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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

How there isn't a full on worldwide ban on this now is just beyond me. Our hubris and overconfidence could kill millions more.

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It may very well be riskier than not to ban research like that on an endemic airborne virus that has shown a proclivity to mutate.

If no humans are running controlled experiments on the virus, there is still an experiment currently being run as a massive, randomized trial in the form of the natural mutative processes the virus undergoes in the infected human population. How much do we want to trust that it won't hit upon an HIV-category combinatoric mutation before we're aware it has the potential to do that?

The risk tradeoff is difficult here, but we should keep in mind that the risk of doing no such research is way, way higher than zero.

I find this very frustrating. If COVID-19 was a lab leak - wether it had involved gain of function related or just unwisely moving viruses from the animal kingdom into human spaces - what good did any of it do?

Apparently our ability to create vaccines doesn't hinge on messing around with the viruses before they infect humans. COVID-19 vaccine was created after the fact, and it hardly prevented a major global catastrophe.

I just don't see the argument. It sounds like pure imagination - by making viruses more dangerous or increasing the odds we'll expose ourselves to novel ones, someday we'll have the technology to prevent any pandemic. How many millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars wasted before that happens? When is it just not worth it? It seems not worth it to me now.

If it's a bioweapons program, I don't see why we need to be playing along. It's not like nuclear deterrence - someone releases a weaponized virus, the whole world gets infected. It's like a nuke that blows up the entire world.

Additionally, in the same way a banana would never occur in nature, many of these experiments researchers conduct are extremely unlikely or out right impossible. For wild viruses crossing over to humans it needs to go through many mutations and people before becoming adapted and highly infectious towards humans. But in a lab you can insert the exact mutation to make it highly infectious towards humans without having to mutate. For example right now the bird flu which can infect humans who have ingested bird droppings, but it can't spread human to human.

The conditions in the lab are just so artificial the predictive power is practically worthless, especially when you consider the massive possibility space. Just like you'd never find something like a banana evolve to it's current state in the wild, you would won't find these viral chimeras just popping up out of no where.

Remember this?

"H5N1 is a type of avian flu virus that occurs naturally in various types of birds but has surfaced in humans in the last ten years. Although human cases of H5N1 are rare, the virus has a 60% mortality rate."

"They reasoned that it'd be better to tinker with H5N1 in the lab and gain knowledge for its prevention than sit back and wait for mother nature to concoct a human-friendly strain. Both teams of researchers artificially mutated H5N1 to spread easily amongst ferrets. Ferrets are commonly used as stand ins for humans in influenza studies. To clarify what I mean by "easily" spread, at the end of Fouchier's study the strain had gained the ability to transmit through the air- an unprecedented feat!"

https://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/viruses101/avian/

The other thing too is that were just going to do ACE2 receptor research from now til the next pandemic, which I'm sure will have NOTHING to do with ACE2.

> Apparently our ability to create vaccines doesn't hinge on messing around with the viruses before they infect humans.

The COVID vaccine built heavily on previous research with flu,. Zika, rabies, and cytomegalovirus.

> The COVID vaccine built heavily on previous research with flu,. Zika, rabies, and cytomegalovirus.

All viruses that are already around. Agree that creating novel viruses is not with the risk.

The treaties in place to restrict biological weapons have exclusions that permit the development (and use) of incapacitating agents. The DoD/NIAID/Daszak/Fauci model has been that a hostile nation would release a biological weapon that would compromise the ability of members of the Armed Forces to engage in combat operations over a period of months or years, and to address this they had planned to be able to quickly marshal a new transfection to induce neutralising antibodies [in the relevant groups before they were deployed to combat zones], hence the focus of research into these particular areas from the defence establishment and its partners over the last few decades.

Thank you. This is the first time I've seen a true steelman of the pro-GoF poisition.

I would say that viruses, like a lot of other aspects of life, are chaotic and capricious both in their evolution and their affects on an individual humans (COVID really drove that home for me in that it killed some and was asymptotically carried by others).

But we demand explanations where there are none, and so we create them ourselves or accept them from others.

