What is the point of doing actual GOF research? We already know viruses can gain function. We already know that bat viruses can infect humans. Is this backdoor bioweapon research framed to avoid breaking the letter of treaties banning it? But if that's the case, outsourcing it seems totally insane.
GoF was used to make the bat virus infect humans... Reasoning was to develop vaccines in advance. Duh.
"What they were worried about was something called “gain-of-function” research, in which the virulence or transmissibility of dangerous pathogens is deliberately increased. The purpose is to help scientists predict how viruses might evolve in ways that hurt humans before it happens in nature. But by bypassing pathogens’ natural evolutionary cycles, these experiments create risks of a human-made outbreak if a lab accident were to occur. For this reason, the Obama administration issued a moratorium on gain-of-function experiments in October 2014.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology had openly participated in gain-of-function research in partnership with U.S. universities and institutions. "
Your idea sounds nice, but it doesn't really make sense. Consider that terrorists can easily do GoF and release the product - no research necessary. On the other hand, when scientists do GoF research, our virological knowledge may be furthered, possibly with applications to making new vaccines and similar.
So, wait. It's not gain-of-function research unless they successfully make a more dangerous virus? These "scientists" are getting so much better at politics. Playing with the definitions of words is a class political tactic!
I'm going to quote one of the scientists the article actually quoted themselves:
"Now, the outcome of the experiment was not clear. You could have assumed that the virus, compared to the ancestral virus is less pathogenic (which was the case). But it could also have been more pathogenic. Therefore, these experiments need to be done in appropriate biosafety laboratories. And, if the virus can become more pathogenic and falls into certain categories, you also need permission from the US government to perform the experiment - especially if they fund your research. And that is what was not done here."
Later on, on the same subject, he literally says: "Having said all that, I absolutely think GOF research should be tightly regulated and controlled."
Our scientific institutions surely have become wholly corrupted by politics. This is gain-of-function research. Whether you think that type of research should be conducted or not is moot. The scientist quoted said he thinks this was not dangerous GOF research, but still needed to be tightly regulated.
I'm a layperson, but AFAIU GoF research in principle is a good thing. It helps us anticipate future viruses, study how they impact humans, and prepare for an eventual outbreak.
It's obviously very risky to do, but we should focus on adopting and enforcing better security practices to minimize the risks, not ban GoF altogether.
It's a bad idea (regardless of whether it's how COVID originated or not), but there are theoretical benefits. Make a GoF virus, observe how it interacts with humanized nice, see how different therapeutic agents work.
The issue is that it's unlikely that any knowledge gained from the GoF research meaningfully accelerates the delivery of treatments or a vaccine, which is the hypothetical benefit that makes up for the increased risk of escape.
Remember that people at the lab were dicking around with bat coronavirus alterations!
While one might say that the same thing was happening in the market via natural gene replication and disease transmission, don't you think that someone intentionally altering parts of genes with the sole purpose of "gain-of-function" (making a more deadly virus) would be more likely to generate something like Covid-19 than a fishmonger who slaps another tilapia onto the ice?
""Gain-of-function" is the euphemism for biological research aimed at increasing the virulence and lethality of pathogens and viruses. GoF research is government funded; its focus is on enhancing the pathogens' ability to infect different species and to increase their deadly impact as airborne pathogens and viruses.
That's not really the case here. Gain of function research can not be justified using this argument.
There are so many potential mutations that putting specific evolutionary pressure on a virus in order to "prevent" only those specific effects has such low efficacy considering the size of the problem space.
GOF research has provided very little in terms of benefits, and many argue it's simply been a way to disguise bioweapons research after the Geneva convention.
It would not, but it would sure as hell reduce the risk of a lab leak. The whole idea of GoF research was to preempt evolution on bad viruses. If instead, the research is causing the evolution of bad viruses, it should be shut down.
I haven't read from them, but as a general thing, GoF research is very directional, so in practice the experiments will pressure a virus to gain a function, but the rest of the functions are usually impacted to a large extent due to the lack of evolutionary pressure.
So you may do selection on virions that target better certain receptors in certain human cells to infect them, and that's useful to know of possible evolutions of a wild virus, but in parallel it might be losing environmental resistance (temperature range, UV light), or maybe damage the expression of some vital protein, or become too pathogenic and die along with the host.
