Gain of Function Research Survey
This repo contains supplemental material on the gain of function research survey conducted by CSET.
We designed a survey fielded in fall 2022 to ask researchers with expertise in biotechnology how they define and perceive gain-of-function research. We define our population of interest as individuals who authored a GOF-relevant in PubMed and a targeted group of researchers and industry professionals who have been identified by the CSET research team as performing GOFR or have expertise in a field related to gain-of-function research. As this population is fairly small, we supplemented our sample of academic researchers performing gain-of-function research with targeted outreach and a snowball sample of U.S. professionals who work in fields that may include policy, biosafety/bioethicists professionals that was sent via email. In total, we received 14 responses (9 complete and 5 partial) for a response rate of 4.05 percent. The median response time was 10 minutes. We asked questions about individuals' definitions of 1) gain-of-function research for a variety of audiences 2) merits and risks of performing GOFR, and 3) comments on existing definitions of GOFR. The goal of this survey is to garner insight on what experts deem to be GOFR, including identifying GOFR experiments and perspectives on its purposes.