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Comment by op00to | Hacker News Reader

Better to study and be prepared, than to stick our head in the sand and pretend emerging infectious disease aren't a recurrent factor in our lives.

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That's not really the case here. Gain of function research can not be justified using this argument.

There are so many potential mutations that putting specific evolutionary pressure on a virus in order to "prevent" only those specific effects has such low efficacy considering the size of the problem space.

GOF research has provided very little in terms of benefits, and many argue it's simply been a way to disguise bioweapons research after the Geneva convention.

(Agree with you, but - sorry - as a practitioner in the law of armed conflict, I have to point out that the Biological Weapons Convention didn't take effect until more than a quarter century after the Geneva Conventions of 1949.)

The NIH, the scientists doing the research, and most other experts in the field disagree. Partisan politicians are the ones yelling about how dangerous it is. I think I'll listen to the experts.

Do you say the same thing about AGI?

You mean the ones who get their paycheck from this research don't want to lose their job?

Do you really know what "most" of the experts agree or disagree with? It seems like you'd have to be an expert yourself to know that.

Are you referring to "experts" in the field such as Peter Daszak?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancet_letter_%28COVID-19%29?w...

I mean, modifying a bat virus to be more infectious to human and then doing so in a lab that only requires masks not full body suits. How many millions died, how many suffered, what did we lose?

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that is a terrible idea. “Sticking our head in the sand” appears to not fit this use case very well

counter example: we won't know how to fight a robot apocalypse unless we go ahead and develop some super-intelligent kill bots ourselves, so we can train against it and develop strategies. Given enough time and random variation, someone or some government is bound to create them, so we should not stick our heads in the sand or let fear-mongering stand in the way of research.

In reality COVID-19 required several key mutations to be as harmful and to bind as effectively to human cells as it did. The likelihood of all of these mutations occurring naturally, in animals only, without intermediate variants to observe and develop immunity against, is very small. If only 64 amino acids must mutate exactly correctly to create the deadly variant then it would require 4^64 or 2^128 mutations, which is a large number. Assuming it mutates 100B times per year, that's still more years 3e27 years.

For example, this experiment on more transmissible HIV requires hundreds of acids (600-1000, and a 32 amino prefix).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2836558/

The point being that creating extremely unlikely events to "see what would happen" is only justified if the risk of the observation is less than the natural risk of the event. If the risk of a world-ending pandemic is 1e-128 per year, and the risk due to human-made viruses is 0.1%, then "not sticking your head in the sand" has raised your risk by an astronomical factor.

The idea that the mutations that happen in a lab setting whether direct editing or serial passaging would ever resemble anything that would happen in the wild is as likely as expecting a store bought banana evolving in the wild.

Sure, but then if we're gonna create and study viruses that can erase significant percentage of our population, why not do that on some remote island with one month of required onboarding/offboarding quarantine for all of the scientists involved?

Even if that’s the case, which could be possible, it would be nice to have some accountability for the accident that led to the covid pandemic and lockdowns, and a transparent accounting of why even after all that, the risk from not doing this research is greater than that of restarting it

The evidence for the lab leak theory is weak. You're assuming facts that most experts dispute.

The evidence for every other theory is even weaker by any objective standard, though.

EDIT: the evidence in favor of wet market zoonosis is what, exactly? "It's always been zoonosis in the past" plus "we (claim to have) first found this in a wet market" and maybe also "there's some RNA fragments in the wet market samples that show interesting animals plus covid"? As far as I'm aware that's it.

They literally study viruses that don’t infect humans but they purposely mutate them so they can study the “what if they mutate in real life” - this is cover to study bioweapons

If you want bioweapons, you'd start with viruses that conveniently already infect humans, and probably wouldn't indiscriminately infect the whole world including yourself.

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