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.
I don’t research viruses, so I can’t tell you if GoF is the right tool to fight a future pandemic or not. What I do know is that if a deadly virus with a 30% CFR is spreading rapidly, I want the experts fighting it to have every tool at their disposal. I don’t want them artificially handcuffed in finding a cure/vaccine by the feelings of some Hacker News posters like me and you. Happy to stipulate that this should be an emergency capability, but frankly I don’t know enough about the value of preemptive GoF research to determine whether that’s a good balance.
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.
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.
Consider the alternative history where we had always decided that GoF research is not worth the risks. There is a very real possibility that in that universe, we wouldn't have had the coronavirus pandemic with (checks) around 6 million casualties (and counting, and countless other negative effects for billions of people). You need A LOT of high quality results from successful GoF research to make up for that. I'm not familiar with the field at all, but I highly doubt you could point at the complete accumulated body of research resulting from all GoF research everywhere and say that it was worth it.
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.
well how about establishing safety procedures, research guidelines and international regulation body governing dangerous GoF research so that such outbreak doesn't happen again.
"Should" is a pretty strong statement. GoF studies, like social media-based disease surveillance, are one of those things that has a compelling "Just So" story justifying its existence, but has yet to show that it actually does what it's supposed to do.
Also, the alternative is not burying our head in the sand. It's monitoring and studying nature, instead of forcing the issue in a lab, and investing in infrastructure and capacity that work against a broad range of pathogen threats.
Suppose that a lab created a novel virus, which then leaked and killed 2 million people, including making you very sick so that you had difficulty breathing for a month and killing someone close to you. If that happened, might you conclude that maybe we shouldn't mutate deadly human viruses in the lab? Or at least, that the burden of proof that that research is worth millions of lives should be very high?
A lot of people died from Covid; there's a good chance it was due to virus research; even if it wasn't it certainly could happen in the future; I don't want them to have died in vain.
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.
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.
I think your 'commoners' framing... is not helpful here.
You raise a few objectionable assertions that I think is good to contemplate:
- GoF was never banned
- The ban was NIH funding GoF
- The ban was lifted in 2017 anyways
- Is this risky? The ban on funding it doesn't mean it's risky, as per se.
- The potential pie in the eye risk are infinite, but what are the realistic risks? That really depends on the technical details of how the research is done, and where it's done.
- Compare and contrast to activities that are very dangerous and have nearly infinite catastrophic risks but we do every day: driving, flying, operating nuclear power plants, refining oil, and much much more.
All of this research came out of the desire not to be caught flat footed by the next version of SARS or MERS. Overall global research did in fact prep us for SARS-CoV-2. Vaccines "made in months" that have stood the test of efficacy and safety? Months if you ignore the years of research behind it.
Is this particular thing excessively dangerous or not? I'm not 100% sure. Most of the "this is unacceptable" seems to be coming from people who seem to have a visceral hatred of Dr Fauci and who as head of the NIH was indirectly responsible for this funding. But I don't find that a reasonable line of reasoning. One thing I know, is every scientist I know is not paid a boat load, and care deeply about what they are doing and why.
Perhaps GoF is too 'dangerous', but maybe we should also hear about how it can be made safe, how does it compare in hazardousness to other common things that are deemed 'safe' and what the benefits are.
TLDR for the paper: GoF is not necessarily the strongest candidate for this flu outbreak. However, all the candidates are man-made due to research efforts.
To me this points out that every study on a pandemic-possible virus should have an extremely high bar to meet in terms of both safety and reason for performing the study in the first place. Effectively the only reason that is needed now to perform such research is that you want to publish a paper. The linked paper points out one possible source of the flu pandemic: vaccine development. This may have been a worthy enough cause but greater safeguards are needed. We should take the money we spend on GoF research and spend it on ensuring better safeguards for existing research.
GoF research has an explicit goal is to make a virus more human transmissible: if it is too successful, you end up with the possibility of a pandemic. We now have a COVID pandemic that might have been caused by GoF research. On the flip side we can't show much benefit from this kind of research.
GoF on pathogens that couldn't possibly cause a human pandemic (including viruses that don't infect humans, or anything replication-incompetent) seems much less risky to me, and I believe that was excluded from the 2014 restrictions. It may still present some risk, to the extent it would guide later practitioners working in replication-competent human pathogens, with or without malicious intent. I generally dislike the framing of the debate in terms of a "GoF ban", which is why I chose the phrase "high-risk research" and qualified GoF to potential pandemic pathogens. I'm aware that very few people are going to understand this nuance; but that's the reason why practitioners need to competently regulate themselves, instead of leaving this to an uninformed mob.
