New Scientist magazine: Hybrid flu virus in near-miss escape:

Last April, a researcher at the University of Texas, Austin, put tubes into a centrifuge to separate out their contents, which included a human flu virus modified to carry a gene from H5N1 bird flu. The centrifuge became unbalanced and stopped, and when the researcher opened it he found the lid of a safety cup holding one of the tubes had fallen off. [...] If aerosol had escaped, the consequences could have been serious, since the virus would have been able to infect humans, with unknown effects.

I spoke with Bob Krug about this incident in his lab; he emphasized that the experiment used only 1 gene from H5N1 and that they substituted a hemagglutinin gene from "an old virus from 1972" to which many people have immunity, in order not to increase the hybrid virus's transmissibilty to humans and to decrease its pathogenicity. I asked about whether this experiment could be viewed as weaponizing H5N1 or providing information that could be used to do so; he replied that this is the least dangerous work that is currently being done to examine the H5N1 genes that are distinct from human flu genes and that code for internal proteins (not surface proteins) that could be targets of future animal studies. He also emphasized the lab's BSL3 safety procedures and responsibility in reporting the incident. He is concerned that the publicity generated by this accident, especially by the Sunshine Project, will discourage other labs from reporting such incidents.