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Comment by _red | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully no one ever funds "gain of function research" using this corpus of data...

Gain of function? You realize that mother nature is far more sophisticated than us humans. She has manufactured many plagues over the eons. we will likely never come up with viruses that have the kind of crazy cascading systemic building block chaos causing destruction in the human body. Radiation doesn't count because we just figured out we could harness it, but we have very little control over that. Viruses make ionic radiation look like child's play as just like ionizing radiation, studying the thing could kill you within days/weeks/months. You have a voodoo science belief that Dr Evil might create the next real zombie, only @9pm on Fox.

It's really funny how media coverage, combined with all the conspiracy-inducing effects of a global pandemic, have made the concept of "gain of function research" into something that is somehow combinable with 23andMe's database.

I haven't been following much of the media coverage of things like this, or the social media rumor mills, but a comment like that makes it clear that public perception is going way off kilter. And that mismatch between public perception and reality is exactly what fuels bad policy in governments.

Your lack of concern for gain-of-function research is not shared by experts in the field. They almost uniformly appreciate that that there is a risk of creating a pandemic that would be unlikely to arise naturally, and they take strong (but, imo, not nearly strong enough) safety steps to prevent it.

Nature generally didn't develop wheels or nukes either, but humans did and use them to great effect.

What's the better alternative? Halt science as if it's the middle ages?

You don't have to halt science to decide that the benefits of gain-of-function research is not worth the risk. We don't test nuclear weapons anymore either.

Because "we" arrived at a point where they are, arguably, good enough. Not to mention that "others" still do test them. See north korea for example.

Our knowledge of pathogens is not good enough. See the current pandemic. The question is whether the net benefit of this sort of research, once the risk are properly accounted for, is larger than the benefit we could get with alternative research methods.

The fact that someone else is taking huge risks of unleashing another pandemic is not a good reason for us to do so.

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