biden policy as having “insufficient levels of oversight.” It directs the Office of Science and Technology Policy to revise or replace the policy with new regulations.
The new policy would end support for gain of function research that was deemed dangerous and was conducted in countries of concern, including China. It would also impose new constraints on research within the United States. The executive order also calls for the government to develop a strategy to oversee potentially dangerous research carried out without federal funds within the United States.