A group of Republican senators urged the federal government to halt funding to all ongoing and new gain-of-function research, which they say may have contributed to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“These experiments pose extreme threats to public health if the altered pathogens are accidentally or deliberately released,” the senators wrote in a letter (pdf) dated Nov. 22 addressed to Dr. Arati Prabhakar, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).
