The problem is that the two theories can have competing indications as to how to prepare. Specifically: should we do gain of function research, or is that foolish — depends on how you read what happened in 2020.
Most folks had no idea about the sort of GoF being done, and the attitude of many researchers (highly dismissive of risks) should worry us a lot.
We should also be more worried about zoonotic transmission too, and press harder to ban wet markets.
I don't think these conclusions compete, that’s the point; the actual fact of the matter regarding origins doesn’t much affect the weight of the damning evidence.
Even if you don’t think the lab leak was the source of COVID-19 virus, we know for a fact that lab leaks occur even at the highest level security facilities.
I’m not sure about gain of function research one way or the other, I’m just commenting that leaks will happen.
1. What's the probability distribution and damage distribution of GoF research lab leaks? It's not zero-- it likely has enormous long tail risk. But:
2. What's the probability distribution and damage distribution of not knowing as much about how gain of function happens in the wild? Because nature is doing some of these GOF experiments on its own, without much effort at containment.
When you compare the massive risks of spillover from animal populations, which have millions of interactions with humans every minute of every day, with the risks from a small number of highly contained biology labs, the ratio between the two risks is so enormous that this entire discussion is absurd.
It's kind of absurd that he have hundreds of millions of farmers and hunters interacting with infected animals every day, and nobody cares, but then we have a few researchers interacting with the same viruses under highly controlled conditions, and that's what we're worried about.
The reason is that people have watched too many sci-fi horror movies and listened to too many xenophobic / fear-mongering politicians who want to find scapegoats.
The problem with imposing even tighter conditions on research is that you end up making the research much more difficult, expensive, unattractive to actual scientists who have to live their lives. And all that for security theater, just to pander to ignorant politicians who won't actually be satisfied.
We take the effort to air gap infected or security critical IT systems, but can't be bothered to air gap humanity from existential threats. If protecting all of humanity from the next pandemic is too much work for virologists, maybe it's best that they consider another career?
> We take the effort to air gap infected or security critical IT systems, but can't be bothered to air gap humanity from existential threats.
My whole point is that we're not air-gapped in the first place. Millions of humans are interacting with infected animals every day, under conditions that are much less safe and controlled.
Imagine if all of your data had been leaked to the public internet, was mirrored across a dozen websites, and was being downloaded 1000 times a day, but then one security researcher had your data on an encrypted drive, and only read it on an air-gapped computer. Would you be more worried about the one security researcher, or the dozens of publicly accessible websites?
> If protecting all of humanity from the next pandemic is too much work for virologists, maybe it's best that they consider another career?
They are protecting you, and the thanks they get is that you scapegoat them, hound them online, and cheer when they get fired. You should be grateful that people like Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology worked so hard on understanding coronaviruses for decades, and warned about the risks of a pandemic. Instead, without any knowledge of the subject, you're participating in a witch hunt against her and her colleagues.
Factory farming is indeed a dangerous breeding ground for infectious disease which needs to be addressed. Farmers, however, are not performing gain of function research on the diseases in their herd. The largest danger of factory farms seems to be the widespread application of front line antibiotics, which is another issue entirely. Attempts to conflate the two are disingenuous at best. Unscientific whataboutism at worst.
> people like Shi Zhengli at the Wuhan Institute of Virology worked so hard on understanding coronaviruses for decades, and warned about the risks of a pandemic. Instead, without any knowledge of the subject, you're participating in a witch hunt against her and her colleagues.
I've worked in science for more than a decade. I have lab experience. I have never named or witch hunted anyone as you seem to have. I have advocated for the most basic level of isolation of potentially dangerous experiments, and this is your response.
Thank you for demonstrating the arrogance which underlies the problem.
The phrase "gain of function" has become a general-purpose bogeyman, but 99% of the people using it have no idea what it means.
Farmers are interacting with viruses that are far more dangerous than the gain-of-function viruses. Gain-of-function experiments are generally just characterizing properties of viruses that already exist out in the wild. An effective way of doing that is to insert a component of the wild virus into a virus you can already grow and have characterized in the lab. The lab virus gains a function, but that function already exists in the wild.
> I have advocated for the most basic level of isolation of potentially dangerous experiments
Shi Zhengli and her colleagues are taking far more than the "most basic level" of precaution. Yet you're participating in the witch hunt against her and the virology community.
The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained. It’s likely a good idea to locate such labs outside of highly populated areas as part of a defense in depth strategy.
Strongly, strongly disagree. When even a teeny risk of escape means that millions of people could die, I think a much better argument is to simply make certain types of research completely off limits.
I'm certainly not the only person who thinks this. Zeynep Tufekci, who in my opinion had the most rational commentary during the pandemic, argued that much virus research just doesn't work from a cost/benefit analysis. For example, even if the root cause of COVID wasn't a lab leak, it's probably not a great idea having researchers milling around bat caves collecting sick bats and what not - it's very possible a zoonotic virus made the jump not necessarily in the lab but from researchers specifically looking for zoonotic viruses.
