The term GOF didn’t have much to do with virology until the past decade. Then, the ferret influenza studies came along. In trying to advise the federal government on the nature of such research, the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) borrowed the term — and it stuck, says Gigi Gronvall,a biosecurity specialist at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. From that usage, it came to mean any research that improves a pathogen’s abilities to cause disease or spread from host to host.
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