If the increased focus on mRNA vaccine research due to the COVID outbreak leads to successful new anticancer therapies, we could make up for the COVID death toll in a hurry, and benefit enormously from subsequent availability.

In no event is "don't research this, it's too scary" ever the right answer. The question is how to do it safely. For instance, I don't understand why gain-of-function research is less regulated than, say, nuclear research. The work needs to happen, but our risk assessments are hopelessly out of whack.

The pandemic forever cured me of my willingness to participate in Trolley Problems. I would say harming people over some vague future promise of helping them is, from this point forward, always the wrong decision.

> Apparently our ability to create vaccines doesn't hinge on messing around with the viruses before they infect humans. COVID-19 vaccine was created after the fact, and it hardly prevented a major global catastrophe.

I don't think you can make that conclusion. Sure we didn't make the vaccine before covid existed. But virology research in general certainly builds the body if knowledge required to synthesize vaccines.

Did the Wuhan lab research help the covid vaccines? Maybe not, but it's really _really_ hard to know ahead of time which avenues of research will yield breakthroughs.

> COVID-19 vaccine was created after the fact, and it hardly prevented a major global catastrophe.

What? It immediately dropped the death rate. How many more millions of lives would it have to have saved to get notice?

Knowing about the virus ahead of time wouldn’t help much. By far the most expensive (in time and money) part of a publicly available vaccine is testing it. It is impossible to test a vaccine under any reasonable procedure we have today before the virus is a full blown pandemic.

The best case scenario for putting this kind of research into practice is saving two weeks off a months or years long development schedule. It might not even work. Frankly the risk reward trade off here is so laughably bad that I can’t understand why it’s even a debate.

Ah! I read the parent's comment in a different way, but i see what he was trying to say now. He wasn't saying the vaccine didn't do anything, but that not having it developed before covid19 started wasn't the biggest blocker.

The current pandemic was probably caused by such research. But even if you don’t believe that it was probably caused by it, a reasonable person and can admit it was possibly by it. Multiply that “possibly” out by 6.5M deaths or so and that’s your research death toll.

So 1% chance of lab escape? 65,000 deaths. Weigh that against your hypothetical benefits of performing the research and I think it’s hard to conclude that such research is wise.

The 1918 flu involved no lab leak and killed [edit]: 50 million people.

I don't care for the game of fatality calculus, but if one is going to play it, that's the enemy humanity is up against.

Your counterexample would need to be a positive instance, not “other bad things also happen” and that evidence would also need to be strong! Chemotherapy has many terrible side effects but it helps kill cancer! With high certainty!

You wouldn’t subject people to chemotherapy if you lacked any evidence that it was helpful.

Yes, but how has the millions we have spent on collecting and modifying wild coronaviruses helped us with this pandemic. Despite over 100 years of technological advancements and the virus is still impossible to stop! So why do we want to risk creating new viruses when the decades of research has proven to be such a colossal failure?

> impossible to stop

I don't think one stops a pandemic; IIUC, one gets out in front of it with vaccination. Which we did, thanks to previous mRNA research conducted on other viruses. GOF research is one of the few ways we're aware of to get out in front of vaccinating viruses that don't yet exist but are probable to exist.

This argument treads suspiciously close to "Sometimes people use fire to burn a house down, so why do we allow cooking? People should only be allowed to use naturally-occurring fires and not create new ones."

And what is the probability that out of the thousands of viruses we identify the exact one that mutates in the exact manner as researches induce in the lab? The possible mutations a virus could take are astronomical, and conditions in a lab using humanized mice models are not something that would ever happen in the wild. Efforts are better spent on surveillance not prediction! https://media.nature.com/original/magazine-assets/d41586-018...

Your article actually argues in favor of the type of research BU was doing because it's being done post-outbreak: "Once an emerging outbreak virus has been identified, it needs to be analysed quickly to establish what type it is; which molecular mechanisms (such as receptor type) enable it to jump between individuals; how it spreads through human populations; and how it affects those infected In other words, at least four kinds of analysis are needed: genomic, virological, epidemiological and clinical.". BU's work is in the genomic and virological categories and addresses the kind of questions the article wants addressed as part of a surveillance strategy.

