Hacker News Reader

Comment by denotational | Hacker News Reader

Without meaning to take a position either way, as a non-American, why does the Energy Department have a position on this?

I’m aware that the Energy Department has sone degree of responsibility for the US nuclear arsenal, but even taking that into account, it seems out of scope.

View on HN

Firstly, the DOE has expertise in areas such as biosecurity, biodefense, and biological threat reduction, and is responsible for managing national laboratories and supporting research in various scientific fields.

Just one example of this is the HAMMER facility at Hanford, WA, where DOE can train people to deal with all manner of disasters. https://hammer.hanford.gov/

Given the potential for a laboratory-originating virus to pose a significant threat to national security, the DOE may be interested in studying the origins of SARS-CoV-2 to better understand the risks associated with biosecurity and to inform its efforts to prevent and respond to biological threats.

Secondly, the DOE has collaborated with other agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in conducting research related to COVID-19. The origins of SARS-CoV-2 are an important aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic and understanding its origins can inform public health responses and the development of treatments and vaccines.

Finally, the DOE has a stake in global scientific cooperation and the international research community. The origins of SARS-CoV-2 are an area of intense global interest, and understanding the virus's origins is important for future pandemic prevention efforts. By contributing to the scientific understanding of the virus's origins, the DOE can help to advance international collaboration and cooperation in addressing global health threats.

It's still not obvious why any of those functions are the remit of the Department of Energy though. Defence I could understand.

If your point is that the department of energy is badly named, you are 100% correct. It's more like the "department of applied science towards security, energy, and nuclear bombs"

Per the article, it looks like a supporting report came out of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is funded by the DoE.

While LLNL is primarily known for nuclear research, biosecurity is also apparently part of its mission: https://www.llnl.gov/missions/biosecurity

They're also one of the few people with a massive "supercomputer cluster" to do simulations. (and part of the reason we have zfs on Linux now)

DOE and the national labs have done extensive work with biological weapon detection systems and various forms of analysis related to delivery systems. E.g.

https://web.ornl.gov/info/news/pulse/pulse_v270_08.html

>"A team of scientists at DOE's Sandia National Laboratories recently revealed their involvement in the more than six-year investigation led by the FBI surrounding anthrax spores that killed five people in the fall of 2001. Their work, using transmission electron microscopy, was the first to link the spores from several of the letters as coming from the same source."

Actually as a side question, why does the reporting on this story in particular use the somewhat unusual phrase “US Energy Department?” It is the Department of Energy, right?

I seems like a little nitpick, but there are lots of agencies in the US, sometimes there’s a little nobody agency with a name similar to a big deal one… as a style thing, reporters should stick to the common names for big agencies, so we can be sure they aren’t mixing things up.

I think in cases where there are two large agencies that can be abbreviated to the same acronym people who work for those agencies tend to use names that don't lend themselves to that abbreviation. So in this case it's the Energy Dept and Education Dept rather than something that might be turned into the ambiguous DoE.

Interesting! I assumed the Department of Energy just got the initialism because they got there first.

I wondered if WSJ must have a style guide that tells their writers to use this construction but there seems to be a mix of both (Energy Department and Department of Energy). Yes, DoE is the correct name, but I see ED used commonly in journalism.

The US government is so large and sprawling that essentially every agency concerns itself with every possible topic.

Another example - the CDC expanded itself to health in general and involves itself with gun violence: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.htm...

The placement of the national labs in DOE is mostly a historical artifact of the time they were born. They cover most sciences these days and it isn’t uncommon to hear people with DOE jokingly refer to it as the “department of everything”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com