[HN Gopher] Researchers' tests of lab-made version of Covid viru...
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Researchers' tests of lab-made version of Covid virus draw scrutiny
Author : russfink
Score : 171 points
Date : 2022-10-18 12:47 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.statnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.statnews.com)
| derstander wrote:
| The linked article mentions a BU response via email. There's also
| one via the web [0]. The preprint is way outside of my field of
| expertise so I can't confidently evaluate the news stories
| against the preprint. But if journalists misinterpreted
| scientific research it would certainly not be the first time.
|
| [0] https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/neidl-researchers-refute-
| uk...
| tripletao wrote:
| That response is an exercise in obfuscation. For example:
|
| > Corley says the line pulled out of context actually had
| nothing to do with the virus' effect on humans. The study began
| in a tissue culture, then moved to an animal model.
|
| So they're saying we don't know if their lab-created chimera is
| actually more dangerous in live humans, because they
| (fortunately!) haven't tested in live humans. That completely
| misses the point of those models, though--the reason why tissue
| cultures and animals are used is that they're often predictive
| of the effect in humans.
|
| By that standard in their mice, their chimera is possibly less
| deadly than the original Wuhan wild type, but definitely more
| deadly than omicron. They didn't study the effect on
| transmissibility, but we know that's determined mostly by the
| spike.
|
| So their chimera may combine most of the deadliness of the
| Wuhan wild type with the transmissibility of omicron. We can't
| prove that without experiments in live humans that I hope will
| never be conducted, but that sure sounds like a gain of
| function research of concern to me.
| SSJPython wrote:
| Why are we fucking with nature? Like literally what is the point
| of this? To show that we can? Some fucked up biological arms race
| with the other great powers?
|
| When you fuck with nature, nature wins. Always.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > When you fuck with nature, nature wins. Always.
|
| There's, like, an entire human civilization on this planet
| right now that begs to differ.
|
| Ever been to Vegas? Not a single thing natural about that
| place; it's been there over 100 years.
| salawat wrote:
| Do you not understand Nature does not operate on the same
| timescales as humanity?
|
| Do you realize that place's entire existence is predicated on
| a _massive_ logistical network that if left untrnded for a
| week would likely result in a completely inhospitable
| environment for the residents?
|
| Civilization as we know it is excruciatingly fragile, and
| maintained by active expenditure of human energy. Nature, is
| self'sustaining, closed loop, enthalpy decreasing and Just
| Frigging Works. It just may take a while for us to
| see/realize something that makes it click that, wow, nature
| finds a way.
|
| I'd think the modern hiccups in the supply chain recently
| would have provided sufficient examples of how fragile the
| entire artifice is...
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Nature isn't magic, and our species has exterminated enough
| species and ecosystems to respect how fragile it is.
|
| And while you speak of nature at large, we tend to care
| more about subsets of it. Life, in the large, survived the
| extinction of the dinosaurs, but a rock from space could
| easily fuck with nature in a way that it wouldn't "bounce
| back" in any way relevant to us.
| rhacker wrote:
| But that's also a major problem. We have deemed life so
| unimportant, that if Russia wants San Francisco
| obliterated tomorrow, they have the power to do that.
| Literally nothing can stop them if they are hell-bent on
| that, damn the consequences.
|
| I think the only people that realize things like this are
| those that have lost others. Perhaps by mistake even-
| perhaps especially - his hand slipped and he is dead now.
| Someone's wife out there is thinking that ALL the time.
| Perhaps in a year we'll be mourning permanently for New
| York like that.
| obert wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33244592
| mgamache wrote:
| "There is a lot of evidence that points to the virus spreading
| from a wet market in the city"
|
| Spreading, yes. Originating no. Note:
|
| This article uses two preprint papers one of which was changed
| before publication and the other doesn't support zoonotic origin:
|
| https://www.science.org/content/article/do-three-new-studies...
| giantg2 wrote:
| Whether natural or escaping from a lab, I fully expect a mass
| casualty disease in my lifetime. We saw what a shitshow covid
| was, and it wasn't even _that_ bad.
|
| Fast global travel is spreading the endemic ranges of many
| diseases and make it essentially impossible to stop many diseases
| depending on the traits of the disease.
|
| A potential lab leak of many types of diseases is more of a
| threat and will likely kill more people than a limited nuclear
| deployment. At least with the nuclear issue someone has to push
| the button. With the lab leak it's almost a certainty that
| equipment will fail in some unprecedented way, or someone will
| absent-mindedly violate protocol. It's a lot harder to keep track
| of a microbe than a warhead.
| bigdollopenergy wrote:
| I don't think so. I think Covid was unique in that it occupied
| a sweet-spot in it's severity. A more severe virus would play
| out very differently. I don't think we'd see such a huge
| conspiracy movement around it and much greater compliance from
| the population.
|
| The danger of the covid virus was concentrated in specific
| demographics such that a lot of people didn't directly see how
| dangerous it was. This created a disconnect between what was
| being reported vs what people saw with their own eyes, creating
| the perfect environment for conspiracy theories to run rampant.
| For example, I don't know anyone that died or had a bad time
| with it, nor does anyone else in my family/close circle. But
| that's because I don't really know any old or medically
| vulnerable people, but with our aging populations in the
| western world this group is actually huge. We had people
| dropping like flies in certain sub-groups while in others
| nothing much happened and only where the groups intersected was
| it visible how bad it really was (healthcare workers, people
| with old grandparents not taking it seriously). It also doesn't
| help that older demographics almost always have something else
| wrong with them and Covid a lot of the time was one
| contributing factor that pushed them over the edge, this really
| fueled the conspiracy theorists narrative of falsely
| attributing causes of death to "inflate" numbers.
|
| I also think the media took a wrong turn in it's messaging and
| told too many noble lies. It was really important that the
| young and healthy also thought that this might be real threat
| to them personally so they'd actually take it seriously and
| stop spreading it. But young people would lookup the statistics
| for their own risk and would see fatality/complication rates of
| sub 1%, and also note that those affected were primarily the
| morbidly obese and immuno-compromised. I recall seeing a lot of
| articles indicating that there was a surge of young people in
| ER and articles showing obituaries of young people in order to
| hammer home the message that it was a real danger to them too.
| The problem is the official statistics didn't back that message
| up to the degree that it needed to, so you had this big
| disconnect that was exploited heavily by conspiracy theorists.
| IMO this was likely a misguided effort directed towards
| reducing spread, because it was determined that quarantining to
| save other people wasn't a strong enough incentive to curb
| risky behavior (which is depressing), but backfired heavily and
| likely caused more harm than good.
|
| If a more serious virus came around that had fatality rates in
| the double digits, I don't think conspiracy theories would be
| able to form. Because very quickly people would see people they
| know in their lives dying/becoming extremely sick. There's no
| uncertainly/disconnect to exploit in that scenario like there
| was with covid.
| [deleted]
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > IMO this was likely a misguided effort directed towards
| reducing spread, because it was determined that quarantining
| to save other people wasn't a strong enough incentive to curb
| risky behavior (which is depressing), but backfired heavily
| and likely caused more harm than good.
|
| Perhaps a large set of people have a different set of values
| and consider the tradeoff between endless (and mostly
| useless) lockdowns and restrictions not worth it compared to
| taking their risks of getting covid.
|
| Perhaps they have decided that the costs to society far
| outweigh any benefits from these mitigations. These are a
| perfectly valid set of values, just different than your own--
| it requires absolutely no "conspiracy theories" to think
| this.
|
| > conspiracy theorists
|
| There is not many conspiracy theories about covid and a very
| small set of people peddle them. Most of the "conspiracy
| theories" turned out to be perfectly true. For example
| requiring proof of vaccination to sit down at a starbucks
| turned out to be true. Vaccines turned out to do very little
| to stop infection or transmission. Masks not working as well
| as some people would like to believe. Lockdowns and school
| closures hurt children--especially those who are low-income.
|
| Writing off everything you disagree with as "conspiracy
| theory" is poor intellectual thinking. Maybe if you put aside
| your preconceived notions and dug harder into the arguments
| people have against everything society has done for covid,
| you'd discover that they have very valid points.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "A more severe virus would play out very differently."
|
| It wouldn't necessarily. It could still be nearly impossible
| to contain given the right characteristics, like asymptomatic
| carriers, a latency period, or benign early onset symptoms.
| With the right parameters and fast global travel, it would be
| global before any measures could even be implemented (theory
| is this was the case with Covid).
|
| "I don't think we'd see such a huge conspiracy movement
| around it and much greater compliance from the population."
|
| There might be better compliance, but not likely enough to
| make a difference. Many of the things that they're supposed
| to be complying with were misunderstood, ineffective (maybe
| marginally effective), and wouldn't prevent transmission.
| Even if you were to lock almost everyone in their homes, you
| still have some essential personnel who must travel/work/etc.
| Most lack the training necessary for _consistently_ complying
| with prevention protocols.
|
| Just look at the number of people dying of drugs every year.
| They know it's bad. Some think it won't happen to them.
| Others don't care. There's no reason to believe that a non-
| zero portion of the population would share these two thought
| processes in this sort of situation and still cause
| significant damage. Including the people who see no/limited
| risk for themselves.
| muaytimbo wrote:
| This is an interesting case, making chimeras can always be
| thought of as "gain-of-function" research because you really only
| know if you succeeded after you've created and tested the new
| organism, and there might be failures along the way if indeed
| creating a more lethal organism is your goal.
|
| In this case there is some handwaving about 80% mortality vs 100%
| mortality in a mouse host about it technically not being more
| lethal than the original. But what if the testing revealed 100%
| mortality plus some other metric of increased transmissibility or
| something similar after the fact. It would've been unknown to the
| researchers at the time of synthesis and fit every definition of
| "gain-of-function" research.
|
| I think in light of this inability to know apriori if a virus is
| going to be more/less lethal we're splitting hairs when we say
| this is not technically "gain-of-function" research.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| Exactly. Lowe is using a really horrible argument, he is trying
| to use the results to justify the experiment, but the entire
| point is it was an experiment and they had no idea how it would
| turn out. It's entirely possible it could have been 100% as the
| result and that somehow this chimera found a spike mutation
| that provided human immune escape and a lab worker was
| accidentally infected as patient zero. It's not what happened
| obviously but the idea he can use the experiments results to
| justify the experiment is absurd. He is a dangerous apologist,
| "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his
| salary depends on his not understanding it".
| muaytimbo wrote:
| It's unfortunate because I like reading Lowe usually, but
| these pieces that obfuscate and explain to us how we should
| feel about something so obvious is telling.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| How there isn't a full on worldwide ban on this now is just
| beyond me. Our hubris and overconfidence could kill millions
| more.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Biology research gives me nightmares. For the low price a an
| undergraduate degree and a few tens of thousands of dollars you
| can build a garage lab which can make something like covid in
| your spare time.
|
| In physics and chemistry you at least have to work hard for
| your WMD. In biology you get them for free because you're not
| careful enough.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It may very well be riskier than not to ban research like that
| on an endemic airborne virus that has shown a proclivity to
| mutate.
|
| If no humans are running controlled experiments on the virus,
| there is still an experiment currently being run as a massive,
| randomized trial in the form of the natural mutative processes
| the virus undergoes in the infected human population. How much
| do we want to trust that it won't hit upon an HIV-category
| combinatoric mutation before we're aware it has the potential
| to do that?
|
| The risk tradeoff is difficult here, but we should keep in mind
| that the risk of doing no such research is way, way higher than
| zero.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| The current pandemic was probably caused by such research.
| But even if you don't believe that it was _probably_ caused
| by it, a reasonable person and can admit it was _possibly_ by
| it. Multiply that "possibly" out by 6.5M deaths or so and
| that's your research death toll.
|
| So 1% chance of lab escape? 65,000 deaths. Weigh that against
| your hypothetical benefits of performing the research and I
| think it's hard to conclude that such research is wise.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The 1918 flu involved no lab leak and killed [edit]: 50
| million people.
|
| I don't care for the game of fatality calculus, but if one
| is going to play it, that's the enemy humanity is up
| against.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Your counterexample would need to be a positive instance,
| not "other bad things also happen" and that evidence
| would also need to be strong! Chemotherapy has many
| terrible side effects but it helps kill cancer! With high
| certainty!
|
| You wouldn't subject people to chemotherapy if you lacked
| _any_ evidence that it was helpful.
| baja_blast wrote:
| Yes, but how has the millions we have spent on collecting
| and modifying wild coronaviruses helped us with this
| pandemic. Despite over 100 years of technological
| advancements and the virus is still impossible to stop!