The article strongly opposes making predictions of whether a pathogen will be pandemic because predictions are a rigged game. There are enough factors that you are very unlikely to be correct, and even then a true positive combined with successful mitigations erodes public trust because "the severity of the virus had been overblown". Geologists avoid making predictions of volcanic eruptions or earthquakes for similar reasons.

It is not directly opposed to study of pre-pandemic animal pathogens: "Surveys of animals will undoubtedly result in the discovery of many thousands of new viruses. These data will benefit studies of diversity and evolution, and could tell us whether and why some pathogens might jump species boundaries more frequently than others." This makes sense, because study of pre-pandemic pathogens is needed to set a foundation such that the post-outbreak analysis the article wants us to focus on can be completed in a reasonable time frame.

The article is arguing for rapid response and against predictions. It's not opposed to basic research of pathogens, and actually supports this specific type of research.

mRNA research was mainly developed to fight cancers, not viruses. To the extent that it was already being researched to stop viruses, it was being tested on existing viruses, not GOF-modified ones.

I thought it was more like 50 million?

Thank you and good catch; I quoted the infection number where I meant to quote the estimated fatalities.

Well you have to include excess deaths which is at 15M or higher. The reason is that even if you are including drug overdoses, the pandemic was still a catalyst for homelessness and... excess deaths. Covid is still responsible.

I think there's a difference between studying existing viruses, or even their natural mutations, and engineering a virus to be more potent (and not in the highest level lab even).

These "convergent mutation" variants seem to be arriving at a rapid pace, all by themselves without researchers helping (some hypothesize this is due to virus replication in immunocompromised patients.) [1] Since these mutations seem capable of repeatedly emerging, we should understand what they do, both alone and in combination. The cost here is that yes, researchers could make and release a new deadly variant. On the other hand it's just as likely that something very similar will pop up through natural evolution in the next few months. When that happens we can be clueless or we can be armed with knowledge.

[1] https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payers/preliminary-data-poi...

And how did our decades of Coronavirus research help us prevent/fight this last pandemic? Given the fact it was already known at the time that the spike protein on SARS2 was what researchers have been using to attach to wild viruses so infect humanized mice/cell cultures via the ACE2 receptor we should have already known that Airborne H2H transmission was possible!

We've had very little GoF research, in large part because it's controversial. There have been several outright bans, and the issue is so emotional that many scientists probably avoid it just because the costs are high.

I am not necessarily in favor of GoF research, but I recognize a broken argument when I see one. In the face of a clear policy preference to dissuade GoF work, the question "why didn't [the very limited GoF work that we allowed to take place] produce huge numbers of beneficial results" isn't really an interesting question about the usefulness of the research, since it might just as easily reflect a (known) pre-existing policy bias.

We're in a rapidly-developing new era and have just seen clear evidence of how devastating a pandemic can be. The question we should be asking is whether we're using every tool at our disposal to defend ourselves from the next one, and that requires some careful and dispassionate weighing of risks/rewards. The arguments I see don't meet that standard at all.

> And how did our decades of Coronavirus research help us prevent/fight this last pandemic?

IIUC, the vaccine was synthesized in record time, was it not?

the MRNA vaccine had nothing to do with the research involving modifying wild coronaviruses. The technology was originally built independently and for different reasons, but there was a MERS vaccine they developed and modified for SARS2, but again that was for an existing known virus. The type of research Ecohealth conducted contributed absolutely nothing to the development of the vaccine.

In fact Ecohealth didn't even share their research of any data with anyone since the pandemic began. So the value of the risky research is dubious.

Biology research gives me nightmares. For the low price a an undergraduate degree and a few tens of thousands of dollars you can build a garage lab which can make something like covid in your spare time.

In physics and chemistry you at least have to work hard for your WMD. In biology you get them for free because you're not careful enough.

On what? Virus research?

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