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Comment by Jerry2 | Hacker News Reader

If anyone wants to go down the "lab leak" rabbit hole, check out Charles Rixey's Substack [1]. He's assembled a massive database of articles and a complete timeline of events [2] that lead to COVID-19 pandemic. He's one of the members of DRASTIC which is a loose group of researchers looking into the "lab leak" hypothesis. [3][4][5]

Even Moderna's CEO Stephane Bancel does not discount it and say's "it's possible" after researchers found a genetic sequence in SARS-CoV-2 virus which was patented by Moderna three years prior to pandemic. [6]

[1] https://prometheusshrugged.substack.com/

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353547700_SARS-CoV-...

[3] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRASTIC

[5] https://drasticscience.com/

[6] https://youtu.be/YcgE-5a1Ztc?t=436

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I find it suspicious that very few of these "researchers" seem to even have any expertise in virology. Furthermore, very few of them seem to even have a PhD in their respective fields, nor any significant institutional affiliations.

Two of them at least have research profiles, but their fields of expertise are in microbiology and nitrogen fixation, which have very little to do with virology or pathology. Their primary mode of publication also seems to be ArXiV and ResearchGate, which doesn't go through peer review, so there is no good way to verify their findings.

Calling these people researchers would be equivalent to calling your average software developer a physicist.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=LLlFfdUAAAAJ...

[2] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=YWuJkRsAAAAJ...

> Furthermore, very few of them seem to even have a PhD in their respective fields, nor any significant institutional affiliations.

I see this as a sign that they're more trustworthy. This is a poor situation to be in and not really something we can productively argue about.

Trust should be the most important priority for any scientist (or any person really, but that's another issue).

You seem to be making a really broad claim with a hidden assumption. When you claim that "Trust should be the most important priority for any scientist," whose trust should be prioritized?

The truth should be prioritized. That's a very simple statement with a ton of complexities behind it and no good solution, I think.

Those complexities seem to be central to how you view graduate degree holders as less trustworthy. From what I understand, you're stating that these institutions are not trustworthy for some reason, which seems to be that they are trying to hide something that is true. Could you elaborate on that?

More or less comes down to trust in institutions and whether or not you think trust should be earned not given. I've seen (personally and in the news) way too many occurrences of trust being abused by institutions. My default is the more political an issue is, the more likely I am to have 0 trust.

I've got a much higher relative trust in underwater basketweaving PHD's than virologist PHD's commenting on the lab leak.

No PhD does not imply no expertise

This is tangential, but I've noticed a trend with this argument and other debates in biomedicine where there's a particular form of appeal to authority that takes the form of immunity by authority. That is, "anyone who is not credentialed in X cannot criticize the practices of those in X."

This assumption, if accepted, creates a sort of a ethical-logical problem where a class of experts cannot be criticized by those outside of the field, leading to an inherent conflict of interest in issues where the nature of the problem are the practices of those in the field. If everyone in the field is doing problematic thing A, but the only people who can evaluate whether A is problematic, there's no way to change the field.

It's basically like not only letting criminals be police and judges of their crimes, but forbidding anyone who isn't a criminal be police or judge.

I'm not saying virologists are criminals, or even that the lab leak theory is correct, but it's the same ethical dilemma, which is what people are pointing to here. It's also not unique to COVID; it shows up in other issues, especially those surrounding medical practice.

In society we have to prioritize the substance of argument or criticism above credentials; otherwise it leads to lack of transparency. There always has to be an outside overseer.

I think there are enough virologists in the world to trust that they don't all believe the same things or have the same bad/good practices.

Some things are too complex for non-experts. It would be like a front-end web developer writing articles about how cryptography is flawed. Who are you going to believe if all the cryptographers disagree?

It would be more like an amateur cryptographer finding a flaw with a published algorithm or certain companies security practices. Which can and does happen.

Which would not pick up any traction unless the cryptographers chimed in and agreed that it is a flaw.

Arguments should survive on their own merits though, not an appeal to authority. Sometimes a whole field can be flawed (or be afraid of having their funding cut since it comes from only a few sources), and an outsider may be needed to point it out.

Your first source writes in a way to trigger an emotional response (anger) in people so they look past the lack of real evidence being presented.

Common tactic and many fall for it. I'm instinctively put on guard at any hint of emotional leading, especially with anger.

> researchers found a genetic sequence in SARS-CoV-2 virus which was patented by Moderna three years prior to pandemic

Tangential questions:

- Does the natural presence of a patented genetic sequence nullify the patent?

- If not, can a company that doesn't hold or pay for the patent 'copy' the naturally occurring genetic sequence and not be liable for patent infringement?

- Whether or not it occurred naturally, does the fact that it's "out there" in such a large way, not nullify the patent so much, but nullify the chances of being liable for patent infringement?

Genetics patents very much do exist based on genes found in living organisms.

The patents protect the usage of gene sequences in particular ways, usually in genetic engineering ways. You can’t patent a gene from a cow and say nobody can breed cows any more, of course that’s silly.

Some would argue that allowing a patent on a naturally-occurring gene is the silly part there.

This is the basis of nearly all of genetic technology

The problem is how trivial most of the things are to create.

Take a cell line (e. coli, a yeast, some animal cell line), combine together the target gene, a few boilerplate add-ons specific to the host cell, and send it off to get manufactured. A first prototype can be engineered in an afternoon. Then somebody patents it, the same thing from every species they can think of, and nobody gets to do that same thing for decades.

The process being so low effort and obvious these days is the core of the problem with patentability. "I put X gene into Y, and it worked" can be done for so many X and Y and anybody with, say, a graduate degree in the appropriate field can do it quite quickly.

I agree that there is room for productive discussion around what should be patentable, but you are greatly over simplifying the process.

Take a biologic developed for cancer treatment for example. A tremendous amount of work goes into determining what gene does useful work, and Much more work goes into showing that it is safe and effective for treating disease.

I generally agree that simply reproducing a gene found in nature should not be patentable. However, most genetic patents are more specific and take a different form. Instead of "put X gene into Y", they are use "X gene, to make Y protein, to treat Z".

Figuring out what protein can treat Z, is an invention, takes hard work, and should be rewarded.

Legally speaking, just putting X gene into Y, isn't patentable because it fails the non-obviousness test. Doing something new with known methods to yield predictable results is not valid.

No one has declared it impossible even now. They are saying there is now a very strong preponderance of evidence favors natural origin, while no new evidence of lab leak has appeared.

What's their verdict on the probability that it's a lab leak?

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