| So why do we want to risk creating new viruses when the
| decades of research has proven to be such a colossal
| failure?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > impossible to stop
|
| I don't think one stops a pandemic; IIUC, one gets out in
| front of it with vaccination. Which we did, thanks to
| previous mRNA research conducted on other viruses. GOF
| research is one of the few ways we're aware of to get out
| in front of vaccinating viruses that don't yet exist but
| are probable to exist.
|
| This argument treads suspiciously close to "Sometimes
| people use fire to burn a house down, so why do we allow
| cooking? People should only be allowed to use naturally-
| occurring fires and not create new ones."
| tsimionescu wrote:
| mRNA research was mainly developed to fight cancers, not
| viruses. To the extent that it was already being
| researched to stop viruses, it was being tested on
| existing viruses, not GOF-modified ones.
| baja_blast wrote:
| And what is the probability that out of the thousands of
| viruses we identify the exact one that mutates in the
| exact manner as researches induce in the lab? The
| possible mutations a virus could take are astronomical,
| and conditions in a lab using humanized mice models are
| not something that would ever happen in the wild. Efforts
| are better spent on surveillance not prediction!
| https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-
| assets/d41586-018...
| jpeloquin wrote:
| Your article actually argues in favor of the type of
| research BU was doing because it's being done post-
| outbreak: "Once an emerging outbreak virus has been
| identified, it needs to be analysed quickly to establish
| what type it is; which molecular mechanisms (such as
| receptor type) enable it to jump between individuals; how
| it spreads through human populations; and how it affects
| those infected In other words, at least four kinds of
| analysis are needed: genomic, virological,
| epidemiological and clinical.". BU's work is in the
| genomic and virological categories and addresses the kind
| of questions the article wants addressed as part of a
| surveillance strategy.
|
| The article strongly opposes making predictions of
| whether a pathogen will be pandemic because predictions
| are a rigged game. There are enough factors that you are
| very unlikely to be correct, and even then a true
| positive combined with successful mitigations erodes
| public trust because "the severity of the virus had been
| overblown". Geologists avoid making predictions of
| volcanic eruptions or earthquakes for similar reasons.
|
| It is not directly opposed to study of pre-pandemic
| animal pathogens: "Surveys of animals will undoubtedly
| result in the discovery of many thousands of new viruses.
| These data will benefit studies of diversity and
| evolution, and could tell us whether and why some
| pathogens might jump species boundaries more frequently
| than others." This makes sense, because study of pre-
| pandemic pathogens is needed to set a foundation such
| that the post-outbreak analysis the article wants us to
| focus on can be completed in a reasonable time frame.
|
| The article is arguing for rapid response and against
| predictions. It's not opposed to basic research of
| pathogens, and actually supports this specific type of
| research.
| [deleted]
| giantg2 wrote:
| I thought it was more like 50 million?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Thank you and good catch; I quoted the infection number
| where I meant to quote the estimated fatalities.
| rhacker wrote:
| Well you have to include excess deaths which is at 15M or
| higher. The reason is that even if you are including drug
| overdoses, the pandemic was still a catalyst for
| homelessness and... excess deaths. Covid is still
| responsible.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think there's a difference between studying existing
| viruses, or even their natural mutations, and _engineering_ a
| virus to be more potent (and not in the highest level lab
| even).
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I find this very frustrating. If COVID-19 was a lab leak -
| wether it had involved gain of function related or just
| unwisely moving viruses from the animal kingdom into human
| spaces - what good did any of it do?
|
| Apparently our ability to create vaccines doesn't hinge on
| messing around with the viruses before they infect humans.
| COVID-19 vaccine was created after the fact, and it hardly
| prevented a major global catastrophe.
|
| I just don't see the argument. It sounds like pure
| imagination - by making viruses more dangerous or increasing
| the odds we'll expose ourselves to novel ones, someday we'll
| have the technology to prevent any pandemic. How many
| millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars wasted before
| that happens? When is it just not worth it? It seems not
| worth it to me now.
|
| If it's a bioweapons program, I don't see why we need to be
| playing along. It's not like nuclear deterrence - someone
| releases a weaponized virus, the whole world gets infected.
| It's like a nuke that blows up the entire world.
| brippalcharrid wrote:
| The treaties in place to restrict biological weapons have
| exclusions that permit the development (and use) of
| incapacitating agents. The DoD/NIAID/Daszak/Fauci model has
| been that a hostile nation would release a biological
| weapon that would compromise the ability of members of the
| Armed Forces to engage in combat operations over a period
| of months or years, and to address this they had planned to
| be able to quickly marshal a new transfection to induce
| neutralising antibodies [in the relevant groups before they
| were deployed to combat zones], hence the focus of research
| into these particular areas from the defence establishment
| and its partners over the last few decades.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _I find this very frustrating. If COVID-19 was a lab leak -
| wether it had involved gain of function related or just
| unwisely moving viruses from the animal kingdom into human
| spaces - what good did any of it do?_
|
| If the increased focus on mRNA vaccine research due to the
| COVID outbreak leads to successful new anticancer
| therapies, we could make up for the COVID death toll in a
| hurry, and benefit enormously from subsequent availability.
|
| In no event is "don't research this, it's too scary" ever
| the right answer. The question is how to do it safely. For
| instance, I don't understand why gain-of-function research
| is less regulated than, say, nuclear research. The work
| needs to happen, but our risk assessments are hopelessly
| out of whack.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| The pandemic forever cured me of my willingness to
| participate in Trolley Problems. I would say harming
| people over some vague future promise of helping them is,
| from this point forward, always the wrong decision.
| darkarmani wrote:
| > COVID-19 vaccine was created after the fact, and it
| hardly prevented a major global catastrophe.
|
| What? It immediately dropped the death rate. How many more
| millions of lives would it have to have saved to get
| notice?
| creato wrote:
| Knowing about the virus ahead of time wouldn't help much.
| By far the most expensive (in time and money) part of a
| publicly available vaccine is testing it. It is
| _impossible_ to test a vaccine under any reasonable
| procedure we have today before the virus is a full blown
| pandemic.
|
| The best case scenario for putting this kind of research
| into practice is saving two weeks off a months or years
| long development schedule. It might not even work.
| Frankly the risk reward trade off here is so laughably
| bad that I can't understand why it's even a debate.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I would say that viruses, like a lot of other aspects of
| life, are chaotic and capricious both in their evolution
| and their affects on an individual humans (COVID really
| drove that home for me in that it killed some and was
| asymptotically carried by others).
|
| But we demand explanations where there are none, and so we
| create them ourselves or accept them from others.
| baja_blast wrote:
| Additionally, in the same way a banana would never occur in
| nature, many of these experiments researchers conduct are
| extremely unlikely or out right impossible. For wild
| viruses crossing over to humans it needs to go through many
| mutations and people before becoming adapted and highly
| infectious towards humans. But in a lab you can insert the
| exact mutation to make it highly infectious towards humans
| without having to mutate. For example right now the bird
| flu which can infect humans who have ingested bird
| droppings, but it can't spread human to human.
|
| The conditions in the lab are just so artificial the
| predictive power is practically worthless, especially when
| you consider the massive possibility space. Just like you'd
| never find something like a banana evolve to it's current
| state in the wild, you would won't find these viral
| chimeras just popping up out of no where.
| rhacker wrote:
| The other thing too is that were just going to do ACE2
| receptor research from now til the next pandemic, which
| I'm sure will have NOTHING to do with ACE2.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Remember this?
|
| "H5N1 is a type of avian flu virus that occurs naturally
| in various types of birds but has surfaced in humans in
| the last ten years. Although human cases of H5N1 are
| rare, the virus has a 60% mortality rate."
|
| "They reasoned that it'd be better to tinker with H5N1 in
| the lab and gain knowledge for its prevention than sit
| back and wait for mother nature to concoct a human-
| friendly strain. Both teams of researchers artificially
| mutated H5N1 to spread easily amongst ferrets. Ferrets
| are commonly used as stand ins for humans in influenza
| studies. To clarify what I mean by "easily" spread, at
| the end of Fouchier's study the strain had gained the
| ability to transmit through the air- an unprecedented
| feat!"
|
| https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/viruses101/avian/
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > Apparently our ability to create vaccines doesn't hinge
| on messing around with the viruses before they infect
| humans.
|
| The COVID vaccine built heavily on previous research with
| flu,. Zika, rabies, and cytomegalovirus.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > The COVID vaccine built heavily on previous research
| with flu,. Zika, rabies, and cytomegalovirus.
|
| All viruses that are already around. Agree that creating
| novel viruses is not with the risk.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| These "convergent mutation" variants seem to be arriving at a
| rapid pace, all by themselves without researchers helping (some
| hypothesize this is due to virus replication in
| immunocompromised patients.) [1] Since these mutations seem
| capable of repeatedly emerging, we should understand what they
| do, both alone and in combination. The cost here is that yes,
| researchers could make and release a new deadly variant. On the
| other hand it's just as likely that something very similar will
| pop up through natural evolution in the next few months. When
| that happens we can be clueless or we can be armed with
| knowledge.
|
| [1] https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payers/preliminary-data-
| poi...
| baja_blast wrote:
| And how did our decades of Coronavirus research help us
| prevent/fight this last pandemic? Given the fact it was
| already known at the time that the spike protein on SARS2 was
| what researchers have been using to attach to wild viruses so
| infect humanized mice/cell cultures via the ACE2 receptor we
| should have already known that Airborne H2H transmission was
| possible!
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > And how did our decades of Coronavirus research help us
| prevent/fight this last pandemic?
|
| IIUC, the vaccine was synthesized in record time, was it
| not?
| baja_blast wrote:
| the MRNA vaccine had nothing to do with the research
| involving modifying wild coronaviruses. The technology
| was originally built independently and for different
| reasons, but there was a MERS vaccine they developed and
| modified for SARS2, but again that was for an existing
| known virus. The type of research Ecohealth conducted
| contributed absolutely nothing to the development of the
| vaccine.
|
| In fact Ecohealth didn't even share their research of any
| data with anyone since the pandemic began. So the value
| of the risky research is dubious.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| We've had very little GoF research, in large part because
| it's controversial. There have been several outright bans,
| and the issue is so emotional that many scientists probably
| avoid it just because the costs are high.
|
| I am not necessarily in favor of GoF research, but I
| recognize a broken argument when I see one. In the face of
| a clear policy preference to dissuade GoF work, the
| question "why didn't [the very limited GoF work that we
| allowed to take place] produce huge numbers of beneficial
| results" isn't really an interesting question about the
| usefulness of the research, since it might just as easily
| reflect a (known) pre-existing policy bias.
|
| We're in a rapidly-developing new era and have just seen
| clear evidence of how devastating a pandemic can be. The
| question we should be asking is whether we're using every
| tool at our disposal to defend ourselves from the next one,
| and that requires some careful and dispassionate weighing
| of risks/rewards. The arguments I see don't meet that
| standard _at all_.
| Loughla wrote:
| On what? Virus research?
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Yes. Fucking around with viruses and deliberately making them
| more dangerous. This isn't like math research.
| Loughla wrote:
| So how do you suggest we plan for the future and try to
| solve problems with viruses before they occur without
| research?
| [deleted]
| tsimionescu wrote:
| By doing what we did with the Covid vaccine: fucking
| around with treatments against existing wild viruses.
| There's plenty of viruses out there, there is 0 reason to
| engineer our own to try to fight (there are reasons to
| engineer our own viruses for other kinds of genetic
| research, but that's a different discussion).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jacknews wrote:
| 'Ask for forgiveness, not permission' is really not something we
| want in biotech.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Seems like this kind of work, if deemed neccessary, should at
| least be done somewhere remote.
| marshray wrote:
| It's not the possibility that a simple lab accident could kill a
| billion people, the headline is that it "draws scrutiny".
| snshn wrote:
| Humanity has peaked sometime around 1960s-1980s, it's all been
| downhill since then. My theory is that we're in a self-
| destructive mode now. The technology we possess keeps advancing
| while our control over it and intellectual abilities are
| diminishing, partially because we rely on tech so much
| (smartphones, automation, "AI"). So in retrospect, we were meant
| to go (mostly) extinct during the cold war, by some miracle it
| was narrowly avoided, so we survived past our peak, and now we're
| just existing on borrowed time, the whole planet is a ticking
| time bomb, and the question is if we manage to become multi-
| planetary species before then or go (mostly) extinct. I think
| Elon has the same view on things, that would explain Neuralink,
| Starlink, SpaceX.
| mikkergp wrote:
| > Humanity has peaked sometime around 1960s-1980s
|
| I'm 99% certain they would have said the same things in the
| 60's to 80's about the 20's to 40's (maybe stopping somewhere
| around 1939) and in the 20's they would certainly be
| reminiscing about the industrial revolution and gilded age.
