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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

That's not necessarily the best response even in that case. We know for a fact that animal to human transmission happens, and that it will happen again. I don't know the ins and outs but it's possible that gain of function research could be crucial in preventing or fighting future natural outbreaks. That's a judgement that we should consider carefully.

If you're fighting a shooting war and you have an explosion in a munitions factory, you don't necessarily decide to stop making munitions, or perhaps even that type of munition because it's too dangerous. You make a judgement that balances the risks.

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Except the gain-of-function research specifically targeting covid-like viruses did not help us prepare or respond to the current pandemic one bit. On that basis alone we should suspend this research. It's not worth the risk.

I'm not familiar with the specifics of gain-of-function research, but on its face this comment sounds a lot like "we haven't developed a vaccine for COVID yet, so we should ban trying to develop a vaccine" would've sounded a few months before the vaccines came out.

In scientific research particularly, not having seen results yet doesn't mean we should abandon the research. If gain-of-function research is supposed to help us gain a better understanding of viruses and we're likely to see more pandemic-worthy viruses like SARS and SARS-CoV-2 arise naturally, I think any ban should be considered very carefully.

Except creating vaccines does not have the risk of producing a novel extremely dangerous virus that could kill millions worldwide

I 100% disagree, GoF research produces viruses as natural as selective breeding. The conditions that researchers expose various animals and humanized mice to infect each other would never happen in nature. This type of research only produces did not help predict the current pandemic, nor did it help with the fight against it, but it may have caused it!

Virologists competing with each other on who can produce the most infectious virus does not make us safer. Pursing research to prove that small pox can indeed mutate to be infectious via airborne aerosols is reckless, it creates a super charged version of a virus that never evolved naturally despite being a common disease for millennia.

>If you're fighting a shooting war and you have an explosion in a munitions factory, you don't necessarily decide to stop making munitions

What an apt analogy!

Except that munitions don’t self replicate. It’s more like deciding to do munitions research specifically in enemy territory where the research could be taken an used against you on any security breach.

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