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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

> I feel few people actually have legitimate scientific interest in discovering the truth. Either theory is perfectly viable given the evidence we currently have.

This has been extensively investigated by scientists - it’d be a career making move if you could prove something that juicy! - but the problem is that the conclusions aren’t completely certain but rather comparing probability & the limited evidence to conclude that the lab leak hypothesis is increasingly unlikely. That doesn’t make the news and it especially won’t convince conspiracy theorists when there’s a raging political battle.

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Scientists aren't going to prove lab leak one way or the other because the evidence isn't going to be in the virus itself.

The for or against lies with the lab and the staff working there and the PRC is not going to allow an open and honest investigation to either prove or discount it.

So unless it can be proven to have come from somewhere else, you are likely never going to settle whether it was lab leak.

But we've pretty much established that it was a virus of natural origin - all of our molecular techniques leave signs, so an honest discussion would foreclose that possibility. That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a natural virus which had been collected and subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique but the former is too attractive a conspiracy theory to let go..

This is not true. Ralph Baric developed (and patented) a seamless technique to assemble coronaviruses in 2002 [1]. Baric was a close collaborator of the Coronavirus group at WIV.

Since then there has been even more progress. Since 2015 or so it's been possible to "print" DNA of any sequence.

In fact as COVID started to spread in China and the sequence was released, a Swiss lab used this technology to print the genome of SARS2, inject it into some yeast cells, and voila, you have the virus. They wrote this up in Nature [2].

If you wanted to change a naturally sampled virus using this technique, say, to insert a Furin site, swap out an RBD, whatever, you can literally do it with a text editor and copy and paste.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US7279327B2/en

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2294-9

> insert a Furin site, swap out an RBD, whatever, you can literally do it with a text editor and copy and paste.

Saved a lot of money this year making Covid-19 at home using the SARS viruses I already have. Takes like 2 seconds

Now we need someone to implement an LLVM backend to emit RNA.

And a Rust frontend! That way the viruses can't leak.

Yes, Seamless Ligation ("No See'm" technology) has been written about since at least 2006 for its potential to be used in creating biological agents that lack signs of laboratory manipulation.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/39652

Suffice it to say, this has been a very active area of research (and DoD/NIH/NIAID funding) for many years.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7120940/

In light of this, people that are confidently dismissing or playing down the possibility of a lab l̶e̶a̶k̶ origin at this point seem to be exhibiting some kind of ideological commitment.

Modern molecular techniques don't really have to leave signs. Indeed scientists synthesised a copy of sars-cov-2 from the sequence data a few months after the sequence was published:

"it is possible for researchers to reconstruct the virus in a lab, using either fragments of virus from patients, or fragments of DNA that are synthesised chemically by biotech companies. " https://www.varsity.co.uk/science/19172

It seems you can basically type any sequence you want and have it made up.

> That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a natural virus which had been collected and subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique but the former is too attractive a conspiracy theory to let go..

For some reason most discussions claiming that the lab leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory focus 90% of their effort arguing against being a bioengineered weapon and little time arguing against the actual strongest lab leak hypothesis: a zoonotic virus was collected and brought to a virology lab, where it was passed through humanized mice, a worker contracted it, and accidentally spread it in the city the virology lab was based.

The fact that people can pick out whackadoodles in Congress who argue for stupid theories doesn't make the strong theory weaker.

What I will tell you is a thing that I have read, and I hold close:

Forgive one another, and you will be forgiven.

In order to forgive, we must have the truth. Without it, we are in a fog of blind judgement and accusation.

Clarity of the source of this misfortune allows us to forgive.

I cannot say that I hold the full pantheon of the origin of these words to be true, but the four books that imparted this teaching to me have left an indelible imprint, and I cannot escape their mercy, justice, and hope.

I have read many other books, of course, and I believe in compassion. Though great calamity has befallen us, we might find any who have acted wrongly to be worthy of forgiveness.

When we grow beyond apprehension of recrimination, blind to fear of punishment for a cataclysm caused by ourselves and others, and only seek to salve our unwilling harm, perhaps then we will be able to say "move!" to a mountain, and it will move.

Yes, I have loved these books. Sometimes, they are my only solace.

For what it's worth, I neither think the lab leak hypothesis is definitely proven nor that the scientists involved are worthy of some kind of punishment. It's a matter of increasing security at scientific research facilities and banning certain lines of research altogether as too risky.

I agree, forgive before corrective action.