| simple-thoughts wrote:
| If by "humanity" you mean the United States' population,
| possibly. But for most people in most countries, life is much
| better today than in the 1980s.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| photochemsyn wrote:
| In this snippet from the abstract, S stands for spike protein:
|
| > "We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S
| gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2
| isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating
| Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes
| vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the
| receptor-binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring
| Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like
| distal lung cells. _In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild,
| non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe
| disease with a mortality rate of 80%._ This indicates that while
| the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major
| determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S. "
|
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.13.512134v1....
|
| See russfink comment above for the relative mortality compared to
| the original Wuhan strain (100% for Wuhan compared to 80% for
| this hybrid). So this researcher-generated strain appears to be
| intermediate in mortality between the original Wuhan strain and
| Omicron, BUT _it escapes vaccination relative to the Wuhan
| strain, making it more dangerous in that regard and more likely
| to spread through a vaccinated population causing significant
| mortality._ I 'd classify this as reckless and irresponsible
| research.
|
| As far as the original Wuhan strain, we have about four theories
| of origin. (1) natural wild type with no lab research
| involvement, (2) natural wild type collected by a lab and
| accidentally released from that lab, (3) wild type 'heated up' by
| serial passage through mice and cloned human-type cells without
| explicit genetic engineering, and (4) deliberate engineering
| using a CRISPR system to insert a furan cleavage site in a
| collected wild-type virus, which allowed a bat virus to leap to a
| human host.
|
| Really (4) has the most evidence at this point, and note that
| this is not entirely the fault of the Chinese Wuhan Institute of
| Virology as the research concept was partially developed in the
| USA and continued (despite an Obama-era ban on gain-of-function
| research) in China with Ecohealth Alliance funding.
|
| As far as why doing gain-of-function research to predict
| 'emerging disease outbreaks' is a godawfully stupid idea, it's
| that it appears that almost any infectious animal virus can be
| converted to a human pathogen by selective transfer of human-
| receptor-binding motifs, even though such transfer would never
| take place under natural conditions. An immediate global ban on
| this kind of research (under the Biological Warfare Convention)
| is needed.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > Really (4) has the most evidence at this point
|
| No, there is literally zero evidence of this.
|
| The BANAL viruses are a couple of mutations away from a
| workable furin cleavage site, nature can engineer them just as
| easily as we do, and has done so multiple different times that
| we know of across beta-coronaviruses.
| tripletao wrote:
| > The BANAL viruses are a couple of mutations away from a
| workable furin cleavage site,
|
| That's true, but you can argue it in either direction. It
| proves the mutations to create that FCS are possible and
| indeed likely; but it also proves they're selected against in
| their usual hosts, or else we'd have observed the complete
| FCS. So you need the mutation to happen concurrently with the
| species jump (or in a yet-undiscovered intermediate host),
| which gets less likely.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > it also proves they're selected against in their usual
| hosts
|
| No it doesn't. They can be neutral. And BtCoV-HKU5 is a
| MERS-like bat coronavirus with a functional FCS and
| BtHpCoV-ZJ13 is even closer to sarbecoviruses than MERS and
| is another bat coronavirus with an FCS. It is more likely
| that the absence of an FCS in BANAL-like viruses is due to
| us not having found them yet, our surveillance coverage is
| immeasurably poor.
|
| And a species jump involving coinfection with proto-SARS-
| CoV-2 and some other coronavirus and a recombination event
| is actually a likely way to start a pandemic. The 2009 H1N1
| pandemic was started by a triple reassortment with three
| viruses in a pig. Pandemics are very uncommon infection
| events so the conditions that create them are necessarily
| highly unlikely.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| > such transfer would never take place under natural conditions
|
| How confident are we that is the case?
|
| HIV resulted from the fusion of, IIRC, three virii in a host
| animal.
|
| The odds of any single such event are vanishingly small, but
| that stacks against how many cells per second a virus can
| infect, worldwide. Life is a _frightening_ goodness-of-fit
| optimizer at the scale of microorganization.
| mgamache wrote:
| It would never take place between animals that don't
| naturally cohabitate.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Studying rare historical accidents of evolution that resulted
| in pandemics to see how they took place is one thing, but
| creating hundreds of such accidents of evolution deliberately
| to see how many novel deadly pathogens one can create is
| quite another.
|
| In the case of HIV:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3234451/
|
| Now, should we start taking all the viruses known to infect
| every species of squirrel, rat, monkey, gorilla and
| chimpanzee and start splicing in motifs that bind, say, the
| top 100 most common human cell-surface receptors in order to
| see what's the most dangerous virus - with the optimal mix of
| mortality and transmissibility (R factor) - we can create,
| the one best able to cause a global human pandemic? That's
| insane, and there's no justification for it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Is that research done? I don't think that's an accurate
| description of gain-of-function research; I thought it was
| more focused than "just throw everything in a beaker and
| see what happens." I agree that's a bad idea.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It's more focused exactly in the sense that it is
| specifically targeting known-dangerous characteristics -
| hence _gain_ of function: they 're aiming to increase the
| virus' ability to do something.
| throwaway43903 wrote:
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Why have one pandemic when you can have two pandemics for twice
| the price
| flobosg wrote:
| See also Derek Lowe's article about the preprint:
| https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function-not-...
| russfink wrote:
| Some snippets:
|
| The spike protein of an Omicron version of SARS-2 was fused to a
| virus of the Wuhan strain, the original version that emerged from
| China in 2020. The goal was to determine if the mutations in the
| Omicron spike protein were responsible for this variant's
| increased ability to evade the immunity to SARS-2 that humans
| have built up, and whether the changes led to Omicron's lower
| rate of severity. The testing actually showed, though, that the
| chimeric virus was more lethal to a type of lab mice than Omicron
| itself, killing 80% of the mice infected. Importantly, the
| original Wuhan strain killed 100% of mice it was tested in. The
| conclusion is that mutations in the spike protein of the Omicron
| variant are responsible for the strain's ability to evade
| immunity people have built up via vaccination, infections, or
| both, but they are not responsible for the apparent decrease in
| severity of the Omicron viruses.
| cstejerean wrote:
| If it went from 100% IFR (original strain) to 80% IFR (Original
| + Omicron spike) how did it not reduce the severity? Sure it's
| more severe than Omicron by itself so there were other factors
| as well, but it does seem like a decrease in severity to me.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| The researchers could not be sure of this result before they
| did it, which is why I believe there's a reasonable case this
| should be considered GOF work even if the lethality of their
| chimera (in hu mice) was ultimately less than that of
| original strain.
|
| Furthermore, strictly speaking I don't believe we know the
| actual severity of this in humans. While it's possible to
| make a fairly confident guess, surprises are still possible.
| algon33 wrote:
| Because it has Omicron's increased ability to avoid people's
| immunity. That would result in higher infectivity than just a
| copy of the wuhan strain, with near the same severity. Note
| that earlier Sars viruses had even higher severity than Sars
| Covid 2 (Wuhan strain), but weren't as infective and killed
| far fewer people. Which implies that a slight reduction in
| severity for a gain in infectivity is not a worthwhile
| tradeoff.
| baja_blast wrote:
| Exactly, for example Ebola has a mortality rate of around
| 50% but has only killed around 11 thousand people, SARS-
| CoV2 has less than 1% can has killed 20 million or more.
| Wild viruses like SARS1 and MERS are poorly adapted towards
| humans when the spillover happened making it possible to be
| contained. But SARS2 a which is a Sarbecovirus a family of
| gastrointestinal viruses some how was able to bind towards
| human airways with a binding affinity 20 times that for
| humans than for bats, all while leaving no traceable trail
| of mutations that researchers could trace back to the
| intermediate host.
|
| For context with SARS1 and MERS researchers were able to
| find the spill over animal within a few months. But after
| 3+ years we have yet to find an intermediate animal host.
| Also before anyone says "It took years to find the source
| for SARS1", but that is for the original bat virus, the
| intermediate animal where the cross over to humans happened
| was found within months. Additionally SARS1 and MERS had a
| rapid period of mutations as it adapted towards humans
| which allowed researchers to trace back to the source.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Errorbars, probably. 80% and 100% might be samples of a true
| death rate of 90%.
| Izkata wrote:
| Indeed, beware of round numbers, they tend to indicate very
| low sample size and very large error range.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 1) talk about failure to read a room
|
| 2) even the alleged learning from the experiment: "The conclusion
| of the study is that mutations in the spike protein of the
| Omicron variant are responsible for the strain's ability to evade
| immunity people have built up via vaccination, infections, or
| both, but they are not responsible for the apparent decrease in
| severity of the Omicron viruses."
|
| ...does not hold up, because this was in mice. Ordinary lab rats
| were immune to the original strain of covid-19, but not to
| Omicron, which shows that it is not at all unlikely for there to
| be significant differences in the resistance of rodents to one
| strain or the other, compared to humans.
|
| So, they made a hybrid covid-19 strain, that could conceivably
| have been as contagious as Omicron but as lethal as the original
| strain. Nice work, folks.
| brundolf wrote:
| stuckinhell wrote:
| This alone has convinced me, these scientists need to be
| investigated and punished for biological terrorism. This
| represents an insane lack of ethics. Did they forget, we've
| been in a multi-year pandemic lockdown.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| Lets not forget some estimated 16 million dead, that puts one
| among such peers like Mao, Stalin and Hitler
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| The result of the research is very valuable. It helps predict
| the attributes of future novel strains.
|
| In reality, infectious success and malignancy are highly anti-
| correlated, strongly. The combined Virus (which probably has
| existed in a very similar form in the wild somewhere!!) is
| actually a lot less dangerous than the two sources.
|
| Also: Both Viruses have become a lot less dangerous to the
| world population because of immunity.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _It helps predict the attributes of future novel strains._
|
| Prove it.
| creato wrote:
| Why is that valuable? It takes weeks if not days to
| synthesize a vaccine for a new strain. It then takes months
| if not years, and massive investment, to test it for safety
| and efficacy. How the hell does shortening the weeks part of
| this at the expense of potentially requiring a new expensive
| test, in case the experiment leaks, make any sense?
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Creating a vaccine was not the purpose of this research.
|
| The problem with new variants is that it takes months to
| know how virulent and how transmissible it is. Such
| research enables better prediction from the point of
| detecting and sequencing such variants.
|
| We know now that Omicron's spike protein is responsible for
| the better transmission and better immunological evasion.
| If we see a new variant with Omicron's spike protein, but
| modified, we can first of all tell it's going to be better
| at evasion. If there are changes in parts that are highly
| selected, it's probably more transmissive. If that part is
| less selected-for (there are ways to tell from the
| sequence) we have a clue that it is probably a little less
| transmissive. We also know that the spike protein is less
| associated with the virulence. Which means researchers have
| to keep looking for what makes the Virus deadly. This could
| lead to more effective vaccines and antibody treatments or
| even antiviral agents. Knowing which protein to target is
| half the game.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| > 1) talk about failure to read a room
|
| The people most upset in the room are the same people who have
| been screaming that Covid was not a lab accident. I wonder why
| they would be upset at someone showing how easy it is to
| weaponize a coronavirus?
| alexfromapex wrote:
| I think the other part that is appalling is they did this in
| Biosafety Level 3 labs instead of 4 when COVID has basically
| brought the entire world to its knees for 3 years. What is
| wrong with the biosafety review committee?
|
| Also, they completely skirted the NIAID approval process,
| putting the public at risk, will anyone see jail time for that?
| baja_blast wrote:
| Well the mice the researchers used were genetically modified
| mice to have human ACE2 receptors which is standard practice in
| Virology. But! I will say it 100% is not worth the risk, just
| last year a researcher in Taiwan got infected with the delta
| variant in the same level lab BSL3, so any dangerous or novel
| virus they create has a real possibility of escaping.
|
| Also it's not like this type of research helped us predict or
| even fight the pandemic. Millions have been spent on studying
| and modifying wild coronaviruses and it not only failed to
| predict this pandemic, but none of the research helped in
| anyway combating it. For example the Ecohealth Alliance the
| main collaborators with the WIV has still to this day refused
| to share research and data they have collected over the years.
| So either the research is worthless and thus why are we funding
| it despite the dangers, or they have something they want to
| hide.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Also it 's not like this type of research helped us
| predict or even fight the pandemic. Millions have been spent
| on studying and modifying wild coronaviruses and it not only
| failed to predict this pandemic, but none of the research
| helped in anyway combating it._
|
| I was under the impression this research was partly
| responsible for quickly identifying parts of the virus that
| are conserved in evolution, thus making them good targets for
| mRNA vaccines. If vaccine manufacturers had targeted proteins
| that have high rates of mutation, it would allow the virus to
| evade vaccine immunity faster, potentially making vaccines
| useless by the time they were actually rolled out.
| Izkata wrote:
| The spike protein was selected because the virus was
| already well-adapted to humans and they _assumed_ changes
| to the spike protein would make it less-fit and not able to
| infect as readily. They were wrong.
|
| > If vaccine manufacturers had targeted proteins that have
| high rates of mutation, it would allow the virus to evade
| vaccine immunity faster, potentially making vaccines
| useless by the time they were actually rolled out.
|
| This is what happened - the variant later named Delta was
| first identified in Oct 2020, long before the vaccines were
| released. If anything the vaccines helped it become the
| dominant one.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| This particular research helps to understand how important
| this particular variant of the spike protein is.
|
| When future virus variants are discovered and sequenced, this
| information helps understand what to expect. Because the
| virulence of new Variants can't be estimated for months after
| their first detection.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| If this research does help us to understand that, it should
| be done in the highest level safety protocol labs, which
| this was not.
|
| If it is not able to get funding for being done in such a
| lab, that's probably because the potential learning does
| not justify such $$ cost. Which means it's also not worth
| the risk.
|
| You are correct that the virulence of new variants is hard
| to predict. That very fact means you shouldn't be making
| new ones, and assuming you can predict how virulent your
| new one is going to be (and thus how hard it will be to
| contain).
