A Science in the Shadows
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
If someone told you they were working on experimental nuclear warheads, you'd think they were crazy if their lab was in a city.
But they experiment with dangerous pathogens in cities of millions of people, and the janitors go home to their families every evening.
I don't know whether covid escaped from a lab, and I don't know whether the benefits of GoF research outweighs the risks.
But if the research is so important, it should be done in the desert somewhere with a long quarantine period on exit.
I'm sure the appropriate labs are designed to never let the pathogens escape. Sure; when the stakes are this high, backstop it.
They said that no scientist wants to work in a remote location, they want to have a city social life. Which is why these labs are typically located in million+ cities.
They also said that this is safe, because no pandemic to date started from a lab, and that eventually it will be proven that this pandemic is zoonotic too.
They also said that they do not understand why a year and a half in people keep on talking about this baseless conspiracy theory.
It would appear the virologists are not trustworthy.
Sounds honest, but selfish given how the most recent pandemic took out the 'city social lives' of hundreds of millions of non-virologists. Hard to understand the cost:benefit there.
> They also said that this is safe, because no pandemic to date started from a lab,
That's got to be the least reassuring safety argument I have ever heard.
>They also said that they do not understand why a year and a half in people keep on talking about this baseless conspiracy theory.
Kills millions directly; massive indirect costs; a year and a half later virologists don't understand that its a problem that we're not certain it didn't come from a lab.
Not an expert, but at these stakes, it makes it sound like there's no adults in charge.
It has only been a year and a half. It typically takes several years or even decades to trace a new virus in humans back to its origin.
I mean we should be sure it wasn't a lab escape because lab escapes have a prior probability extremely close to zero.
There are lots of smart folk, and intelligence agencies, trying to figure out whether covid is a natural event or a lab leak, and very few analyzes seem to be starting off with "as we all know, because of X, Y, and Z, lab escapes are effectively impossible, and these labs are so well designed that human error never results in accidents, so..."
Not quite the same order of magnitude, but a certain reaction comes to mind:
> THAT IS NOT REASSURING! HAVEN'T YOU PEOPLE EVER HEARD OF THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE?
But the 2007 British foot and mouth disease outbreak indeed started from a lab. Fortunately this disease can be controlled fairly well as long as you are willing to slaughter anything in wide circles around the case clusters. So, no global pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
A similar human disease would be much harder to stop.
It should be obvious now, that all the gain-of-function research done on coronaviruses didn't help at all with this pandemic. Gain-of-function researchers didn't contribute to vaccine development, vaccines were developed by different people.
And tickling the Dragons Tail is great fun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
You need people that like to have that kind of fun and don't really care about the risks.
Since they are underpaid in relation to the potential risk, a risk they absolutely know but don't care about, because its so small in their own calculations, you have to give them at least some incentives.
They don't do it just for the scientific fame or out of patriotism anymore.
And they are really bright guys and girls.
At least they were told.
They were selected for it.
Oh, of course they were also selected for following the security guidelines.
They are good boys and girls.
That helps them to hide the dangers from their conscience.
And none of them would ever doubt their own calculations or that of their superiors.
Everything is under control, nothing can happen, everything is safe.
We calculated at least twice.
Until an eye is poked out.
Or a lot of eyes.
And even if something happens, who cares about a few dozen or hundred expendables at most, in the long run?
I already said, it can't be more, because of our safety routines and our extremely bright guys and girls that we need to tickle the Dragons Tail.
Setting the labs up in population centers for other reasons, lab phase two?
Now come on, that is conspiracy theory and Resident Evil Science.
“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.
The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.
The world is rudderless.” Alan Moore
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/662444-the-main-thing-that-...
But then again, only the paranoid survive and being paranoid doesn't mean, they are not after you.
;-)
> The notion that science is morally neutral is also widely held and advanced by scientists. Indeed, many scientists wear their neutrality as a badge of honor, presenting themselves as disinterested servants of truth who merely supply society with facts and tools. They leave it up to others to decide how to use them. “Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be,” Albert Einstein said, “and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary.”
> ...
> We must therefore judge modern science not only by its material products, but also, and more so, by its intentions and its influence upon the way humanity has come to think. In both these ways, science is far from morally neutral.
[1]: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-moral-challe... (2006) by Yuval Levin who was at the time "a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center"
Controls on ‘gain of function’ experiments with supercharged pathogens have been undercut despite concerns about lab leaks.
It seems likely that investigations into the origin of the pandemic will remain inconclusive, but hopefully safety can be improved anyway.
I am almost angry and furious - why is this not discussed with 100x more media stories and scrutiny about what safeguards are in place, how level 5 biolabs are secured and what are the ways it can fail!?
Even if we have proven that it was not released from the Wuhan lab, the risks are still present and absolutely alarming.
For example, suppose I claim to have found a fatal flaw deep in the most difficult part of Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
If someone says that I'm unlikely to be right because my mother was a hamster and my father smelled of elderberries that would be an ad hominem fallacy.
My mother's species and my father's smell have no bearing on my mathematical claim.
However, if someone says that I'm unlikely to be right because I have not studied any higher math beyond what was covered in classes for my bachelor's degree in math from Caltech and so it is quite unlikely that I have any clue as to what is going on even on the first page of the proof let alone anywhere near the most difficult part (or could even figure out what part is the most difficult part) that would be an ad hominem but not an ad hominem fallacy.
It's not a fallacy because it is questioning whether I have the knowledge to be able to even make a valid argument about details deep in Wiles' proof. That has bearing on the likelihood that my mathematical claims are correct.
Isn't it still a logical flaw to discount a thing based on where or who you heard the thing from without assessing the validity of the thing itself?
> The term refers to techniques used to enhance aspects of a pathogen. This is usually done via a combination of gene editing and serial passage of the pathogen between animal hosts.
To illustrate that the definition is both broad and variable: "The term gain-of-function (GOF) research describes a type of research that modifies a biological agent so that it confers new or enhanced activity to that agent. Some scientists use the term broadly to refer to any such modification. However, not all research described as GOF entails the same level of risk. For example, research that involves the modification of bacteria to allow production of human insulin, or the altering of the genetic program of immune cells in CAR-T cell therapy to treat cancer generally would be considered low risk" [0]. It's also possible to modify the agent to make it safer while preserving other aspects that need to be studied. For example, creating a model virus that has no pathogenicity, but depends on the Covid spike protein for replication so it can be used to study receptor binding and vaccine evasion safely.
I wish we'd collectively chosen a clearer term, like "engineered potentially pandemic pathogenicity", that more closely matches our collective Covid-inspired concerns. Arguments about "gain of function" gives the dangerous stuff cover by mixing it together with innocuous experiments. Lack of clarity makes it easier to synthesize controversy, accidentally or intentionally, by mixing together statements about very different kinds of gain of function work. The Post says they identified 18 projects that "appeared to include gain-of-function experiments"—they should say exactly what risks those projects pose instead of leaving us with merely a vague and sinister implication.
[0] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/gain-function-research-invol...