What books are you cryptically referring about?

The USA just launched a major assault on the human rights of 55% of its population (women and homosexuals), after a yearlong assault on the foundation of our democratic government, all under the guise of four books of "mercy, justice, and hope".

Forgiveness is not on the political table.

Perhaps you will find them someday.

A zoonotic jump that happened to occur inside of a wildlife research facility due to bad lab technique is not that scary. If it's proven true, it's pretty likely that the lab operators will fix it. Could you imagine being the guy who caused the COVID-19 pandemic by forgetting to sanitize some tool? I bet whoever did it would be the single most careful and clean research scientist in the entire world after that kind of episode.

The bioweapon theory, however, is politically useful. If you want to start a war, or at least trade sanctions, a villain is a good place to start. Someone violating international law and gene splicing themselves a pandemic in a bottle is exactly the right kind of comic book supervillainy, without being technically impossible.

> The bioweapon theory, however, is politically useful. If you want to start a war, or at least trade sanctions, a villain is a good place to start.

This is precisely Nature's gambit. She carefully engineered SARS-CoV-2 in a matter of weeks (to conceal the evidence, which was eaten), all naturally of course, but carefully, subtly made it appear like it might have been designed by mere mortals... and for this very purpose. Armageddon. When there's an imbalance, Nature corrects. And no one would deny there is an imbalance in the Earth regarding our species alone totally messing it up for all living things.

>I bet whoever did it would be the single most careful and clean research scientist in the entire world after that kind of episode.

"Fire you? I just spent a million lives training you up!"

(For those who don't get the reference, https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/thomas_j_watson_209882 )

"not that scary..."

What an utterly extraordinary thing to say!

No we haven't. At all.

>But we've pretty much established that it was a virus of natural origin

You keep repeating this sentiment even though there are other comments that provide evidence to the contrary, that we haven't established that at all.

Do you have any sources to support this claim other than what are effectively op-ed essays?

Serial passaging is effectively all “natural” (but intentional) infection. That wouldn’t leave signs of molecular techniques since none would be involved.

Anyone claiming to disprove the lab leak hypothesis by making a claim against solely molecular engineering is either hilariously uninformed or intentionally misleading you.

>But we've pretty much established that it was a virus of natural origin - all of our molecular techniques leave signs, so an honest discussion would foreclose that possibility.

I've only heard crack pots claim it was man made up to this point. I think repeatedly bringing it up or acting as if that's what lab leak means to most is disingenuous at this point.

>That doesn't eliminate the possibility that it was a natural virus which had been collected and subsequently escaped due to bad lab technique

That's what everyone is actually talking about. The man made conspiracy theory is a red herring that only serves to strawman and shut down legitimate discussion.

They’re not going to have a video of it jumping, no, but they can look as probabilities as they’ve done. This has ruled out the bioweapon theory which got a lot of chatter a couple years ago, and it’s shown that zoonotic origin is heavily favored as the likely candidate. That doesn’t rule out something like a natural virus infecting a worker who made a lab safety error but it hasn’t made that look extremely likely, either.

For anyone honest, the big question here is how we prevent this from happening again. The conclusions seem pretty solid: be careful about pushing humans into wild animal populations, better surveillance for emerging diseases, and continue pouring money into research on things like rapid test and vaccine development so response times can shrink.

"it’d be a career making move if you could prove something that juicy!"

That's absurd. We know the grant that funded the WIV lab work was signed off by Fauci during a time when GoF research was banned in the USA. If you proved the virus came from a lab funded by the guy who literally funds your colleagues you would never work in the field ever again.

We know in science that sometimes scientific results for analyses based largely on suppositions regress toward the mean, and this effect is stronger when prestige or politics are on the line. This is called "ideological hegemony" and it reproduces itself in the halls of power because those who occupy those halls are all funneled through the same conditioning programs.

I'm not sure what to say further other than "I guess we're going to have to find a way to be comfortable never knowing". The analyses are compromised because the topic is too charged now. Too much is at stake based on one or another direction to trust any conclusions.

Too much is at stake based on one or another direction to trust any conclusions.

One could still say "My god! This virus could have been even worse, more deadly! Lab leak or not, the entire planet should double check conditions at all labs, ensure proper containment and processes exist!"

>the limited evidence to conclude that the lab leak hypothesis is increasingly unlikely.

Any citations to share? I've only seen peer-reviewed evidence shared in this comments section that contradicts this claim.

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