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| This particular variant that didn't exist until humans
| combined two variants into a new one?
| clint wrote:
| Which is simulating what could and probably will happen
| in nature, before it really happens
| JamesBarney wrote:
| Or could cause it to happen. There's still a decent
| chance the original covid wouldn't have happened if
| people weren't doing this type of research.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| There is zero indication of the Virus having originated
| in a lab. Some hand-waving, no actual evidence. No
| genomic signature. No merging of known lineages (which
| would happen). No plausible mechanism (to those who know
| the subject).
|
| Much more likely: This Virus originated just like the
| thousands before it. From ordinary Human-to-animal
| contact. Virus particles pass from animals to Humans
| trillions of times a year. Most of the time exactly
| nothing happens at all. Even rarer are actual
| transmissions. Still rarer are chains of transmission
| that allow the Virus to evolve into an actual threat.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| How would we know if there would be a genomic signature
| if the database of viruses Wuhan worked with wasn't
| opened up?
|
| There is not plausible mechanism for anyone from the
| Wuhan laboratory to get sick with a virus they are
| studying? This happened several times, and happens 100's
| of times a year (not Wuhan specifically but labs).
|
| There is some circumstantial evidence it was a lab leak.
| Like the virus doesn't naturally occur in the Wuhan
| district, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology is one of
| the few in the world that study coronaviruses and do gain
| of function research. Unlike SARS and MERS where we
| discovered the origins quickly, we still don't know the
| origins of covid-19. I don't know how you leap to the
| conclusion it was of natural origins when we don't even
| know what those natural origins are.
|
| We don't know if it's a lab leak or not, but they do
| happen and they've fairly common. (10's-100's per year)
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| I love how everyone involved always jumps on the most
| extreme version of the lab leak hypothesis "Chinese
| government made COVID super weapon" and then use that to
| discount everything else instead of admitting the much
| more nuanced reality of the situation.
|
| The lab leak hypothesis has a range from "This virus was
| created and released by the Chinese government as a bio-
| weapon against the US and to kill off their own aging
| population" at the extreme. To the "The virus was being
| studied at the Wuhan Virology Institute and someone one
| got lax on safety protocols got exposed accidentally and
| then took the train home."
|
| Most people that seem to argue against lab leak, seem to
| assume everyone ascribes to the first position, whereas
| the majority of the people that believe in the lab leak
| subscribe to the later position, including myself.
| dTal wrote:
| Except it's not a simulation, it is _causing_ it to
| "really happen". The _only_ difference hinges on the
| ability of human institutions to keep it contained, which
| at the very least we have reason to be concerned about.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| A pandemic virus circulating in the wild is an incredibly
| fine-tuned machine. Just mashing together integral parts
| from two quite different genomes is not going to result
| in a Variant that is tuned enough. In order to make a
| Virus virulent and transmissive, it needs to evolve
| through multiple, probably dozens of hosts, and only if
| that is on a broad scale, like thousands of such
| lineages, does it have a chance of success.
|
| Even one lab leak isn't enough. The Virus would most
| likely die out on its own, if not it would get
| outcompeted by naturally developing variants. The risk of
| a lab leaking a variant in a way that it would outcompete
| natural strains is so miniscule compared to natural
| variants arising and doing the same, it's not worth
| mentioning.
| reuben_scratton wrote:
| You must know that virologists routinely "serial passage"
| viruses through animal hosts? Evolving a candidate virus
| "through multiple, probably dozens of hosts" is what
| virology labs _do_.
|
| And lab leaks happen All The Time. SARS-1 escaped labs on
| six separate occasions.
| d0mine wrote:
| Do we have definite proof that the original SARS-CoV-2
| hasn't escaped the lab?
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| To what standard? It's the same game with climate change.
| When only 1% of the scientists dissent, that gives
| certain people enough confidence to believe the opposite
| of what the 99% believe.
| xupybd wrote:
| I'm always skeptical when people say x% of scientists
| agree or disagree with a given hypothesis. Most of the
| time these numbers are flat out wrong or misleading. Most
| scientists have very complex views on their own domain.
| Those complexities lead to a very nuanced understanding
| of topics that we lay people don't fully understand. Most
| have subtle disagreements on most topics.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| In fact it seems like a reasonable assumption that on
| many days at a BSL-3+ lab, we're trusting at least one
| hungover graduate student who is operating on two hours
| of sleep at 9 in the morning, not to commit human error
| while implementing biosafety protocols to protect against
| the accidental release of a synthetic pathogen to the
| local urban population.
|
| Another comment in this thread suggested building these
| labs in a desert or some other extreme environment where
| scientists can be isolated for months at a time. This
| seems like an obviously necessary mitigation against the
| unknown risk of introducing synthetic pathogens that
| haven't been created in billions of years of evolution.
| And yet, the secretive groups funding and regulating this
| research instead choose to build their labs in urban
| centers. Why?
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Bioweapon labs have a history of being built on small
| islands for this reason.
|
| > _This seems like an obviously necessary mitigation
| against the unknown risk of introducing synthetic
| pathogens that haven 't been created in billions of years
| of evolution._
|
| I'd wager that it's likely that the COVID variant that
| was made in a lab was also created through evolution at
| some point. Every infected person with the virus has
| billions of viral replications taking place in their
| body, and each virus itself will have its own mutations.
| There's a high chance such mutations already took place,
| somewhere and in someone/something, but those mutants
| never created their own worldwide outbreaks.
|
| I think it's worthwhile to understand how mutations can
| affect a virus at the heart of a pandemic. Finding such
| mutations in the wild is a roll of the dice, and the
| chances of encountering something like it rise the longer
| and more widespread the epidemic is.
| inkcapmushroom wrote:
| An obvious answer is it's expensive to build and hard to
| staff and maintain labs in extreme environments.
| sampo wrote:
| > This particular variant that didn't exist until humans
| combined two variants into a new one?
|
| Nature created a very similar hybrid earlier: "Deltacron"
| was in the news in March 2022.
|
| _The gene that encodes the virus's surface protein --
| known as spike -- comes almost entirely from Omicron. The
| rest of the genome is Delta._
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/science/deltacron-
| coronav...
|
| _His team described three patients in France infected
| with a version of SARS-CoV-2 that combines the spike
| protein from an Omicron variant with the "body" of a
| Delta variant._
|
| https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-
| pharmaceuticals/...
| foobarian wrote:
| I read this and dream of the day where the common cold is
| cured. And it makes it all seem worth it.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| There is no common cold. There are over 200 distinct
| viruses that cause the illness we call "a cold."
| foobarian wrote:
| s/common cold/over 200 distinct viruses that cause the
| illness we call "a cold."/
| echelon wrote:
| Sure, but investigators need to treat this subject with
| reverence. Unlike pretty much every other discipline on
| earth, this one has the potential to disrupt billions of
| lives from a single mistake.
|
| Virologists were the first ones that jumped to say Covid
| wasn't a lab leak, yet what they should have been saying
| was, "we'll get to the bottom of this and then, even if
| wasn't a lab leak, work to make sure that outcome never
| comes to pass."
|
| Instead we got a blame game, accusations of racism, and
| everyone not in their field was called stupid or
| incapable of understanding the situation if we asked for
| more light to be shed in the subject.
|
| Also, what happened to the scientific method? There was a
| whole lot of certainty being prematurely thrown around.
|
| This hubris won't do.
|
| I don't know how Covid came about, and at this point the
| only reason to know is to prevent the next one. But no
| matter the case, whatever is next better not be from a
| lab.
| varelse wrote:
| John23832 wrote:
| You want a global replace, so the end is "/g"... but I
| feel you lol.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > There are over 200 distinct viruses that cause the
| illness we call "a cold."
|
| Probably far, far more than that if you count the
| inevitable mutations that occur during replication.
| echelon wrote:
| It's a feature of how our language, labeling systems, and
| brains can only grapple with so many things. We rarely
| need to be so precise.
|
| There are millions of human cells in your body right now
| that don't share "your" DNA [1] due to mutation or
| specialization (somatic recombination, Barr bodies, etc.)
|
| We've known this since trying to apply species
| categories.
|
| [1] "your" DNA becomes a population average sometime
| after fertilization.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Discrete classification of continuous phenomena is always
| going to be messy. Humans create discrete categories
| because they are useful to humans, but it's always
| important to remember the map is not the terrain.
| [deleted]
| sterlind wrote:
| what? nearly nobody's dying from the common cold. covid
| kills hundreds of people every day. how is fucking around
| with covid worth a common cold cure?!
| [deleted]
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Common colds push many people on the brink of death over
| the edge. But to your point, the years of potential life
| lost (YPLL) when that happens is minimal.
| zasdffaa wrote:
| > Common colds push many people on the brink of death
| over the edge
|
| Be nice if you could provide some backup cos I've not
| heard of this, or any idea how bad it is.
| dilap wrote:
| > or they have something they want to hide.
|
| Indeed. I recommend this interview with Jeffrey Sachs, who
| headed _Lancet 's_ commision to investigate Covid-19.
|
| https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2022/10/jeffrey-sachs-
| lessons-...
|
| You may find your eyebrows a couple inches higher after
| listening :-)
| beebmam wrote:
| No thanks, I'd rather trust virologists and the people who
| are doing the actual engineering. I don't trust
| directors/executives, by definition. They have ZERO idea
| about nearly anything, other than sounding confident.
| throwaway1248 wrote:
| AnnoyedComment wrote:
| somenameforme wrote:
| Many people seem to believe that lab leaks are exceptionally
| rare:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
|
| That page offers "only" dozens of examples in recent times, but
| that is certainly going to be non-exhaustive and the potential
| magnitude of impact of a single of these incidents is difficult
| to overstate. Notably while the biosafety levels for each leak
| are not stated, at least two came from BSL-4 labs - the highest
| safety standard there is.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| Covid has killed something like 20 million people (taken from
| Wikipedia, estimated based on excess deaths). It's plausible
| that it came from a lab leak. How _bloody fucking valuable_ do
| you have to think "making viruses more deadly and studying
| them" is for this to be worthwhile?
|
| Oh, actually you can calculate this, assuming you're
| utilitarian and think risking innocent lives is OK as long as
| it saves that many lives in expectation. If you think there's a
| 10% chance that Covid came from a lab leak, then the "making
| viruses more deadly" research that we've done _so far_ ought to
| have saved more than 10% * 20 million = 2 million people. Did
| it? From what I 've heard it's done fuck-all.
|
| I stand by my pissed off voice here. I think it's appropriate
| to be pissed off about risking _millions of lives_ for
| hypothetical benefits.
|
| (To be clear, I'm only talking about research that studies
| deadly extinct viruses and deadly lab-created viruses. We
| should absolutely continue to study viruses in general.)
