US Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The pathogen to be modified must pose a serious health threat, and the work must produce knowledge — such as a vaccine — that would benefit humans. Finally, there must be no safer way to do the research.
> "Now, a government panel will require that researchers show that their studies in this area are scientifically sound and that they will be done in a high-security lab."
It does sound like there are concerns. I'm glad that people are keeping their eyes on it. I found this quote interesting as well, regarding publishing the results of such research:
> “Physicists long ago learned to distinguish between what can be publicly available and what’s classified,” he added, referring to nuclear weapons research. “We want to keep some of this stuff on a need-to-know basis.”
I'd prefer if drilling for oil in the gulf were illegal, not legal with regulatory oversite, for example. I don't think a pessimistic outlook on the reliability of federal oversight is unwarranted, given my (admittedly dim) view of how the process has worked in the past.
To be more constructive: I'm up for substantive suggestions for ensuring more transparent and reliable oversite than exists today.
The US still has the largest arsenal of nerve gas in the world, much of it which is still in the queue to be destroyed, much of it still leaking.
I've always interpreted it as being a corollary to "actions speak louder than words". Simply saying something, or having the intention to do something does not mean it will actually get done.
And how do you know the work will 'produce knowledge?'
A vaccine is impossible to guarantee.
So a bioweapon might not satisfy this criteria. Besides it probably violates other laws, and is thus still illegal.
What I fear, however, is that this action undermines the Biological Weapons Convention[0].
The convention explicitly allows for research such as this, yes. Nonetheless, it effectively worked as a moratorium on such research, with the US leading by example.
This program creates a situation much like nuclear research, where civil and military use cases exist on a continuum, with the first often being used to cover the second. Note how biological agents, where the US had the moral high ground, have entirely disappeared. Meanwhile, nuclear and chemical agents, which can be produced under the cover of closely related civil industries, are still very much threatening (and killing) people today.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention
This is a better article: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/nih-lifts-3-year-ban...
This ban that's being lifted stems from a few incidents, but really the driving force was Ron Fouchier's [0] gain-of-function study where his lab made a few mutations that enabled transmission of the bird flu (H5N1) virus between ferrets. All they had to do was make five mutations and it was suddenly more dangerous (here's the paper [1]). Ferrets may sound random, but they can become infected with human flu virus and show similar pathology to humans - they're a model for humans.
I remember hearing Fouchier speak in Washington at a biodefense conference right after the study came out. He was (is?) pretty much a celebrity among scientists, but the policy folks had a different opinion...
Pretty sure these things will escape from the lab at some point. I've personally handled some B. anthracis (causes anthrax) that was supposedly non-viable only to find out later that it was almost certainly still alive. (Not this case, but here's an example [2] mentioned in the article.) There would (hopefully) be more regulations on BSL3+ organisms like the viruses being discussed, because anthrax is relatively friendly, but like any other field, all it takes is one incompetent person.
[0] https://www.erasmusmc.nl/MScMM/faculty/CVs/fouchier_cv?lang=...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4810786/
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/anthrax/news-multimedia/lab-incident/ind...
Now I have a lack in knowledge of biology at this level, but can someone maybe explain to me how all those disease mass extinction movies cannot be real? I feel like my lack of knowledge here causes my concerns when reading stuff like this article.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-31982078
All it will take for Ebola to be a truly massive killer is a small mutation that would reduce immediate mortality or that would increase the incubation time. Either one of those would greatly increase the number of people that a single outbreak would affect. I'd rather not have to live through that.
I learned two things playing that 'Pandemic' flash game a few years back:
1) don't evolve deadly characteristics until you've infected as many people as possible (to get around ebola's issue you pointed out)
2) Madagascar is the place to be in the event of a global epidemic
It's completely possible to go years without catching a cold if you're willing to devote maybe 10% of your time and a little money to it, and avoid certain situation. We just don't bother because getting a cold isn't (usually) that terrible.
You picked my curiousity! What do you have in mind?
Use the enhance feature to magically unblur images to clarity? I've seen ML demos of stuff like that.