The benefits of research here are also human lives. So doing nothing has a real cost and the benefits extend indefinitely into the future.
Suppose you’re deciding between a 1% chance of a lab leak costing 10 million lives and a 20% chance you save 50 million lives over the next 100 years. That’s heavily weighted towards doing something, while still carrying significant risk. Some people would still say the risks aren’t worth it, but it’s not an obvious decision.
That is, when people want to do something-- risks tend to be understated and possible future benefits tend to be overstated.
I don't back the precautionary principle, but I do think risk in cost-benefit analysis has to be viewed from a pretty cautious place, in general (not just science).
One goal for disease likely to cause pandemics is ultimately to create better treatments for those already infected. There’s a long lag between a vaccine being designed and scaling production and distribution to actually protect people. That means there’s going to be a lot of people infected in an outbreak, including many vaccinated people.
Take antimicrobial resistance, you need to understand how microbes gain resistance by actually creating resistant bacteria/fungi etc before you can develop efficient countermeasures.
With COVID there was a lot of confusion around using masks and disinfecting public spaces in the early days. A better model of the disease could have been really useful both in the early days and how people responded to mixed messages.
How, precisely, do you believe that gain of function will benefit us the next pandemic?
Edit:
Swap “aid” to “benefit us” for hopefully better clarity.
The Intercept wrote an article about it: https://theintercept.com/2023/07/12/covid-documents-house-re...
It begins as:
House Republicans on the subcommittee probing the origin of the Covid-19 virus appear to have inadvertently released a trove of new documents related to their investigation that shed light on deliberations among the scientists who drafted a key paper in February and March of 2020. The paper, published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, was titled “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” and played a leading role in creating a public impression of a scientific consensus that the virus had emerged naturally in a Chinese “wet market.” The paper was the subject of a hearing on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, which coincided with the release of a report by the subcommittee devoted to the “Proximal Origin” paper. It contains limited screenshots of emails and Slack messages among the authors, laying out its case that the scientists believed one thing in private — that lab escape was likely — while working to produce a paper saying the opposite in public.
The newly exposed documents include full emails and pages of Slack chats that were cropped for the report, exposing the “Proximal Origin” authors’ real-time thinking. According to the metadata in the PDF of the report, it was created using “Acrobat PDFMaker 23 for Word,” indicating that the report was originally drafted as a Word document. Word, however, retains the original image when an image is cropped, as do many other apps. Microsoft’s documentation cautions that “Cropped parts of the picture are not removed from the file, and can potentially be seen by others,” going on to note: “If there is sensitive information in the area you’re cropping out make sure you delete the cropped areas.”
When this Word document was converted to a PDF, the original, uncropped images were likewise carried over. The Intercept was able to extract the original, complete images from the PDF using freely available tools, following the work of a Twitter sleuth.
I understand how WIV could have caused a pandemic, but I don’t understand the other direction — how WIV doing gain-of-function would help the situation in which there was a zoonotic origin, eg at the wet market.
The person I was replying to said that our opinion on gain-of-function should depend on the origin — but I don’t understand how gain-of-function would have helped at all. Only how it poses a risk, whether or not this particular virus was such an example.
The problem is just that P(avert catastrophe) is fairly low, and P(create catastrophe) is substantially higher.
I am not in the sector but AFAIK there has been no direct benefit from GoF. There is huge potential which some experts believe outweigh the risks, which is why it is controversial, and that is why it has been politicized.
Protecting the funding and ability to continue the research would explain why scientists have a preference for spillover as opposed to leak. Then there are the politicians...
Has there ever been benefit to such research? People fall back on wishy-washy "we could learn ___" when trying to defend it, but with how long it's been going on have we ever actually had a solid benefit from it?
We might have the usual problem with every high-powered technology, from the fission reaction to the silicon fab: the underlying science is viewpoint-neutral, but people will be overwhelmed by doom scenarios associated with it.
What am I missing here? That biolabs are the only human made thing that can be made absolutely 100% secure?
This is not true.
GoF includes any research that amplifies specific characteristics. Transmissibility or severity of infection are just two of those possible dimensions.
For example, the research that enables us to produce insulin (and tons of other biologic medicines) with E. coli is GoF.
I lean on the side of banning GoF that's designed to increase transmissibility of a contagion, but that is indeed just a subset of GoF generally.
We can sharpen the language and say "ban GoF research that increases transmissibility of infectious disease", for example.
There's also GOFROC (gain of function research of concern). That's better than just GOF, but rather vague.
GoF contra: might cause a pandemic, kill millions, probably did.
So, yeah, I don't know, tough decision.