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| It's taken 2 years for logic to finally overcome political
| polarization and you can now express a logical opinion
| without being removed from the internet! Progress.
| president wrote:
| I don't think it ever went away. You see people getting
| massively flagged or downvoted and called "Republican" for
| going against the grain everyday here on HN.
| wwweston wrote:
| What makes you think it's _easy_ to distinguish "studying
| viruses in general" from "making viruses more deadly"?
|
| I'm happy to listen to expert virologists tell me about how
| they could advance the field without modifying/running viral
| code. Maybe they're a hell of a lot better at their job than
| most software types who rely on that. I suspect that's not
| how it works, though.
|
| And hey, let's do more arbitrary probability space
| exploration! The Lancet says almost 20 million people have
| probably been saved by covid vaccinations[0]. If toying with
| viral DNA|RNA helped produce 10% of the research contributing
| to that, and/or any additional margin supporting other
| interventions, then I guess it fits your people-saved
| profile.
|
| [0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS147
| 3-3...
| timbo1642 wrote:
| kbos87 wrote:
| I live right around the corner from here and pass this place
| daily. There was a lot of concern when this place was built in
| the heart of a major city and I understand the concern (though
| I'm guessing the risk a place like this poses is really in that
| an individual who works there gets infected with something and
| goes out into society - which means the location doesn't matter
| much.)
|
| On the flipside, I also understand that research like this needs
| to happen for us to learn and make progress. All that being said,
| this just comes off as sloppy, which is exactly the feeling I
| don't want to have about a BSL-3 lab in my neighborhood.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Lab-made viruses like that have a close to zero chance of being
| more successful in the wild, even if the researchers had
| attempted that goal.
|
| Evolution can try gazillions of variations. Humans can't. No,
| computer simulation doesn't help that much. No, drawing
| conclusions from differences in natural strains also doesn't
| help.
| achr2 wrote:
| This isn't a random 'lab made virus' this is a virus made by
| taking the specifically deadly aspects of one strain and adding
| the specifically infectious aspects of another. There is a
| _very_ high likelihood of it being successful, because it
| already _is_. What is unlikely are these mutations happening
| naturally, which is why this should never be researched in sub-
| BSL-4 environments.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Because...?
|
| I'm not saying you're wrong, just that most of us aren't
| virologists.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| I'm neither. But basically designing a Virus would mean
| composing a 30k long string of RNA (in this case) which
| creates the proteins and RNA molecules which do all the
| things a Virus does. And it does more than you'd think. It
| makes the cell copy the Virus, make the proteins, often
| interferes with other processes in the cell.
|
| Copying the genome is easy. Making specific modifications
| isn't even that hard, as long as you don't have the illusion
| to know the result beforehand. But for the Virus to change
| its behavior in a meaningful/useful way requires multiple
| changes. The best someone could do is recombine changed parts
| from multiple variants. But they don't necessarily fit
| together. And the recombination also happens in nature,
| probably a lot more often than in the lab.
| baja_blast wrote:
| And yet H5N1 virus has yet to spread between mammals, but
| an airborne version of H5N1 that can spread between
| ferrets(and by extension humans) was achieved in a lab: htt
| ps://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1213362?cookieSe..
| ..
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Yes. It has spread. And was very non-virulent. And they
| got valuable data on what to do when H5N1 does become
| transmissible in Humans.
|
| However, had this Virus escaped, it would have fizzled.
| Showing airborne transmission does not mean the Virus
| would spread among ferrets and Humans under normal
| conditions. Mammalian H5N1 viruses might have already
| existed but failed to survive subsequent passage and thus
| did not evolve to become transmissible enough. Such lab
| experiments only add a minuscule risk to the much bigger
| risk of such a Virus occurring naturally.
| lamontcg wrote:
| This involves testing the Omicron spike on a Wuhan-Hu-1 backbone.
|
| Damn near every single person in this comment thread has
| antibodies and T-cells to Omicron spike and everyone naturally
| infected has T-cells for the original strain as well because
| T-cell epitopes aren't immune escape targets.
|
| Chances of this "escaping" the lab and producing another
| coronavirus wave are zero because that already happened.
|
| Like Derek Lowe pointed out nature already did a similar
| experiment with an Omicron spike and a Delta backbone because
| coronaviruses undergo recombination naturally:
|
| https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function-not-...
|
| Nobody has heard of the XD strain because there was so much
| immunity to it that it never really went anywhere.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Damn near every single person in this comment thread has
| antibodies and T-cells to Omicron spike and everyone naturally
| infected has T-cells for the original strain as well because
| T-cell epitopes aren't immune escape targets.
|
| Checking my layperson understanding by trying to make a dumbed-
| down version:
|
| "The outside of the new virus is stuff almost everybody's
| immune system should already be primed to seek and destroy,
| preferably before it hits a human cell. Even if it _does_ hit a
| human cell, the inside stuff is old /simple enough that your
| immune system should easily recognize that the cell is infected
| and swollen, and kill it quickly too, there are no false
| everything-is-fine-here tricks."
| lamontcg wrote:
| Correct.
|
| See for example:
|
| https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/mbio.03617-21
|
| "These data suggest that virtually all individuals with
| existing anti-SARS-CoV-2 CD8+ T-cell responses should
| recognize the Omicron VOC and that SARS-CoV-2 has not evolved
| extensive T-cell escape mutations at this time."
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41423-022-00838-5
|
| "Although the Omicron variant escapes neutralizing antibodies
| induced by COVID-19 vaccination or natural infection [1,2,3],
| our current analysis demonstrates that T cell epitopes are
| considerably conserved in the Omicron variant and that
| substantial proportions of memory T cells elicited by
| COVID-19 vaccination or natural infection respond to the
| Omicron spike. These results indicate that memory T cells may
| provide protective immunity during reinfection or
| breakthrough infection with the Omicron variant."
|
| Here's a review of all the SARS-CoV-2 T-cell epitopes:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S193131282.
| ..
|
| "Here, we focus on a specific topic: our current knowledge
| concerning the definition and recognition of SARS-
| CoV-2-derived T cell epitopes in humans. While the data
| related to this topic was initially sparse, 25 different
| studies have now been published as of March 15, 2021 [...],
| which collectively report data from 1,197 human subjects (870
| COVID-19 and 327 unexposed controls), leading to the
| identification of over 1,400 different CD4 (n = 382) and CD8
| (n = 1052) T cell epitopes."
|
| And I'd highly recommend this video on the adaptive immune
| system, along with the whole rest of the series:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXL2TvhNqZI&list=PLGhmZX2NKi.
| ..
|
| (I think that covers how proteins get chopped up by proteases
| and then those short epitopes are displayed on MHC receptors
| and undifferentiated T-cells learn to identify them)
| tripletao wrote:
| > Chances of this "escaping" the lab and producing another
| coronavirus wave are zero because that already happened.
|
| Are you aware of any situation where the omicron spike and
| Wuhan backbone could have recombined naturally? As far as I
| know, the latter was extinct in the wild by the time the former
| emerged.
|
| It's good that the omicron/delta variant didn't blow up in
| humans. The omicron/Wuhan variant seems like another throw of
| the dice, though, and even a very small probability times
| millions of potential deaths is significant.
| lamontcg wrote:
| You didn't read carefully what I wrote.
|
| The T-cell epitopes in all strains of SARS-CoV-2 are not
| subject to immune escape and there are thousands of them.
| Even the neutralizing antibodies to Wu-Hu-1 spike will cross
| react with omicron still.
|
| Nobody at this point is immune naive to this combination.
|
| And the most recent pandemic strain of SARS-CoV-2 was
| Omicron. If this Omicron spike containing virus escaped into
| the wild then it will encounter a human race with substantial
| neutralizing antibody activity to this exact spike protein
| sequence.
|
| And there isn't any "but maybe by splicing them together it
| literally changes everything, you can't possibly prove that
| isn't true" argument. This isn't science fiction. Inside the
| cell all of these proteins are diced up into small hexamers
| and displayed on MHC and it doesn't matter what the
| combination of the spike and the backbone are, the T-cell
| epitopes are going to be the same. Omicron spike will have
| Omicron antibody epitopes and Omicron T-cell epitopes, doen't
| matter what backbone you splice it onto. If you want to
| create a new pandemic, particularly one with "millions of
| potential deaths" you need to change this virus sufficiently
| that it is no longer identified as SARS-CoV-2 by our T-cells
| and you don't get that just by combining two different
| variants.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| You and Derek Lowe are at best apologists who due to your
| myopic perspective can't see the obvious risks that many of
| us outsiders can imagine. At worst you're part of a group
| for which "it is difficult to get a man to understand
| something, when his salary depends on his not understanding
| it"
| lamontcg wrote:
| If I wind up rotting in hell with Derek Lowe that'll be
| pretty good company, I think I'll take that.
| tripletao wrote:
| If that's your argument, then what do you even need the XD
| strain for? You could simply assert that because natural
| omicron has spread widely, any lab chimera with the omicron
| spike must be safe. That seems remarkably cavalier though,
| considering that (a) natural omicron continues to spread,
| and kill people every day; and (b) while China's reported
| case counts are probably inaccurate, they probably do still
| have a large population that's completely omicron-naive.
| lamontcg wrote:
| I clearly didn't need the XD strain, I thought that would
| be read as supplementary.
|
| I routinely forget that no matter how clear your argument
| sounds to you that someone on the Internet will always
| misunderstand it (and pick apart a detail that has no
| central relevance).
| tripletao wrote:
| Except that natural omicron continues to kill people now?
| So it's empirically true that at least one backbone
| (i.e., the natural omicron backbone) plus the omicron
| spike remains able to cause significant sickness and
| death, despite the immunity we've built up, even outside
| China. So what's your argument that the risk from a
| different backbone is "zero"?
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| Sweet maybe after this we can go ahead and extract DNA from a
| mosquito in amber and use that to make dinosaurs and open a theme
| park with them. Sounds like that is the next Chriton movie on the
| list now that we are checking of "The Andromeda Strain".
| dqpb wrote:
| I'm totally in favor of bringing back dinosaurs. I'm also in
| favor of modifying animals to have more human-like brains.
|
| I understand that many/most people would oppose this on ethical
| grounds. I could probably even articulate those positions if I
| tried.
|
| But, deep down in my inner child, I think the world would be
| much more interesting if these things existed.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| I will consent to your argument on the grounds that we
| provide equal funding and research to the construction of
| giant robots to fight the dinosaurs when they escape.
| dqpb wrote:
| Sounds like a win-win!
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| IMHO the real question is why would we do this? Just because we
| can? Is there a hidden bio arms race we can't stay away from?
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Some people get a kick out of 3D printing guns in their garage.
| Why not apply that to other weapons?
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| No one is 3d printing ballistic nuclear weapons. Scale
| matter?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| If you use weapons-grade plutonium as the feed stock for
| your 3D printer, you won't live long enough for the scale
| issues to stop you.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Unlike those who print guns, I don't think virologists are
| motivated by spite for politicians.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I don't see any reason there would be correlation in those
| qualities. But it's more that I think that advances in
| technology will eventually democratize biological weapons
| in ways that 3d printing have democratized the production
| of small arms.
| muaytimbo wrote:
| Virologists at academic centers like BU are beholden to
| their paymasters. Grant-writing and groveling day in and
| day out. I'm not sure what feelings develop in that endless
| loop of futility.
| stiiv wrote:
| > The goal of the research was to determine if the mutations in
| the Omicron spike protein were responsible for this variant's
| increased ability to evade the immunity to SARS-2 that humans
| have built up, and whether the changes led to Omicron's lower
| rate of severity.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| Yes, there is an arms race, an all-arms race of which bio is
| only a part. I reccomend the following two books, _The Sheild
| of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History_ , and _The
| Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade_.
|
| The revolution in technology has shifted the global array of
| national security threat models away from _just_ the nation-
| state. The low barrier to entry to tech like the latest in bio
| or cyber research means now a single actor with no grouo or
| state affiliations is now capable of producing some destructive
| event on a national or even global scale.
|
| On the backend, this is one of the quiet whispers in the halls
| of power in DC as a justification for the surveillance systems
| being enabled. You ask if there is an arms race. No, there are
| many arms races going on right now.
|
| Just like nuclear, if its possible they will consider building
| it, potential side effects be damned, as long as we have some
| force multiplier the "enemy" doesn't.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Yes, but it's not hidden.
|
| On the one side of it: humanity, and our ability to explore,
| comprehend, and modify the reality around us.
|
| On the other side of it: naturally-evolved viruses. They have a
| couple billion years' practice overriding biological
| countermeasures and massive territory advantage. If we do
| nothing, odds are they will eventually mutate into something
| that drops us dead in our tracks or wrecks us slowly, as they
| have before (smallpox, 1918 flu, HIV). And in our modern,
| deeply-interconnected world, geographic defenses and population
| isolation no longer protect us as they did our ancestors.
|
| The main tools we have to avoid this are our ability to
| explore, comprehend, and modify. The capacity to change
| something and observe how the change affects it is something
| the viruses cannot do, and arguably our best chance of
| "outsmarting" them so that when they naturally mutate into a
| dangerous form, we already have the tools in place to mitigate
| or disassemble the danger.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Exactly how does modifying the virus help create prevention
| measures or treatments for it? Please provide real world
| examples.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The most banal reason is that groups of researchers generally
| coordinate to set up little bureaucratic power centers within
| the national research agencies to ensure themselves a steady
| stream of grants; this in turn allows them to get tenure at
| their universities (under 'publish or perish' which more
| practically means 'get your grant renewed or perish' and grant
| renewal relies on (1) a steady stream of publications and (2)
| ensuring the federal agency keeps earmarking funds for your
| area of research).
