Original sentence: " Jeremy Farrar, director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City, described the work as "remarkable" and said that it demonstrated the "very real threat" that "continued circulation of H5N1 strains in Asia and Egypt" poses.As in the Fouchier and Kawaoka experiments above, the viruses in this study were also significantly less lethal after the modification.Chen's work "“appallingly irresponsible" and also raising concerns about the biosafety of the laboratory itself.Critics of the study (including Simon Wain-Hobson of the Pasteur Institute and former Royal Society President Robert May) decried this as an unsafe experiment that was unnecessary to prove the intended conclusions, calling Dr.Importantly, the experiments had been conducted before a research pause on H5N1 experiments had been agreed upon by the greater virologist community.In May 2013, a group led by Hualan Chen, director of the China's National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory published several experiments they had conducted at the BSL3+ laboratory of the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute,  investigating what would happen if a 2009 H1N1 circulating in humans infected the same cell as an avian influenza H5N1.Others (including the Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre on Influenza in Tokyo, Masato Tashiro) praised Chen's laboratory as "state of the art.Proponents of the research cited several benefits: it answered the question of how a virus like H5N1 could possibly become airborne in humans, it allowed other researchers to develop vaccines and therapeutics which specifically targeted these amino acid changes, and it also demonstrated that there was a linkage between transmissibility in avian viruses and lethality: while the virus had become more transmissible, it had also become significantly less deadly.They used these experiments to determine that certain genes, if reassorted in such a dual-infection scenario in the wild, would allow transmission of the H5N1 virus more easily in mammals (notably guinea pigs as a model organism for rodent species), proving that certain agricultural scenarios carry the risk of allowing H5N1 to cross over into mammals
Edited sentence: " This event caused consternation in European biotech circles, as Professor Simon Wain-Hobson of the Pasteur Institute the Chinese scientists "haven’t been thinking clearly about what they are doing.In May 2013, Hualan Chen, who was then director of the China's National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory, and colleagues successfully created a new strain of influenza virus through a gain-of-function experiment at the BSL3 approved Harbin Veterinary Research Institute.It is of no use for vaccine development and the benefit in terms of surveillance for new flu viruses is oversold," while Lord May of Oxford said: "The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring.It’s appallingly irresponsible.It’s very worrying... The virological basis of this work is not strong.The Chinese scientists "deliberately mixed the H5N1 bird-flu virus, which is highly lethal [to birds] but not easily transmitted between [humans], with a 2009 strain of H1N1 flu virus, which is very infectious to humans.They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission of very dangerous viruses.This research claimed several benefits: it answered the question of how a virus like H5N1 could possibly become airborne in humans, it allowed other researchers to develop vaccines and therapeutics which specifically targeted these amino acid changes, and it also demonstrated that there was a linkage between transmissibility in avian viruses and lethality: while the virus had become more transmissible, it had also become significantly less deadly