On Wednesday, January 17, Biosafety Now co-founders Richard H. Ebright and Bryce Nickels, and distinguished virologist Simon Wain-Hobson will join the Earl Ingram Show to discuss "gain-of-function" research and legislation that seeks to prohibit this research in Wisconsin (Assembly Bill 413/Senate Bill 401).
The event will be broadcast live from 8:00 - 10:00 AM CST (9:00 - 11:00 AM EST) and can be accessed at
https://civicmedia.us/shows/earl-ingram-show
https://www.facebook.com/theearlingramshow/
https://www.youtube.com/@TheEarlIngramShow
The Wisconsin State Assembly's Colleges and Universities Committee conducted a public hearing for Assembly Bill 413 (AB 413) on January 10, 2024. The Senate Health Committee has scheduled a public hearing for Senate Bill 401 (SB 401) on January 18 at 10:00 AM.
Learn more about the bill at: https://biosafetynow.org/gain-of-function-research-legislation-in-wisconsin/
Richard H. Ebright is Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology. He received his PhD in microbiology from Harvard University and was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows. In 1987, he was appointed as Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute and faculty member at Rutgers University. From 1997 to 2013, he was co-appointed as Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He has received the Searle Scholar Award, the Schering-Plough Award of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and the National Institutes of Health MERIT Award. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Association for Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a member of the Institutional Biosafety Committee of Rutgers and has been a member of the Antimicrobial Resistance Committee of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Working Group on Pathogen Security of the State of New Jersey, and the Controlling Dangerous Pathogens Project of the Center for International Security Studies. He has testified to the US House and the US Senate on biosafety, biosecurity, and biorisk management.
Simon Wain-Hobson is an emeritus professor of Virology at the Institute Pasteur, Paris. Wain-Hobson obtained a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Oxford in 1977, served as a post-doctoral fellow at the Weizmann Institute of Science from 1977 to 1980, and thereafter moved to the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He and his colleagues were the first to sequence the genome of the virus that causes AIDS. Wain-Hobson is the co-founder of two biotech companies working to develop countermeasures against cancer. Wain-Hobson won the André Lwoff prize in 1996 and Athena prize from the French Academy of Sciences in 2007 and is Officier de la Légion d’Honneur. Wain-Hobson was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2022 for his services to the field of virology.
Bryce Nickels is Professor of Genetics at Rutgers University and Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology. He received a Ph.D. in microbiology from Harvard University in 2002 and served as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School from 2002-2007. In 2007, he was appointed as Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute and faculty member at Rutgers University. He has received the Pew Scholar Award and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. In 2023, he and Richard Ebright were two co-founders of Biosafety Now (https://biosafetynow.org/), a nonpartisan, New Jersey-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose primary mission is to protect public safety by reducing the likelihood of laboratory-generated pandemics.