|
| This is all perhaps well and good if you're fighting for funds
| for studying, say, childhood leukemia, but in this case it's
| been a major disaster and has almost certainly played a central
| role in this recent global pandemic. Oops.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| _87. Science and technology provide the most important examples
| of surrogate activities. Some scientists claim that they are
| motivated by "curiosity" or by a desire to "benefit humanity."
| But it is easy to see that neither of these can be the
| principal motive of most scientists. As for "curiosity," that
| notion is simply absurd. Most scientists work on highly
| specialized problems that are not the object of any normal
| curiosity. For example, is an astronomer, a mathematician or an
| entomologist curious about the properties of
| isopropyltrimethylmethane? Of course not. Only a chemist is
| curious about such a thing, and he is curious about it only
| because chemistry is his surrogate activity. Is the chemist
| curious about the appropriate classification of a new species
| of beetle? No. That question is of interest only to the
| entomologist, and he is interested in it only because
| entomology is his surrogate activity. If the chemist and the
| entomologist had to exert themselves seriously to obtain the
| physical necessities, and if that effort exercised their
| abilities in an interesting way but in some nonscientific
| pursuit, then they wouldn't give a damn about
| isopropyltrimethylmethane or the classification of beetles.
| Suppose that lack of funds for postgraduate education had led
| the chemist to become an insurance broker instead of a chemist.
| In that case he would have been very interested in insurance
| matters but would have cared nothing about
| isopropyltrimethylmethane. In any case it is not normal to put
| into the satisfaction of mere curiosity the amount of time and
| effort that scientists put into their work. The "curiosity"
| explanation for the scientists' motive just doesn't stand up._
|
| _88. The "benefit of humanity" explanation doesn't work any
| better. Some scientific work has no conceivable relation to the
| welfare of the human racesmost of archaeology or comparative
| linguistics for example. Some other areas of science present
| obviously dangerous possibilities. Yet scientists in these
| areas are just as enthusiastic about their work as those who
| develop vaccines or study air pollution. Consider the case of
| Dr. Edward Teller, who had an obvious emotional involvement in
| promoting nuclear power plants. Did this involvement stem from
| a desire to benefit humanity? If so, then why didn't Dr. Teller
| get emotional about other "humanitarian" causes? If he was such
| a humanitarian then why did he help to develop the H-bomb? As
| with many other scientific achievements, it is very much open
| to question whether nuclear power plants actually do benefit
| humanity. Does the cheap electricity outweigh the accumulating
| waste and the risk of accidents? Dr. Teller saw only one side
| of the question. Clearly his emotional involvement with nuclear
| power arose not from a desire to "benefit humanity" but from a
| personal fulfillment he got from his work and from seeing it
| put to practical use._
|
| _89. The same is true of scientists generally. With possible
| rare exceptions, their motive is neither curiosity nor a desire
| to benefit humanity but the need to go through the power
| process: to have a goal (a scientific problem to solve), to
| make an effort (research) and to attain the goal (solution of
| the problem.) Science is a surrogate activity because
| scientists work mainly for the fulfillment they get out of the
| work itself._
|
| _90. Of course, it 's not that simple. Other motives do play a
| role for many scientists. Money and status for example. Some
| scientists may be persons of the type who have an insatiable
| drive for status (see paragraph 79) and this may provide much
| of the motivation for their work. No doubt the majority of
| scientists, like the majority of the general population, are
| more or less susceptible to advertising and marketing
| techniques and need money to satisfy their craving for goods
| and services. Thus science is not a PURE surrogate activity.
| But it is in large part a surrogate activity._
|
| _91. Also, science and technology constitute a power mass
| movement, and many scientists gratify their need for power
| through identification with this mass movement (see paragraph
| 83)._
|
| _92. Thus science marches on blindly, without regard to the
| real welfare of the human race or to any other standard,
| obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and
| of the government officials and corporation executives who
| provide the funds for research._
| sterlind wrote:
| I read Industrial Society to my parents, and we were all
| shocked how cogent it came across as. the bits about AI were
| especially chilling, very ahead of his time. I disagree with
| his conclusions about leftists (I am one), but I have to hand
| it to him for an excellent take.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This viewpoint is pretty modern (mid-20th century onwards) -
| historically, many 'pure science' pursuits were the hobbies
| or obsessions of the relatively wealthy aristrocrat classes,
| and they really were motivated by curiousity (as their basic
| physical needs were already well-provided for), with the
| exception of rather small groups that found funding in other
| ways (Royal Society of Britain), who even then tended to rely
| heavily on things like royal patronage (see Euler, Kepler,
| etc. for example).
|
| Even now, in the era of federal grants provinding the meat &
| potatoes, a lot of scientists have multiple motivations, as
| in 'this line of research really is quite useful to
| industrial progress/understanding nature/fighting disease/etc
| and thus human civilization' as well as 'hey, I can make a
| decent living and get a fair amount of social prestige by
| doing this'.
|
| The internal bureaucratic politics of the modern science
| world are pretty nasty though, it's like bad office politics
| on steroids. Possibly the most extreme example of how it call
| all go wrong is seen in the legacy of Trofim Lysenko in the
| Soviet Union. Comparing Anthony Fauci to Lysenko might seem a
| bit extreme but recent events show how these types can
| utilize their power to protect their position, even if the
| kind of 'science' they're promoting is either reckless and
| dishonest or just manufactured ideological nonsense.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| If you follow Ted's arguments, the hobbies of wealthy
| aristocrat classes are perhaps the purest example of
| surrogate activities. He explains the concept of surrogate
| activities using leisured aristocrats as his prime example:
|
| _38. But not every leisured aristocrat becomes bored and
| demoralized. For example, the emperor Hirohito, instead of
| sinking into decadent hedonism, devoted himself to marine
| biology, a field in which he became distinguished. When
| people do not have to exert themselves to satisfy their
| physical needs they often set up artificial goals for
| themselves. In many cases they then pursue these goals with
| the same energy and emotional involvement that they
| otherwise would have put into the search for physical
| necessities. Thus the aristocrats of the Roman Empire had
| their literary pretensions; many European aristocrats a few
| centuries ago invested tremendous time and energy in
| hunting, though they certainly didn 't need the meat; other
| aristocracies have competed for status through elaborate
| displays of wealth; and a few aristocrats, like Hirohito,
| have turned to science._
|
| _39. We use the term "surrogate activity" to designate an
| activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that
| people set up for themselves merely in order to have some
| goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of
| the "fulfillment" that they get from pursuing the goal.
| Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate
| activities. Given a person who devotes much time and energy
| to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to
| devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his
| biological needs, and if that effort required him to use
| his physical and mental faculties in a varied and
| interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because
| he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then the
| person's pursuit of goal X is a surrogate activity.
| Hirohito's studies in marine biology clearly constituted a
| surrogate activity, since it is pretty certain that if
| Hirohito had had to spend his time working at interesting
| non-scientific tasks in order to obtain the necessities of
| life, he would not have felt deprived because he didn't
| know all about the anatomy and life-cycles of marine
| animals. On the other hand the pursuit of sex and love (for
| example) is not a surrogate activity, because most people,
| even if their existence were otherwise satisfactory, would
| feel deprived if they passed their lives without ever
| having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex.
| (But pursuit of an excessive amount of sex, more than one
| really needs, can be a surrogate activity.)_
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This viewpoint seems to imply that anything not directly
| related to biological survival and procreation is a
| 'surrogate activity' which then includes all of art,
| science, literature, etc. Would this author also classify
| some of the earliest human technologies (controlling
| fire, making tools, propagating plants from seeds) as
| 'surrogate activities' as well?
|
| It seems like a logical quandry. If the only measure of
| non-surrogate activity is something like 'does this
| activity contribute to the survival of the individual,
| the family, the society, the species', and if science is
| a surrogate activity, then why isn't learning how to
| control fire also an unnecessary and frivolous activity?
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _This viewpoint seems to imply that anything not
| directly related to biological survival and procreation
| is a 'surrogate activity' which then includes all of art,
| science, literature, etc._
|
| Pretty much yeah. I don't think he's implying it as much
| as saying that outright. He doesn't condemn all surrogate
| activities equally though. He has ire specifically for
| those surrogate activities he believes inevitably
| restrict the freedom of individuals to go through their
| own power process, specifically science and
| industrialization. I'll not dump more large quotations in
| this thread, but read the section _" Restriction of
| Freedom is Unavoidable in Industrial Society"_ if you
| want to hear his reasoning for this.
|
| I am not an anarcho-primitivist so the above is not the
| point _I_ am trying to make. I provided the quotations in
| my previous comments to answer the question _" why would
| we do this? Just because we can?"_ I believe the answer
| is this: _" scientists work mainly for the fulfillment
| they get out of the work itself."_
| thrown_22 wrote:
| > But it is easy to see that neither of these can be the
| principal motive of most scientists. As for "curiosity," that
| notion is simply absurd. Most scientists work on highly
| specialized problems that are not the object of any normal
| curiosity. For example, is an astronomer, a mathematician or
| an entomologist curious about the properties of
| isopropyltrimethylmethane? Of course not. Only a chemist is
| curious about such a thing, and he is curious about it only
| because chemistry is his surrogate activity. Is the chemist
| curious about the appropriate classification of a new species
| of beetle? No. That question is of interest only to the
| entomologist, and he is interested in it only because
| entomology is his surrogate activity. If the chemist and the
| entomologist had to exert themselves seriously to obtain the
| physical necessities, and if that effort exercised their
| abilities in an interesting way but in some nonscientific
| pursuit, then they wouldn't give a damn about
| isopropyltrimethylmethane or the classification of beetles.
|
| What rubbish. One need only look at Euclid's Elements to see
| that a small portion of humanity has always been interested
| in completely irrelevant but highly specialized formal
| knowledge manipulation. That a single book about math has
| survived for longer than the Bible and been translated to a
| few dozen languages, across a dozen civilizations tells you
| all you need to know about the universality of curiosity.
|
| Yes, if you're starving you won't be spending your time on
| curiosity, but you also won't be doing much of anything but
| looking for food. You might as well say that sex is a
| surrogate activity that we'd give up if we found something
| better to do.
| null_object wrote:
| > There is a lot of evidence that points to the virus spreading
| from a wet market in the city, not the Wuhan lab. But proving
| something didn't happen three years after the fact is a challenge
| that may be impossible to meet.
|
| I find the anxious disclaimer about the Wuhan lab interesting,
| because of course there were a lot of things the lab itself could
| have done to clear any doubt at the time, including not muzzling
| researchers who worked there, and even releasing their virus
| database (which had been taken offline a couple months earlier,
| under the pretext that 'someone' had attempted to 'hack' it _and
| has still not been made available three years later_ ).
| tlear wrote:
| jimcavel888 wrote:
| soco wrote:
| Important underline: the lab database is not available _to us_.
| null_object wrote:
| > Important underline: the lab database is not available to
| us
|
| Genuine question, as I'm not aware that it's been made
| externally available to anyone - do you mean it's available
| to _researchers around the world_ but not the general public?
| Or do you mean it 's available to Chinese labs?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It's a dumb conspiracy theory about a rarely-used database
| that "went down" in September 2019 which was a smoking gun
| about how the Chinese knew about Covid. Except it turns out
| that it only came online in June 2019, it went down all the
| time from the view of the tracking website, was available
| into 2020, and has absolutely nothing useful to say about
| SarsCov2;
|
| https://twitter.com/flodebarre/status/1577401140345507859
|
| I'm certain that everyone who used this as a prominent
| 'datapoint' for the LL hypothesis will immediately
| reconsider and update their priors.
| pc86 wrote:
| I think the GP's point is that it's a dumb conspiracy
| theory data-point that would be incredibly easy to
| eliminate, and it's frustrating that it's not.
| tripletao wrote:
| The thread you've linked is deliberately misleading,
| refuting a strawman version of the "conspiracy theory".
| Everyone has always agreed that the server was
| intermittently available until Feb 2020. It's a
| particular database that went unavailable in Sep 2019,
| not the whole server. Quoting from a document written by
| the "conspiracy theorists" more than a year before that
| thread:
|
| > Batvirus.whiov.ac.cn had been online for a few years,
| saw a version 2 released in June 2019, went inactive for
| a week during the second half of August 19, before
| becoming definitely inaccessible (out of the WIV at
| least) on the 12th Sep 19. It was online intermittently
| after this date from mid-December 2019, and occasionally
| until February 2020, but was not accessed from outside of
| the WIV after 12 September 2019.
