In October 2017, in Mimi village in Nagaland’s Kiphire district, a few kilometres from the Myanmar border, researchers drew blood from 85 bat hunters. The Bomrr clan there has smoked bats out of the caves every October for seven generations, and the hunters are routinely scratched and bitten. Blood was also drawn from 46 bats and tissue taken from 103 more. The samples were taken out of the country and results published in
PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases in 2019.
Among the co-authors of the study was Shi Zheng Li of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, later popularised as the ‘Bat Lady’ of Wuhan. The funding came from the defence threat reduction agency, an arm of the US department of defence. The study was not approved by the ICMR (Indian Council of Medical Research). A government inquiry ordered in 2020 found several lapses in protocol and approvals.
As revealed in the study, five of the 85 hunters had carried antibodies to filoviruses, the family that includes Ebola and Marburg, in a region with no recorded history of the disease, making their biological profiles priority cases for pharma research. The immune profile of a specific population in a border district was mapped with foreign defence funding, by foreign nationals in sensitive permit-requiring areas, involved transport of high-risk pathogens by public transport and airlines without approvals, and was published with American and Chinese co-authors.
Both US and China have highly developed bio-warfare programmes, one essential arm of which involves work on bat-viruses, a bat being known to remain disease-free despite infection from 17 pathogens. The southern Chinese landmass and northeast India are home to large bat populations, hence the serious national security concern regarding unapproved bat research in India. This is the nature of threat that emerges from dual-use research.
In December 2025, the US White House publicly doubted the natural origins of Covid-19, stating that the virus possessed a “biological characteristic that is not found in nature.”
The White House statement drew on a 500-plus-page
report released in December 2024 by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which concluded that a lab-related incident was the most likely origin. On 5 May 2025, president Trump signed
Executive Order 14292, prohibiting US federal funding of gain-of-function research in countries of concern. The order named China and Iran and extended to foreign nations deemed to have insufficient oversight of research. It also paused work with infectious pathogens and toxins within the United States, pending a new policy to be designed by the country’s scientific and security establishment.
Gain-of-function research artificially enhances the virulence or transmissibility of a high-risk pathogen. Until recently, it was a specialist controversy among virologists. The 2025 order hybridises two areas of national importance, national security and biosafety, whose administrative departments, in most countries, rarely speak to each other.
Earlier, the US government had debarred a New York-based NGO, EcoHealth Alliance, and its chief patron Peter Daszak from federal funding (
debarment notice) for financing gain-of-function work on coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Academic papers
published in 2013 and 2015 describe the creation of chimeric viruses carrying engineered spike proteins in mouse models. Similar spike proteins were found in SARS-CoV-2 strains; there being much debate on whether they were of similar origin or not and/or if they were lab-engineered or not.
The pandemic also punctured a piece of folk wisdom that pathogens reliably attenuate as they spread, because milder variants are more transmissible but less virulent, hence contributing to human immunity. Yet, the Delta variant that hit India in March 2021 was way more virulent than the Alpha variant in early-2020 and led to a correspondingly higher death toll. Omicron and other variants followed the age-old wisdom and were milder. Thus, evolution was not unidirectional, leaving behind the question of whether this was an intentional release or an unintended escape and/or was it lab-engineered or not. Unfortunately, scientific research in this connection is muted and obfuscated by sources of funding that have vested interests in pharma-capitalism.
Gain-of-function (GOF) work is not confined to coronaviruses—comparable questions arise with Ebola and Nipah. Which returns us to the Nagaland case. A wide swath of North-East India and South China is home to bat species that host high-risk pathogens, and that ecology explains the depth of scientific interest in the region. It also explains why the interest is not purely scientific.
The discovery of filovirus-reactive antibodies is genuinely valuable for vaccine and drug development. But data on the immune characteristics of an identified local population, held outside Indian jurisdiction, is dual-use by its nature: the same information that guides a countermeasure can guide the design of an agent optimised against the population it was drawn from.
A related case surfaced in Canada in 2019. At the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg,
scientists Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng shipped Ebola and Nipah virus samples to Shi Zheng Li at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Qiu exported 30 vials with internal approvals in place. The consignment included two samples listed on the customs invoice as “Nipah Malaysia” and “Nipah Bangladesh”, as shown in emails later declassified by the Canadian Parliament. The approvals were internal. That a national laboratory could export agents of this class to a foreign institution without wider governmental oversight is the point of concern, not the paperwork.
With the Nagaland, Canadian and American cases, what is evident so far is that GOF is dual-use research, but is under minimal controls and needs attention.
Beyond chimeric viruses, other dual-use agents have entered the scientific mainstream. Genetically modified mosquitoes, released to suppress wild populations, are the most prominent. The security-scientific community needs to ask whether such constructs are viable in the Indian environment, whether they could give rise to more prolific vectors than the ones they replace, and what the economics look like of releasing engineered mosquitoes in the millions, every few days, indefinitely. These are not objections. They are the questions a State must ask.
Way Forward
To assess bio-disaster risk seriously, India must remain aware of developments in gain-of-function laboratories in pharmaceutical companies, research institutes and universities worldwide and of the specialists working on high-risk pathogens - their publications, their collaborators and their sources of funding. The
Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 provides the legal basis for international regulation. It has 189 states parties, no verification regime, no implementing organisation and depends entirely on voluntary compliance. India hosted the convention’s 50th anniversary conference in New Delhi in December 2025 and argued there for modernisation. The argument would carry further if it rested on a domestic framework.
The intersection of biosafety with national security must be recognised as a distinct vertical, located at the centre of policy and entrusted to a standing group of security and scientific professionals for the collection and analysis of intelligence in this domain. Otherwise, the existing pattern will hold. The samples will leave, the papers will appear and invisible threats to national security will multiply.
(Dr Twinkle Sharma is former public health expert at NDMA and Safi Ahsan Rizvi is former Advisor, NDMA)