By all means, one could try to perform GoF in live humans to ensure there's no LoF, but that limits enourmously the speed of the research, plus it's usually forbidden to experiment in humans these days.
Well one way to put it is: We already know these viruses can gain function. If we can simulate that in the lab and then study the results we can plan how to deal with the situation if it arises in the wild. It's worth noting that this article isn't being completely transparent about the moratorium, it wasn't just a decision by the US to no longer do that sort of reseach, they were just pausing whilst they reconsidered how they evaluate whether to allow & fund that research. There was no real question of completely banning GOF research. They released that report in 2016[1].
Secondly, they cite a weird website called nationalfile.com for the claim Fauci funded the Chinese lab (in an article written now, not at the time the funding was claimed to be made) - I don't believe that. If you actually look at the NIH website what they're passing off as Fauci fundign the Chinese lab, is a 2018 article about collaboration with the lab in studying an outbreak of a disease in pig farms in Guangdong. Which is not exactly the shooting up bats with SARS is it, and it's certainly not the type of research that was effected by the GOF moratorium.
>The Wuhan lab is now at the center of scrutiny for possibly releasing the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and causing the global Covid-19 pandemic.
This is entirely speculation. There's no evidence of this being the case.
Basically what I'm saying is that this website is a fake news site. It's citing other fake news sites, spreading misinformation and mis-representing government reports.
The controversial claims are baseless - and often uncited, and the citations that are there are either to other misinformation sites- literally, waht is the nationalfile.com?
I wouldn't say that all GOF research is for bioweapons, part of it is to see where the virus is likely to evolve next and protect against that, which is more on the defensive side of that.
Doesn't mean it's less risky, mind you, and this is convincing me that the experts on this need to reassess whether it's worth the risks and if so, what safety precautions are needed. I would think that BSL-2 is just way too low, but I would defer to the scientists on this and only say that I think this shows that anything done to make something more infectious to humans should be treated as though it already was highly infectious to humans.
Gain of Function virus research is evil. Making lab work transparent is a half measure.
GoF virus engineering cannot be suppressed now because Covid is obviously an effective military weapon against the USA, whose love of freedom defeats public health policy.
No such problem in Wuhan where authorities reported welded shut the doors of infected households.
Gain of function research on dangerous viruses is one of those things that seems like such a obviously and totally awful idea that I have to assume I'm missing something. Is the whole thing just a bio weapons program with a sheen of paint and the occasional lab escape is a cost of doing business? Like this is stuff that will, eventually, always have an accident, no? Especially when it's financed to happen in countries with less than stellar working conditions. I can't imagine that everyone involved is so deluded as to think they can repeatedly make super viruses with no consequences, right? What am I missing?
The story isn't about 'investigating viruses', but (if true) about gain of function virus research meant to enhance their ability in order to study them.
It's noteworthy that all the research which helped so far had nothing to do with GoF research or the Lab. The spike research dates back to SARS-COV-1 studies. The vaccine technologies used had little to do with GoF. On the other hand, the Wuhan Lab, supposedly experienced with coronaviruses, has apparently gave us nothing useful at all.
Apparently the Wuhan Lab's research was dangerous yet also useless.
The core argument of your Reddit post addressing gain-of-function research is that GoF research causes the sugars on the surface of the virus to be lost.
But that doesn't address the recombination event / recombinant virus, which is what the proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis seem to be arguing (spike protein from one virus combined with backbone from another virus)
Yeah, just don't do GoF research. Or don't let it escape from a lab. Or, don't lie about it when it does. Or, contain it if it does. Or shut down travel outside the country if it does. Or, don't cripple Australia with a trade war if they suggest an investigation into the origins of the disease are warranted. Or don't cancel people if they wonder if maybe it didn't come from nature. Or, do the audits to verify the labs doing catastrophic research are doing it safely and properly. Or, don't sneak in funding for something that has already been declared a risk to human existence. Or, don't pay "non-profits" millions of dollars to pay enemy nations to do research into how to turn a virus into a bioweapon. Or value the health of the world over the profits of corporations.
I bet none of these ideas are in the report.
* read article *
Nope.
* reads report *
Oh, I got one: Waive IP rights to vaccines.
Their suggestion: Give the WHO more money. They'll do it better next time apparently.
I guarantee you, if China had said, "A bioweapon we were developing escaped the lab, lock everything down!"
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