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349073738_An_inv
| est...
|
| Were you aware of that? If not, then you might update
| your priors yourself.
|
| The disappearance of that database obviously isn't proof
| that the WIV did anything nefarious. It continues their
| pattern of zero transparency, though. That might just be
| the reflexive secrecy of an authoritarian state; but the
| nature of zero transparency is that we don't know.
| Izkata wrote:
| Their own evidence shows the September 2019 date is
| correct, and that it wasn't just flakiness like
| previously, it stayed down for months.
| eli wrote:
| That's probably true, but so is what's written in the article.
| A much bigger factor in the lab leak theory is that it played
| into various conspiracy theories and, for some people, was
| convenient politically. It's much easier to believe that
| someone you don't like created covid maliciously than that it
| evolved naturally thanks to a huge number of factors no one
| person can control.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| In the voice of superintendent Chalmers: A rare novel bat
| Coronavirus
|
| Emerged in Wuhan.
|
| Down the street from a virology institute
|
| That was studying coronaviruses
|
| That was studying novel bat Coronaviruses
|
| That had multiple breaches of safety protocol in the years
| leading up to it
|
| Is not where the virus originated?
|
| Skinner: Um yes
|
| "Can we inspect the site freely?"
|
| "No"
|
| "CCP a global pandemic is destroying the world."
|
| "That's just misinformation mother"
| afiori wrote:
| Also animal-to-human viruses usually go over two phases:
| first animal to human contagion is possible but human to
| human is hard, then human to human gets easier as the virus
| evolves.
|
| If Covid-19 started in the wet market it went over the
| first phase very quickly.
|
| Part of fighting disinformation and conspiracy theories is
| also learning to distinguish when things are just lies (eg.
| sandy hook was an hoax) or truish but misused (eg. chemical
| waste in river does affect the sex of frogs).
|
| It is also important not o make a strawman of the opponent.
| For some people the "Lab Theory" is "The CCP was trying to
| exterminate the US but failed" for others it is "A
| researcher got bit by a bat in a lab". The former is
| paranoid, the latter is completely plausible.
|
| Overall there is good circumstantial evidence for both, and
| reasonable people can disagree.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Except substitute "down the street" with "30 km away on the
| other side of a river", and notice that everybody who got
| sick initially was next to the market, none of them
| anywhere near the lab.
|
| So the lab-leak hypothesis is: this virus created at the
| lab accidentally escaped to someone who subsequently only
| infected people on the other side of town.
|
| It's certainly a possibility (viral transmission is
| irregular with high variance, and people can easily travel
| that distance), and the lack of transparency by the
| government is alarming (though not particularly surprising
| to folks studying China), but most of the experts who have
| studied it still think it's relatively unlikely.
| cloutchaser wrote:
| luckylion wrote:
| Your understanding is that a large conspiracy of various
| Western and Chinese (and others?) federal institutes have
| conspired to uphold a fake story because the Western
| officials funding the Chinese research don't want the
| world to know that their money was somehow involved?
| cloutchaser wrote:
| It doesn't take too many data points to at least make you
| suspicious. It's not a conspiracy theory.
|
| We know Peter Daszak lied about his involvement in this
| research. We know Fauci made decisions about coronavirus
| research. We know the NIH funded coronavirus research in
| wuhan. The chinese took their virus database offline.
| They refused any serious investigation. The batwoman has
| disappeared. All these organisations have a lot to lose
| if it was partly their fault for this pandemic. Yet at
| they same time they hold the keys to any serious
| investigation.
|
| This does NOT mean that this is proof that it was a lab
| leak. But it is extremely suspicious behaviour and
| circumstances. At a minimum it should warrant serious
| pressure to investigate what happened.
| null_object wrote:
| > Except substitute "down the street" with "30 km away on
| the other side of a river", and notice that everybody who
| got sick initially was next to the market, none of them
| anywhere near the lab. > So the lab-leak hypothesis is:
| this virus created at the lab accidentally escaped to
| someone who subsequently only infected people on the
| other side of town.
|
| But this isn't necessarily how it works, at all.
|
| The Wuhan market is one of Wuhan's most population-dense
| areas, in close proximity to three hospitals where the
| first cases were identified, and was therefore the
| concentration for infection-tracing.
|
| In other words, the dataset for early cases was based on
| a belief that the market was where the infection was
| spreading, rather than the location of a spreading event
| that came from elsewhere in the city. Even pneumonia
| cases that were reported were only post-hoc assigned as
| probably covid _if they were in close proximity to the
| market_.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Again, it's not impossible or even implausible that the
| spread could have happened like that, or that there were
| cases elsewhere that went unrecognized. But that's not
| nearly the same as flippantly describing this as the lab
| just "down the street" from the market.
|
| The possibility hasn't been incontrovertibly ruled out
| (and maybe never can be at this point), and it's
| important to do independent investigations and examine
| the lab's research, etc. It's just not considered by most
| experts to be the most likely possibility.
|
| As a geographical comparison, it would be like having a
| new disease outbreak where all of the known cases for the
| first several weeks were in Brooklyn, NY and concluding
| that the source could have been a lab in Newark, NJ. It's
| possible, but not the first place to look.
| waffleiron wrote:
| But you can do this too for the Chinese version of the
| conspiracy too.
|
| ----
|
| Emerged after military games in Wuhan.
|
| Where the US competed.
|
| Who is a geopolitical rival of China.
|
| With soldiers that work at a military biolab.
|
| That had a major biosafety breach the same year.
|
| And the US doesn't let the site be inspected freely.
|
| ----
|
| Each of these are true on their own, that doesn't mean we
| can conclude the implied conclusion is true.
| baja_blast wrote:
| But the military games happened in October, the
| previously public database of the WIV was taken down in
| September a month prior due to "hacking" which why would
| someone hack a publicly available database is hard to
| imagine. And why has the database not been shared via
| database dumps or uploaded somewhere else since? Also if
| the outbreak occurred in the US there would have been
| major spikes in hospitalizations months earlier in the US
| than what happened in Wuhan.
| colpabar wrote:
| It's frustrating that people make the argument that the lab
| leak theory is "politically convenient" and that it "played
| into various conspiracy theories" and then go on to list
| ridiculous things that no one here is arguing. A lot of
| people look at covid, which was first seen in wuhan, and
| think "hmm, it seems like there's a good chance it came from
| the lab in wuhan that studies coronaviruses." You don't have
| to involve politics at all for it to be easy to believe.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| You have to ignore all the evidence and data that makes
| this extremely unlikely.
|
| Just as someone might want to believe the moon is made from
| cheese. It looks a bit like it, after all. But to believe
| that, you have to ignore all that scientists have uncovered
| about the moon.
| noptd wrote:
| >all the evidence and data that makes this extremely
| unlikely.
|
| Please, do share.
| themoonisachees wrote:
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| What data makes this extremely unlikely? Worobey and
| Pekar are hardly convincing.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Just google it. There's enough out there, but you don't
| want to believe the experts even though you don't know
| the science. There is no signature of manipulation in the
| Genome. Zero sign of it being "recombined". Experts just
| don't see a clear way it could have happened. Just the
| inability to say it's impossible and will never happen is
| seen as confirmation of the hypothesis.
|
| Proponents of the lab-leak hypothesis often believe the
| researchers have somehow enhanced the virus. The only way
| we actually know to do this is through evolution in lab
| animals. And even then it's pretty damn hard. Maybe
| multiple industrial-scale facilities could evolve a
| threatening Virus. At horrendous cost. Maybe. And even
| China couldn't hide that.
| tripletao wrote:
| The most likely research-origin scenario is either a
| naturally-evolved novel virus collected and accidentally
| released by the WIV, or a chimera of multiple such
| viruses. No genomic evidence could distinguish that from
| natural spillover. For example, here's David Relman back
| in 2020:
|
| > This argument [that SARS-CoV-2 must be natural since it
| doesn't use a known backbone] fails to acknowledge the
| possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors
| (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02)
| had already been discovered and were being studied in a
| laboratory--for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone
| and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other
| with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It
| would have been a logical next step to wonder about the
| properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in
| the laboratory.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2021133117
|
| The WIV had the world's largest effort to collect novel
| sarbecoviruses from nature, often from remote caves that
| no other humans would routinely visit; so I don't see any
| reason to discount that possibility.
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Unfortunately the politics makes it _comforting_ to believe
| (even though all the evidence points to natural origin -
| explained at length here and elsewhere).
|
| It is so much easier to believe that the bad thing was made
| by bad people somewhere else, instead of confronting the
| reality that in fact _we_ did it with our ever greater
| encroachment on the last remaining natural reservoirs - and
| will do it again, probably soon.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Why did the lab in Wuhan study coronaviruses? Is it that
| there are convenient natural reservoirs nearby?
| Jtype wrote:
| nope. hundreds of miles away actually.
| tripletao wrote:
| It is not. In the words of Dr. Shi herself:
|
| > We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province
| for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or
| even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses
| that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don't think the
| spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in
| Hubei Province.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210727042832/https://www.sc
| ien...
|
| Coronaviruses are basically everywhere, as are bats. The
| greatest abundance of sarbecoviruses is far from Wuhan,
| though. The closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were found in
| Yunnan and surroundings, near Kunming or Pu'er, and now
| in Laos.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I'm not really familiar with Dr Shi or your source (seems
| a bit obfuscated via archive.org), but it does seem like
| a very sober and careful analysis from an expert.
|
| Also, she says what I always assumed was the case:
|
| > Scientists from around the world have overwhelmingly
| concluded that SARS-CoV-2 originated naturally rather
| than from any institution.
| tripletao wrote:
| An expert indeed; Dr. Shi discovered the bat virus
| ancestors of SARS-1. Her subsequent research at the WIV
| is the matter of controversy here, as to whether that
| could have caused the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The interview
| is with Science, the well-known academic journal. That
| journal seems to have reorganized their website recently
| and broken my old link, so I used archive.org instead of
| hunting down the new URL.
|
| So Dr. Shi is obviously going to say the pandemic is of
| natural origin. Even if she personally believes
| otherwise, she's under the physical control of the PRC
| government, and would suffer grave consequences if she
| went against their official story. My point is that not
| even she thinks spillover in Wuhan is likely, though. The
| idea that the WIV was situated in Wuhan because of an
| abundance of nearby sarbecoviruses is bizarrely common,
| but it's neither anti-lab-origin nor pro-lab-origin, just
| wrong.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Indeed, I really don't know why there is a virology lab
| in Wuhan, or why they would be located in any given part
| of the world.
|
| I tend to assume that covid-19 came about like
| (presumably) every other virus since time eternal;
| through random mutation in the wild. What I don't really
| understand is any sort of singular alternative theory of
| how it arose - it seems that every alternative is anomaly
| hunting or god of the gaps type arguments in search of
| some greater meaning behind it.
| tripletao wrote:
| I agree there's no conclusive evidence for any specific
| origin of SARS-CoV-2, unnatural, natural, or otherwise. I
| don't see the "god of the gaps" analogy, though. There's
| no evidence that god exists, and attributing actions to
| god has no predictive or practical benefit. But there's
| certainly evidence that virologists exist, and were
| collecting and manipulating novel SARS-like viruses near
| the origin of a novel SARS-like pandemic. (Are you
| familiar with the DEFUSE grant proposal?)
|
| So with millions dead, shouldn't we investigate? There
| are many paths unexplored within reach of American or
| European subpoena, both in the WIV's collaborators and in
| sequencer reads from unrelated work that may contain
| early viral genomes as contamination.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| What would you like to investigate? This is what I don't
| understand - what is the alternative to a natural origin?
| tripletao wrote:
| That researchers at the WIV collected two novel viruses
| from nature, built a chimera with a synthetic FCS,
| infected themselves by accident, and spread the virus
| into the world? The first two steps are exactly what they
| proposed in DEFUSE; that proposal got rejected, but it's
| still an indication of the work they might have continued
| with other funders.
|
| Or that they collected one naturally-evolved virus, got
| infected in the field, and spread it from there? The WIV
| sent grad students into remote caves that no other humans
| routinely entered, specifically selected for their
| abundance of novel potential pandemic pathogens, with
| nothing more than nitrile gloves and a surgical mask. So
| while there are far more farmers and guano collectors
| (and others creating risk of natural spillover) than WIV
| grad students, the risk per WIV grad student seems orders
| of magnitude higher.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I'm not really familiar with the acronyms, but I wonder
| if it would be possible to prove that the virus is _not_
| artificially constructed? The other theory just sounds
| like natural origin with an extra step.
|
| But what I wonder most would be, say that it was proven
| that covid-19 was artificially constructed through some
| method or other - what would it matter? I wonder if more
| people would get vaccines? Would China now know that they
| can unleash something like this on the world with
| relative impunity? Would it incentivize further research
| into biological weapons?
| null_object wrote:
| > It's much easier to believe that someone you don't like
| created covid maliciously than that it evolved naturally
|
| Ah! and there you did _that thing_ to make an accidental lab-
| leak a crazy nut job conspiracy theory.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| The problem with the lab hypothesis is not that it is extremely
| unlikely or "forbidden".
|
| The problem is that any suggestion that remotely sounds like it
| is possible attracts and inflames a large community of nutjobs.
| Just like it is hard to discuss problems around the Israeli
| government's actions without attracting anti-semites.
| wara23arish wrote:
| The damage done from the unchecked israeli government is
| objectively way worse than being called an anti-semite
| unfoundedly. Some western journalists like Robert Fisk lives
| by those values.
|
| I understand that it's complicated to the uninvolved, but
| coming from the receiving side of israeli missiles, Ill wear
| the anti-semite badge proudly if it comes to it.
|
| People who have no real skin in the game will understandably
| avoid being called anti-semite even if it's against their
| moral compass. I imagine i'd be one of them too if I were
| born in a different location.
|
| So in regards to the virus, I just wish people would stop
| caring about fear of association with nutjobs. I believe this
| causes a type of self-censorship worse than any other tech
| platform can do.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| You don't understand my point. It's not about equating
| criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. The point is, once
| you do criticize Israel, you'll attract actual nut jobs who
| actually hate Jews. And criticizing Israel without
| acknowledging the other side's culpability can quickly
| cross over into actual anti-semitism.
| defen wrote:
| That suggests an easy strategy for anyone who wants to shut
| down lab-leak discussion: just post maximally-unhinged
| support for it. See also "cognitive infiltration".
