A fiery exchange between Sen. Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, during a congressional hearing on Tuesday is bringing attention once again to a type of ...

President Trump issued an executive order Monday restricting federal funding for research that involves a controversial field of scientific study known as "gain-of-function" research. The research, ...

Despite the importance of GoF modifications, they have sometimes faced misplaced concerns or opposition that could lead to their being overregulated or even banned.

Biosafety hawks were initially optimistic that the incoming second Trump administration would at last place binding constraints on so-called "dangerous gain-of-function" research, in which pathogens ...

In a party-line vote last evening, the U.S. Senate confirmed Stanford professor and medical researcher Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The confirmation of ...

In just a few years scientist Ralph Baric went from being heralded as a global leader in public-health focused coronavirus research, to a target of unproven accusations that he helped start a pandemic ...

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.) The term “gain of function” is often taken to refer to research with viruses that puts ...