The “invented persona” behind the GISAID viral sequence database
science.org
science.org
They would use a name that was vaguely ambiguous on gender but was far more likely to be considered Male than female, and it was for similar-ish reasons. They would still get some harassers occasionally (usually someone who found out they were female in guild chat... which was thankfully dealt with swiftly by leaders. [0])
[0]- Which, semi-related to the topic, was often instigated by finding out they were my partner!
(Previously seen on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34123302)
Then there was the other scandal of late, Martin Enserink wrote about that one too (https://www.science.org/content/article/dispute-simmers-over...). Basically GISAID claimed they were the first to publish the original Covid genome, when nobody at all remembers it like that and all of the contemperaneous reports credit Eddie Holmes and the courageous Chinese Zhang Yong-Zhen who published that first sequence on Virological days before GISAID/WHO released theirs. GISAID has gone so far as to backdate their original blog posts to establish 'evidence' for the date of publication. They've also threatened litigation for people who claim that the Virological post preceded their publication..
Something is seriously wrong over there.
The article has quotes like this:
many flu scientists hesitated to share newly sequenced influenza genomes, concerned that rivals would skim the most interesting data and publish a paper first
and
Indonesia stopped sharing H5N1 samples with the world in 2007 over concerns that foreign scientists were describing a virus from Indonesia without proper credit
The whole point of giving these people government funding is because they claim it'll let them focus exclusively on noble humanitarian goals, yet here they are acting like tabloid journalists.
and
GISAID has many stalwart supporters. “I’ve known Peter for a number of years, and his push for ‘equitable sharing’ has helped the database, scientists, and the health of humans and animals around the world,” says virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center, who co-chairs GISAID’s Scientific Advisory Council
Equitable sharing seems to be about what you'd expect [1], Should data sharing in epidemics and pandemics primarily advance utility, or should it advance equity as well?
Can anything they say be trusted? How many screwed up public health institutions are out there exactly? Why do we fund these people??
[1] https://bmcmedethics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s129...
Article co-author Jon Cohen comes in with his own murky background in the origins debate (all but outing a whistleblower to Holmes and Andersen in 2020: “Here's what one person who claims to have inside knowledge is saying behind your backs”), as does quoted virologist Marion Koopmans (of the long-since panned WHO-convened origins study trip fame) and evolutionary biologist Kristian G Andersen's group (KGA was lead author of the now overtly infamous Proximal Origins paper in Nature Medicine).
As the article opens with, GISAID restricted access to French CNRS researcher Florence Debarre after publicizing following downloading the raccoon dog sample + SC2 sample data from GISAID that was uploaded by the Gao team of researchers. (Gao, former director of China CDC, asserts that humans carried the virus into the market, not the other way around). Kamil was very vocal on Twitter about the whole kerfuffle.
Getting cut off from such an international database popular with so many scientists was seen as a major reputational slap on the wrist to such an outspoken origins researcher as Debarre. So this article simply serves to take GISAID down a few pegs in its own right (a diminution it certainly sounds like it has earned) mitigating the reputational impact to Debarre.
But bigger picture, the piece is just the latest salvo in the schoolyard dustup that is vocal virologists (and their scribes) jockeying to maintain position. So for all of the status these folks enjoyed in 2020, (when tbe rest of us fearfully turned to any expert for pandemic context with little regard for possible CoI's) it is finally their banal human nature on display that I find utterly disappointing.
(Apologies for any typos, am on mobile.)
But it seems like GISAID has outgrown his ability to lead it, and it would be good to transition to more responsible leadership.
So it is not as much "interesting" but "illuminating" that supposedly smart people like scientists can be just as easily mislead as the random person responding to an email scam.
A subgroup is either more X, less X, the same X to the limits of testing, or has too complicated a relation with X to fit into the above.
The only "absolute" aspects are things like the median and deviation. No positions are being pushed to the extreme.
Even better, "no more" covers both "less" and "same", so it's even easier for a statement like that to be correct.
Is the term "smart people" sufficiently vague that it would need refinement for the level of certainty you're describing?
The reason smart people are no more resistant to being conned than anybody else is because conning people is an emotional approach, not an intellectual one.
Any given specific con may not be one that will sucker everybody (in fact, it certainly won't), but con artists tailor their cons to their target. The one a smart person will fall for is different than the one a dumb person will fall for.
As Brian Brushwood says in his excellent podcast "The World's Greatest Con"... "We don't get conned because we're stupid. We get conned because we're human."
but smart people are more resistant - for the mere fact that they probably know more and are better versed in the goings of life -
I am surprised that anyone would think otherwise.
Nah, you just run a different playbook. You gotta leverage that arrogance. Like Bankman-Fried.
I was talking to a con artist once who took the point even further. He said smart people are actually easier to con for a few reasons.
The smarter a person is, the better they are at working out a chain of reasoning that can "prove" the con isn't a con. Since a con is appealing to human emotion, not logic, you can make a smart person want to believe the con so much that they'll work out the "proof" that it's legit all by themselves.
I suspect if pushed to replace himself as governance for GISAID (which I suspect he controls alone... I doubt the mentioned technical or governance boards exist) he may well lock off all access to the data that's accumulated or even delete it to prevent someone from taking it from him.
How would you know how the millions of dollars sent to the organization are being spent?
For starters he is impersonating another director of the organization - right there probably pulling in two leadership salaries for a start. How many other fake employees are there?
Then he is most likely the sole decider on how that money is spent ... the article shows that he is a convicted grifter that spent time in jail for fleecing people ...
[1] https://www.who.int/news/item/14-12-2022-gisaid-and-who-glob...
If anything the workshops are legit front.
Its here now , did I scare you ?