That said, there's zero question that DEFUSE proposed to collect and enhance replication-competent potential human pandemic pathogens. That proposal wasn't funded, and that proposal indeed anticipated that the GoF work would be done at UNC; but the WIV seems clearly capable of that work too. We don't know what happened next, and I believe we should do everything in our power to find out. If possible, that would occur with China's cooperation; but since that seems impossible for now, it should proceed without. For example, large amounts of raw sequencer reads exist on the servers of American and European research groups and their service providers. Those should be subpoenaed, and searched for evidence of early SARS-CoV-2 genomes as contamination, similar to that found in the Antarctic soil samples. Do you disagree?
I also dislike the framing in terms of "GoF ban" because I agree fully that nature may present a greater risk than anything we could make in a lab. It seems entirely plausible to me that right now, there are viruses deep inside some cave that could end human life as we know it, but that we've simply been lucky enough that the virus has never left the cave. But how could that possibly be a reason to send some grad student into the cave? From pictures and videos of WIV sampling trips, they were sending researchers in with no protection beyond a surgical mask and nitrile gloves. That seems insane to me. If humans will be entering an area regardless--for agriculture, or tourism, or whatever else--then I agree we should be sampling it. But why should we go looking for trouble in areas that no other human is likely to approach?
You keep saying that virology brings potential benefits, and that's obviously true. It also brings potential detriments though, including research-origin pandemics, and it's done so at least once in the past. I see no evidence that you're making anything like a cost/benefit tradeoff here; you're simply disregarding all the costs, somehow classifying deaths quite directly caused by research activities as "natural" and thus unimportant. That's not how anything else in life works--if I'm careless with my campsite, then the resulting wildfire may be indistinguishable from one set by lightning, but the ranger is still going to say it's my fault.
I have no special affection for Ridley, though I still prefer him to the author of the article you linked, who called Alina Chan a "moronic psychopath"[1]. In any case, the messenger shouldn't matter. As to the narrow question of investigating the origin of SARS-CoV-2, I believe Ridley is right and you're dangerously wrong. You've correctly shut down some genuine nonsense here (e.g., Moderna patents on the sequence). You've also posted at least two unequivocal falsehoods yourself though (WIV situated based on diversity of nearby relevant viruses, no prior unnatural pandemic), and presented other evidence in much stronger terms than any scientific consensus (e.g., the two lineages; George Gao[2] thinks they probably evolved in humans, and I presume you're not going to call him a lab leak conspiracist). I don't see how that enhances public knowledge.
Do you actually need GoF research to prevent animal spillovers? Did GoF research help us develop the COVID vaccines? Or does GoF research mostly demonstrate the risks of spillover? Because I think we're now well aware of the risks, and ought to avoid poking the bear any further.
The approximate loss of life for major outbreaks in the past 25 years (excluding Covid) was around 500K. In a best case scenario GoF could have mitigated maybe 20% of that or 100k. Let' say one research initiative as r, the chance of that research being successful as s, the chance of that research being on the exact virus causing the outbreak as v, the type of mutation research being the actual mutation the virus had as m, the chance that the government leveraged the research and took action to prepare accordingly to take advantage of that research as g, we get s * v * m * g = P probability of r mitigating outbreaks by 20%. P of r is probably around 1/100 or less. So you would probably want around at least 100 GOF research initiatives to save ~100K lives.
On the surface that might sound ok. However if we undergo a similar exercise of chances of Lab leak causing an outbreak we'll probably end up with a similar figure of 1/100. In a lab leak we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen that has caused a prior outbreak which may kill an order more people than the average outbreak. So perhaps a million deaths alone, or if we entertain that Covid was caused by a lab lead ~10m deaths, or 100x of 100k.
Ultimately it seems GoF research is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduces total deaths on net.
A much more effective route seems to simply invest in rapid sequencing, rapid wastewater monitoring, PPE stocking/distribution policies, more effective local lockdown procedures/policies.
The link above is a fairly readable summary of a conference in which academics debated the need for gain of function research. As you can see, this was not a settled topic, and even some of the supporters of GoF research admit doubts about its utility.
To summarize the paper I posted:
1. Gain of function research, broadly construed, also includes adapting viruses to live "in culture", i.e. in a dish of cells. That's a fundamentally useful and necessary part of research, so a blanket ban could unnecessarily complicate basic research.
2. GoF is useful for evaluating the potential impacts of mutations observed in the wild. Like, we see a particular mutation circulating, but its significance is unknown, so we introduce it into a model virus in a lab to test what impact it has. This helps us decide which strains we should choose to develop vaccinations for. This can also be done prospectively, GoF can identify particularly nasty variants, which we can then prioritize for more intense intervention if they're observed in the wild.
3. There's a basic research interest in understanding the molecular details of how viruses infect humans. GoF allows researchers to probe this much more easily than the random sampling we get from wild viruses. This research has led (in part) to basic insights in virology, like the role of the furin polybasic cleavage site in coronaviruseses in increasing virulence.
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.
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