Working with oncogenic lentivirus

Of my few readers, I think there are only a couple scientists who occasionally visit this blog. So, I try not to talk science too much here. But, every once in a while I find something interesting that may have a broader appeal (and isn't too technical or super top secret).

I frequently read In the Pipeline, a blog by Derek Lowe. It's a good chemistry/pharma industry blog that doesn't usually get too technical. I'm no chemist but I find it pretty interesting. Anyway, from time to time he will post an entry like the one today, "Things I Won't Work With: Straight Dimethyl Zinc." To be honest, before I read it, I had no idea what a dimethyl zinc was, but it got me wondering. What biological reagents and tools are on my list of "things I won't work with?" I haven't yet come across anything that I feel all that strongly about, but I have recently pondered doing one experiment that gave me the chills.

Short background for the non-science types: An oncogene is a gene that is frequently mutated in human cancers. These genes have normal functions for most of the life of a person - usually involved with regulating cell proliferation - but at some point a cell will acquire a mutation in that gene that causes uncontrolled cell growth, which causes cancer. As a biologist I spend most of my time understanding how these oncogenes work, and hopefully - eventually - how to turn them off in a cancer cell. That brings me to lentivirus. One way we can study an oncogene is to force a cell to mutate the oncogene we are interested in. There are a few ways to do this, but the most reproducible and most "robust" method is to introduce the oncogene to a cell by way of virus. We can actually genetically engineer a virus to infect cells in a culture dish, and force the cell to express the oncogene we want to study. The good news is we can also engineer the virus not to replicate. So, we can actually control how much cancer causing virus we are working with at any given time.

Ok, enough background. This is all cool stuff but the problem with this whole scenario is that we can genetically engineer a cancer causing virus, which is capable of infecting human cells. This raises some obvious and serious health concerns. For now, I won't give much commentary, but I will say that for the time being I don't have a pressing need to do the experiment, so I have never made an oncogenic lentivirus. But I think it's worth asking before actually feeling that "need." I think I've answered the question for myself, but I was curious to hear other opinions on the topic. So, in an effort to get a little reader feedback, would this make your list of "things I will not work with?" What about others? If it were up to you, would you allow others at your institution to work with such a virus? Your direct reports? Under what circumstances would you allow it?