Giant realtime database of all phone calls meta data and recordings? Realtime facial/license plate recognition search of millions of people/cars? Not so funny anymore.
Tracking peoples movements in realtime. Sure just cary this phone wherever you go.
Realtime overhead imagery of an entire city? There's a company that flies drones around that lets them rewind the movements of all cars in the city throughout the day...
Magic black box that can decrypt all encryption? Sure, funny only if you overlook underhanded C planted by the NSA.
Hacking into industrial machinery and power systems?
Having millions of computers all under your control to launch attacks?
This was all funny Hollywood BS and conspiracy theories two decades ago. Elaborate animated "hacking" scenes are still funny but what they accomplish is possible.
Maybe the problem is that my sample size isn't large enough, but I've only encountered about a dozen widely used DVR servers that are actually unique tech instead of rebranding.
2 minutes in he talks about how a strain of flu escaped from a lab in 1977 and killed (and is still killing) millions of people.
The analogue with software development, I'd say, is when people periodically point out that nuclear power plant or ICBM control systems still run on 8-inch floppy disks!!1! and therefore allegedly need to be completely rewritten. That rationale likewise fails to meet my tempting fate threshold.
But I'm ignorant of this topic. Without handwaving or pointing at the worst case, how much should we worry? Is there any evidence that a genetically enhanced virus can be devastating? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_virus doesn't have much.
[1] I am clearly not here referring to the supernatural aspects.
The traits desired in a bioweapon aren't particularly beneficial to the long-term propagation of a viral strain and thus would be selected against, or at least not selected for, by natural processes.
Evolution selects for virulence, not death toll. After all, your hosts can't spread you if they're dead.
Arguable. Dead bodies can and do spread disease.
Humans can suffer very high death rates due to diseases for which we aren't a host. See the Black Death [1]. The host was fleas, riding rodent vectors.
As someone finishing a PhD in computer-aided drug discovery, this seems to be the situation in a lot of cases. Nature often finds it trivial to get around drugs and back to the viral behavior it wants. For example, a lab might make an allosteric drug that reduces the activity of a viral enzyme. In response to treatment with the drug, a few copies of the virus emerge with point mutation that makes them more active. Now a patient has two populations of viruses, and the disease no longer cares about the treatment. The surprising thing isn't just that this happens, but that it happens so rapidly, often requiring just a few days or a single mutation.
A quick example of the above is the I585T substitution in [1]
One big-picture concept is that genes and proteins are more than their immediate sequences/transcripts. On top of their current identity, they all exist on an mutational "landscape". Remember that some codons are redundant, while some amino acid changes would require two or three base mutations. Therefore, the sequence of a virus encodes both its current identity, as well as nearby evolutionary "alternatives". When a recurring threat comes by, the virus might have encoded in its genes a common defense, maybe through a particularly mutagen-exposed gene location or something like that. In the above case, the virus may have had millenia of exposure to weird dietary natural products and whatnot, and encoded easy rate up/down mutations for its essential enzymes, or orthosteric disruptor mutations for its promiscuous binding sites.
This sort of fuckery will have to become a consideration in designing the antivirals of the future.
And, to toot my own horn: In an evolutionary sense, our fight against viruses is particularly interesting. Now that computers are helping us accelerate drug development, our brains and computers could be considered as part of our immune systems. In the same way that metal weapons made us safe against macroscopic threats (lions etc), computers and public health infrastructure will become our arsenal against microscopic threats. If computer-aided drug design can lead to faster approval of cheap drugs, we can design hundreds of antiviral molecules and chase a virus all over its evolutionary landscape, until it has nowhere left to run.
For out-of-field readers -- An anecdote of cancer cells (not viruses) becoming reliant on a drug in [2]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC296079/ [2] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2017/10/04/cancer-...
As a general rule, if your argument starts with this premise, you're probably heading down the wrong path. Natural evolution is an extremely limited optimization process with a dramatically different loss function than the ones used by humans.
A lot of the debate was started because 2 groups did so in 2011, independently of each other finding mutations that allow the deadly H5N1 virus to transmit via air[1][2]. One group also did work to model the chance of these mutations showing up in nature[3]. The techniques by which to do this are fairly well established. Knowledge of how to do it safely is fairly limited, as is access to animals in which to test these modifications.
