The Cambridge Working Group

The Cambridge Working Group is a group of medical research scientists and bioethics experts concerned with the biosafety and biosecurity risks of gain of function research. The group has engaged in public advocacy, influencing the US Government's decision in Dec 2015 to issue a moratorium on funding research creating certain types of novel potential pandemic pathogens. In December 2017, the three-year moratorium expired.
The group was formed by Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch at a meeting held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, following a "trifecta" of biosecurity incidents involving the CDC, including the accidental exposure of viable anthrax to personnel at CDC's Roybal Campus, the discovery of six vials containing viable smallpox from the 1950s mislabeled as Variola at the FDA's White Oak campus, and the accidental shipping of H9N2 vials contaminated with H5N1 from the CDC lab to a USDA lab. On July 14, 2014, the group published a Consensus Statement with 18 original signatories and founding members. Within the first two months of publishing the Consensus Statement, 50 more Charter Members signed, and has since been signed by over 200 scientists.
The group advocates for devising alternative research methods that would meet the same research objectives.
Background
Scientists have performed gain of function studies as an experimentation tool for decades, such as "passaging" a virus in a host that it wouldn't usually infect in order to generate attenuated strains for use in vaccines. This was done for the Polio virus.
The Cambridge Working Group is not concerned so much with "gain of function" studies in general, but with applying the tool to creating variants with increased transmissibility and virulence among mammals that could also affect humans in the case of a deliberate or accidental lab release.
Dr. Arturo Casadevall founding editor-in-chief of the mBio, a scientific journal published by the American Society for Microbiology and Michael Imperiale, another editor of the journal, both of who signed the Consensus Statement, said gain of function experiments can yield important information, particularly about flu viruses, but that the research poses risks. As an example, they cited the strong circumstantial evidence indicating that resulted from a lab accident. Other lapses they noted involved anthrax and H5N1 from CDC labs, and infections of lab workers with Yersinia pestis and Brucella species.
In an interview with the New York Times, Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist and laboratory director at Rutgers University, who also signed the Consensus Statement said he had “no confidence” in the safety of the many labs that have sprung up since 2001, citing the need for increased oversight over their management.
Opposing position
Shortly after the Cambridge Working Group released its position statement, Scientists for Science was formed by 37 signatories taking an opposing position. The group's founder, Paul Duprex, said that studies on risky germs are already subject to extensive regulations saying that it would be better to focus more on lab safetey, not limiting the types of experiments that can be done. Notable signatories are Constance Cepko, Dickson Despommier, Erica Ollmann Saphire, Geoffrey Smith, Karla Kirkegaard, Sean Whelan, Vincent Racaniello and Yoshihiro Kawaoka. Columbia University virologist Ian Lipkin, who signed both statements, said "there has to be a coming together of what should be done".
Members
Founding members
The original founding members from 2014 are:
# Amir Attaran of the University of Ottawa
# Barry Bloom of Harvard University
# Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine
# Richard H. Ebright or Rutgers University
# Nicholas Evans of the University of Pennsylvania
# David Fisman of the University of Toronto
# Alison Galvani of Yale School of Public Health
# Peter Hale of the Foundation for Vaccine Research
# Edward Hammond of Third World Network
# Michael Imperiale of the University of Michigan
# Thomas Inglesby of the UPMC Center for Health Security
#Marc Lipsitch, Harvard School of Public Health
# Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota/CIDRAP
# David Relman of Stanford University
# Richard Roberts (Nobel Laureate '93) of New England Biolabs
# Marcel Salathé of the Pennsylvania State University
# Lone Simonsen of the George Washington University
# Silja Vöneky of the University of Freiburg Institute of Public Law
Additional members
Some additional members include:
* John Brownstein from Harvard Medical School
* Neil M. Ferguson of Imperial College
* W. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University
* Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh, UK
* Steven Salzberg of Johns Hopkins University

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