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 ...

The National Institutes of Health will terminate all funding for grants involving risky gain-of-function research and give researchers until the end of June to say whether their grants comply with ...

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 ...

Former CDC director Robert Redfield told Newsmax in an interview Wednesday why he supports President Trump's executive order preventing the U.S. from funding viral "gain-of-function" research at labs ...

On May 5, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order with the seemingly benign title, “Improving the Safety and Security of Biological Research.” A more accurate title would have been, ...

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 ...

Gain-of-function experiments can help researchers get ahead of viruses naturally gaining the ability to infect people in the wild. But they're also used for many other areas of study within biology.

(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 ...