* [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10831 * [2] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6088/1534.long * [3] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6088/1541.full
But the massiveness of that disaster, or its impendingness, has very little to do with some people in Washington DC mouthing words about how you shouldn't do that.
This is definitely one of those cases where I feel like a lot of people are demonstrating some very magical thinking about the effectiveness of regulations, with all due respect to those involved. Does Kim Jong Un care that some people in Washington DC say that it's illegal to make lethal viruses? Does China? Russia? Iran? Europe? Anyone else in the world, really? Or a small criminal lab located in the United States? Or a criminal with access to a lab in the United States? It's not like there's literally people standing on top of every single gene sequencer in the world, or the US, stopping people from doing things.
The regulations were not all that was standing between us and some deadly virus, because anyone who would make a deadly virus and release it, accidentally or otherwise, still has a very simple path to that goal: "Ignore the regulations the US has." This just gives the good guys a chance to possibly learn some things about that before someone else releases it.
Edit: remember when Ebola was never supposed to leave the CDC fascility and a nurse was exposed to it and left the hospital? That's what happens when there's the highest level of scrutinity and security.
It's been a long time since I read that. The part about the guy's seizures freaked me out for a while.
They have a strong desire to match american machismo. They probably lack the funds to build novel biological weapons their own. They are extremely good at break into computer systems. Companies excel at ignoring their vulnerabilities until it is too late.
I'd be more worried about the lack of scruples among people. Unfortunately that doesn't create as much of a boogeyman.
Vulnerabilities researched and weaponized by the government, ended up in the public, and caused global damage. There is no oversight into how these are produced or their risks.
We humans collectively as one entity clearly have no discipline.
The current set of laws are themselves in first place not providing any peace in the lives of most people. And we have no time to fix that issue and our impulsive anxiety issue is making some weak willed men to open up new roads to destruction. It may yield some benefit but it is not essential.
I have 0 confidence in today's governments that they are capable of containing any damage caused by this law.
If entire of humanity is going to become extinct then we can take a high risk effort. All the day every time we need not take life threatening risks.
Opening up of this law means any minute now in best case scenario there is a 1% chance that there may be a deadly virus in the air u just breathed in. And based on history we humans are capable of leading ourselves into worst case scenarios and that puts the percentage of risk anywhere between 1% to 99%.
Now even if something worst case happens i am sure the human species would not go extinct as the billionaires and few millionaires would have means to survive any death prone event only with nobody left to buy their products anymore.
Kudos!
- AFAIK research on vaccines does not require altering an organism to make it more lethal. You would want to cover as broad a spectrum of serotypes/serovars of the existing organism as possible. I can see how someone might argue that you could pre-empt a more malignant variant but surely this is outweighed by the likelihood of creating systemic risk.
- What exactly would we learn form creating new, highly virulent organisms that can't be learned using the same technology on non-virulent organisms?
- It bothers me that this is a push to create more biological weapons from the military complex (especially terrifying considering the infantile intellects we currently have in congress).
Kewl.
Technology is, in a fundamental way, a force multiplicator. It gives you power to do more things that you could do with only your biological body and mind. That power can be used for destructive means too, so it follows that as we get more power, we open new, exciting ways to destroy ourselves.
It's a great high level overview of dna sequencing from the discovery of its shape through the completion of the human genome project in 2000.
I'm having trouble pasting a link, maybe someone could help me out.
Dr. Francis S. Collins is in several of the videos, and the third video is all about this particular controversy of dangerous experiments at the dawn of genetic engineering(for example one guy wanted to splice a cancer causing gene in e. coli bacterium).
It seemed relevant to me. It is what the article is talking about afterall.
Weird how that works.
Stop making everything political, if this was done under a different administration you would have applauded it because of it being a scientific effort. Chances are this was decided by a panel and not the person you despise.
Being a-political myself, it always amazes me how for BOTH parties, the political issues aren't even about the issue at hand anymore. It's about proving the other side wrong.