Page:Interim Staff Report on Investigation into Risky MPXV Experiment at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.pdf/14



Dr. Bernard Moss discussed this direction of gene transfer in a September 2022 Science article on NIAID work on MPXV (then referred to as “monkeypox”). In particular, the article detailed the following about the project:

Evolutionary virologists have instead concentrated on the influenza virus, HIV, and other small viruses whose genomes consist of RNA. Poxviruses, by contrast, are made of DNA, and are much larger and more complex. With roughly 200,000 nucleotides and 200 genes, the monkeypox genome is more than 20 times the size of HIV’s. It’s not clear what many of those genes do, [Dr. Bernard] Moss says, let alone how they interact with each other or how changes in any of them might affect their impact on humans.

Moss has been trying for years to figure out the crucial difference between two variants of monkeypox virus: clade 2, which until recently was found only in West Africa and is now causing the global outbreak, and clade 1, believed to be much deadlier, which has caused outbreaks in the Democratic