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Comment by jerome-jh | Hacker News Reader

The Nature article only underlines the similarities between Sars-Cov-2 and viruses in the wild. It uses that as an evidence that the virus comes from natural selection.

The similarity absolutely IS NOT an evidence of natural selection, neither guided selection or straight genetic engineering.

Although I am absolutely not in favor of Bannon, many scientists self-censor to preserve their carrier, funding, link with chinese labs. Only those in favor of the natural selection publish in well known journals.

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> Although I am absolutely not in favor of Bannon, many scientists self-censor to preserve their carrier, funding, link with chinese labs. Only those in favor of the natural selection publish in well known journals.

This is fairly standard conspiracy theory stuff. Next you'll be telling us about QAnon and pedophiles.

Seems common sense that scientists, like anyone really, would self-censor anything that goes against the norm.

I remember when Agile was in its heyday and I said it had a lot of negatives and nearly got fired.

I'm sure you agree that your personal anecdote isn't evidence of a vast global conspiracy where scientists around the world censor themselves in order to ensure they retain links to Chinese labs?

Do you know many scientists? To counter your anecdote, my personal anecdote is that many scientists I know (as friends or colleagues) are cantankerous contrarians who would delight in going against the grain especially in the knowledge that real proof of such a theory would vastly increase their profile/notoriety.

In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17938318 some of the parties involved mentioned that they disassociated from the paper in fear of being ostracized.

Scientists are people too. You often see people hiding their real beliefs due to the fear of retaliation and public perception as well as misinterpretation regarding controversial topics, it is only natural that scientists have the same fear, especially when considering this case where we have a highly political topic.

Sure - I agree that there will be some scientists who will self-censor.

What I'm taking issue with is the trope that there's some kind of conspiracy of silence going on, where the global science community has decided it's beholden to China and refuses to research / publish credible theories that this is a lab-made virus. My experience is that scientists aren't a homogenous group and quite a few of them actually care about truth and facts and put that above the risk of losing links to Chinese funding.

You’re using the word conspiracy to ridicule the idea that humans will not speak about something out of fear of repercussions, which is about the most in-evidence thing about past atrocities one can imagine.

No I'm not. I invite you to read the response you replied to more carefully.

Earlier this year, there were attempts to publish articles going against the narrative, and those who attempted were ridiculed, the exactly same way like it is happening in this comments section. No one wants this to happen to them.

You are the only person in this discussion who mentioned the word conspiracy though.

Well in this case that would probably increase their notoriety but not their profile.

There is no value publishing against the apparent consensus for natural selection, because of the high risk, and the lack of a definitive proof, yet. A true scientist would even refrain to conclude for the natural selection hypothesis.

I'm not really following your point?

Are you trying to say there's a global conspiracy to silence scientists who disagree with the prevailing theories of natural selection and evolution?

Exactly. Scientific history is full of these contrarians who presented evidence to show they were right and everyone else was wrong all along. Now, to be respected in the scientific community you need to present strong evidence, even better irrefutable evidence, if possible, so as to not be viewed as a crackpot. In other words when going against the grain you'd better have an airtight case that's credible. Even if it eventually gets shot down, which happens, you'll have wanted the scientific community to have learned something in doing so. You'll still be remembered for that.

This is not correct. There is additional evidence presented in the article which you do not mention. Essentially, to create SARS-CoV-2 in a lab, you would have to pull off several impressive feats of biochemical engineering:

- "a hypothetical generation of SARS-CoV-2 by cell culture or animal passage would have required prior isolation of a progenitor virus with very high genetic similarity, which has not been described"

- "Subsequent generation of a polybasic cleavage site would have then required repeated passage in cell culture or animals with ACE2 receptors similar to those of humans, but such work has also not previously been described."

- "Finally, the generation of the predicted O-linked glycans is also unlikely to have occurred due to cell-culture passage, as such features suggest the involvement of an immune system."

Basically, synthesizing SARS-CoV-2 would require you to do at least three things that are currently unknown to science. Is it possible that a some military lab achieved this working in complete secrecy? Yes. Is it the most parsimonious explanation? No.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2012-7

We have a substantially (96.2%) similar virus with known killing potential (3 out of 6 miners who caught it). It is discovered in 2013, but isn't added to any databases (despite the deaths making it very notable) until late January of this year.

The mine samples came from Yunnan province, but the research was done in Wuhan which is in Hubei province (Those provinces aren't even adjacent) at a lab which just so happens to be rather close to the seafood market where the first cases allegedly happened.

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