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| You need a critical mass of nutters to achieve any
| traction. I don't know of any case where someone
| successfully did that in reality.
| neilv wrote:
| Around a decade ago, when Boston University was trying
| (successfully) to have its campus be the site of a BSL-4 lab,
| there were protests (articles, even outdoor demonstrations) --
| over the risks of a lab leak of the world's nastiest pathogens,
| in an dense urban area.
|
| In that dialogue, the public heard a lot about histories of
| safety incidents at other BSL-4 labs, which generally seemed due
| to negligence.
|
| Today, given all the presumed awareness of lab leak risks, from
| the BU BSL-4 protests, and from the subsequent Covid pandemic-- I
| don't know why anyone at BU would risk modifying Covid without
| the utmost precautions, including at least using BSL-4 rather
| than BSL-3.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It seems stupid to have these sites in urban areas. If we want
| to do this sort of stuff, build the facility in the desert,
| with little population, little wildlife population, and
| environmental factors inhospitable to long lifetime if there is
| escape.
|
| But I guess safety measures like that are too inconvenient.
| jbandela1 wrote:
| When I was in medical school, I heard mentioned that
| Galveston, TX was chosen for a BSL4 laboratory in part
| because it was an island, and if something bad happened the
| US could blow up the bridges and quarantine the island.
| ccrush wrote:
| The same reason was used to host the bioresearch lab at
| Plum Island, NY. However, they dont have a BSL-4 lab there
| and testing animals on the island outside the labs revealed
| that the animals had become infected with various zoonotic
| pathogens under research at the facility. Citing its
| proximity to NYC, the decision to shut down the laboratory
| was made, and a new lab was built in Manhattan. Thankfully,
| they meant Manhattan, KS, and despite repeated testing, no
| intelligent life worth protecting was found anywhere in
| Kansas.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| No worries about Hurricane induced lab leak?
| kosievdmerwe wrote:
| Yeah frankly I can't think of a more dangerous thing humanity
| could be doing than biological research on infectious
| diseases in population centers.
|
| Even doing chemical processing in cities is safer since
| you're only risking the immediate area.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Might be difficult to get people to work there.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| It's really not and is quite common. You keep the site out
| a ways have workers show up and then bus them out to the
| site. You only have to keep the site where you are doing
| the work way out there and so people can do their regular
| non lab related work closer to home.
|
| It's a really common practice. I live near a national
| nuclear research lab and they do that. I also grew up near
| an ICBM building and designing facility and when they
| needed to run tests they drive several hours out to the
| west desert to do things just to be safe.
|
| It's not that uncommon or inconvenient, and makes a hell of
| a lot more sense then just slapping it in the middle of a
| major metro area.
|
| Seriously we've got tons of land out west that is about a
| million miles from everything let's use some of that.
| giantg2 wrote:
| One difference is the bussing may need to be combined
| with a quarantine period which wouldn't be necessary with
| nuclear or chemical research.
| buscoquadnary wrote:
| Would it though? I mean, I am assuming there aren't
| quarantine procedures right now. You'd just have to make
| sure you have appropriate disinfectant/decontamination
| guidelines.
|
| Heck just require decontamination as you leave the lab
| and as you get off the bus, two times makes it more safe,
| and I'd imagine a 40 minute bus ride through the
| sweltering west desert heat in direct isn't an
| environment that microorganisms my flourish in.
|
| Plus that's easy to do to if there is a quarantine
| period, out people on shifts of 5-7 days on site, one
| week off. That's what they do for the oil rigs, plenty of
| people live like that, it isn't easy, or cheap for the
| company but a global pandemic that locked down countries
| shattered supply chains and wreaked havoc with the global
| economy was a hell of a lot more expensive.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Plus that's easy to do to if there is a quarantine
| period, out people on shifts of 5-7 days on site, one
| week off."
|
| Exactly.
|
| "have appropriate disinfectant/decontamination
| guidelines."
|
| Yeah... it seems there have been some issues with people
| consistently following them. At least with the quarantine
| you have some defense in depth in case the procedures in
| the lab failed. (I think a woman in Fance died doing
| prion research. Why? Because she violated multiple
| protocols. I want to say she didn't even report it at
| first, but I could be wrong. And this isnt even a true
| infectious disease)
| giantg2 wrote:
| Somehow they make this sort of model work for various
| classified work in places like NM (although population
| centers have grown around them due to their size and
| support requirements). I don't see why something similar
| can't be done for this. Plenty of Government land in those
| desert areas out west too.
| godelski wrote:
| A significant number of military bases operate like this.
| Edwards and China Lake are great examples. Los Alamos. Even
| Fermi. Cities developed around these areas over time, but
| they once were only military/gov projects.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Endangering billions of people because virologists prefer
| to be urbanite yuppies. Research so important that such a
| risk is accepted, but not so important that it would make
| sense to simply pay virologists 5x more to live somewhere
| remote.
|
| This is _madness._
| rhacker wrote:
| I don't like the idea of paying virologists more money,
| they shouldn't even exist.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| _Dune_ has been on my mind recently. In the universe of
| Dune, AI research brings humanity to the brink of ruin.
| After the rebellion against this, a commandment against
| creating AIs is added to the major religions. Those found
| guilty of creating or possessing thinking machines should
| be sentenced to immediate death. The demonstrable peril
| of such research is severe enough to justify that
| punishment.
|
| If virologists create and lose control of something that
| kills billions of people, wouldn't that justify an
| ultimate taboo against that kind of research? Maybe
| that's why virologists all clam up and circle the wagons
| when something sketchy happens. They say nobody but other
| virologists are qualified to question virology, but how
| can they be trusted to regulate themselves?
| giantg2 wrote:
| The funny thing is, there are some virologists/scientists
| questioning if the lab was involved (just a minority
| though).
| lukeschlather wrote:
| On the other hand, it's easy to imagine that this sort of
| research is the only path to permanently curing
| Coronaviruses (and not just Coronaviruses but also
| Influenza.) As bad as this pandemic was if it was a
| required step on the road to permanently curing both
| Coronaviruses and Influenza... that's a no-brainer, it's
| well worth the pain, it will save billions of lives.
|
| Also if delaying this research delays such a hypothetical
| Influenza cure by 30 years, that will cost more lives
| than this pandemic did too.
| notahacker wrote:
| I'm reasonably confident that there's a more obvious
| explanation for virologists tending to back other
| virologists over homeopaths, politicians and contrarians
| frantically Googling basic virology knowledge in debates
| about viral transmission and protein structures than fear
| of Dune-inspired death sentences for every practitioner
| of their profession.
|
| Sure, and programmers all circle the wagons every time
| someone suggests that if the company recruits twice as
| many people to the team it'll get the project done _at
| least_ twice as quickly. Maybe it 's because they're
| scared of the employment implications of senior
| management knowing best :D
|
| Back in reality, half the evidence presented in favour of
| the 'lab leak' hypothesis is in fact the long list of
| actual lab leaks virologists have identified and blamed
| virologists for...
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| Can't a lot of things automated and operated at distance?
|
| After all we can do lab experiences on Mars, why not at 200
| miles (300km) ?
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| So pay them a little more - enough that you can ask them to
| live there for 6 months at a time to reduce risk of
| pathogen escape as much as possible. If this type of
| dangerous research is actually valuable enough to keep
| doing, then it is valuable enough to implement protocols
| like this.
| baja_blast wrote:
| Worse yet, before the pandemic there was more political
| pressure to regulate and discuss the risks of such research.
| Now it feels like politicians are afraid to even discuss it.
| Places like NYT used to occasionally post articles like
| https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/04/opinion/sunday/the-truth-...
| and https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/health/h5n1-bird-flu-
| rese... but now you will never seem anything like this
| published. It is as if the concerns over lab accidents has all
| but disappeared!
| brippalcharrid wrote:
| Yes, but if we can't attract the world's foremost virologists
| to programs that we have some degree of control over in the
| middle of international cities where they can engage in serial
| passaging of airborne HIV in the morning, and then get lunch at
| places that are trending, authentic and cutting-edge, then
| they'll just go to a program in another country that doesn't
| have these restrictions.
|
| No-one wants to live in an underground facility for weeks or
| months at a time when they could be making the most of living
| in a major city, not even virologists working on pathogens that
| are being modified to see what would happen if there was a
| pathogen whose evolution was guided in a particularly
| interesting direction and compressed from decades to weeks or
| even days.
|
| Anyway, if we were to ask the world's foremost experts in the
| virological community whether we should restrict such research
| to carefully-controlled remote locations subject to stringent
| controls, long quarantines and strict oversight, then we might
| find that the answer was similar to when we asked "is if likely
| or even within the realm of possibility that SARS-CoV-2
| originated from a lab in Wuhan as result of Gain-of-Function
| research". And they might insist that we listen to them because
| they were the experts, and they would probably find a lot of
| support in the government and the media.
| neilv wrote:
| For one itemization of a lot of the concerns at the time,
| here's a Massachusetts Nurses Association statement, dated
| 2005, from their perspective:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20101125034813/https://www.massn...
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| > I don't know why anyone at BU would risk modifying Covid
| without the utmost precautions
|
| My wife was a laboratory inspector for a while. She'd come home
| with the craziest stories about how such-and-such lab tried to
| get away with this or that. I'd have the same question every
| time. "Why?!" Protocols only work if they're followed. We have
| such a long history of disasters, major or minor, because of
| negligence[0]. Cutting corners, operating outside the envelope,
| etc.
|
| She'd always just shrug and say, "familiarity breeds
| contempt".[1]
|
| [0] My favorite is Chernobyl.
|
| [1] Also, a lot of scientists have this, "I know what I'm
| doing" attitude and see safety precautions as holding them
| back. It doesn't help that most of them see grad students as
| expendable.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| >[0] My favorite is Chernobyl.
|
| Biology is different to physics or chemistry. The worst
| nuclear accident can kill a few million people. The worst
| chemistry accident can kill a few hundreds of thousands of
| people. The worst biology accident can kill _everyone_.
| dinvlad wrote:
| Considering all the negative comments here, I'd say we should be
| just as careful trusting "science" news reporting as we think
| science itself should be (which it is). The official statement
| from BU makes a good point on that [0].
|
| The sensationalism perpetuated by far right-wing news outlets is
| in fact the main danger here. Yes, there's always room for
| improvement, but if we are not experts able to understand the
| research as it was actually conducted, imho we should not jump to
| conclusions and blame the scientists etc. This only serves one
| goal (of those far-right orgs) to further diminish trust in
| science among the general public.
|
| [0] https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/neidl-researchers-refute-
| uk...
| TMWNN wrote:
| First, Statnews is not a "far right-wing news outlet".
|
| Second, quoting from said Statnews article:
|
| >But it has become apparent that the research team did not
| clear the work with the National Institute of Allergy and
| Infectious Diseases, which was one of the funders of the
| project. The agency indicated it is going to be looking for
| some answers as to why it first learned of the work through
| media reports.
|
| >Emily Erbelding, director of NIAID's division of microbiology
| and infectious diseases, said the BU team's original grant
| applications did not specify that the scientists wanted to do
| this precise work. Nor did the group make clear that it was
| doing experiments that might involve enhancing a pathogen of
| pandemic potential in the progress reports it provided to
| NIAID.
|
| >"I think we're going to have conversations over upcoming
| days," Erbelding told STAT in an interview.
|
| The BU press release does not address this at all.
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