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I could be missing something but this isn't exactly the smoking gun the title makes it seem. I'm sure there are proposals, plans and applications for all types

• baja_blast 5y ago
  there will never be an independent investigation
  • chrsw 5y ago
    If this is true, then I think we have a bigger problem on our hands. Even if there's no lab connection to the COVID-19 outbreak.
    • mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Is China a bigger problem than the pandemic? Hmmmm….
  • throwawaysea 5y ago
    This is correct. China delayed a site visit for more than a year. And then when it happened they controlled what was said. And on top of that the only US representative was Daszak, since the WHO rejected a few other candidates from the Trump administration and picked someone who was seemingly favorable to the outcome they (or perhaps China?) desired. It is incredible that all these countries around the world didn’t immediately implement sanctions and a maritime blockade after such obviously untrustworthy actions in an incident that has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
    • adflux 5y ago
      Like sending a murderer to investigate his own murders
• imbnwa 5y ago
  I mean, even in the case that occurs, what is the endgame? Fine China? Sanction China? Demand accountability from China? Not happening, not when they make everyone's chips among other things. Can someone enlighten me about the value of this theory? It just seems like another vector of anti-establishment distrust discourse with a more intelligent veneer; easy to profit off of (clicks, book sales, etc) and doesn't require a conclusion.
  • jtdev 5y ago
    They don't "make everyone's chip's"... that would be Taiwan. Regarding what should be done: stop giving money to China for GoF research would be a great start...
    • speed_spread 5y ago
      GoF? Is China still caught in the OO Design Pattern trap?
      • burnished 5y ago
        Gain of Function.
  • gmkiv 5y ago
    The value is to inform the larger discussion of the risks and benefits of gain of function research.
  • cameldrv 5y ago
    Perhaps if we have zero recourse against China in this sort of situation, then the first step would be to work to remove the conditions that lead to that lack of recourse.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • iammisc 5y ago
    The value is that it shows the American media for what it is... CCP apologists more willing to believe the communist government of China than a sitting American president with access to classified evidence. And also their use of 'woke' language to hide truth.
• BellLabradors 5y ago
  I agree with your characterisation of the evidence, except I think "Points to" is not synonymous with "smoking gun" so I don't think the criticism of the title is valid. In terms of how important this evidence is, it isn't just "a novel aspect of a viral genome", it is the aspect of the genome which is hardest to square with a natural origin. And it is an aspect that scientists involved in this research explicitly proposed inserting into coronaviruses. From the article: "Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab,” said Chan. “This definitely tips the scales for me. And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses." And then what's more, they sat on the fact that they had requested funding for this research for the last 18 months, when the world has been desperately trying to find any relevant information on the virus' origins. The fact that they did not put this forward themselves in in and of itself suspect.
  • chrsw 5y ago
    I guess "smoking gun" is too strong. Maybe what I should have said is something like "there's been a new development which completely changes the characterization of the sequence of events leading up to the pandemic." What you're saying is worth looking deeper into, but it's not enough to start making claims yet, imo. There are probably hundreds or thousands of proposals and papers floating around now that talk about different things one can do with genetic engineering. If something should arise that is related to the concepts in some of those papers you wouldn't necessarily jump to the conclusion that there's a causal connection. Not without more information, anyway. "it is the aspect of the genome which is hardest to square with a natural origin" This doesn't tell me it's artificially created. The most this tells me is it's not well understood. "The fact that they did not put this forward themselves in in and of itself suspect." It could be related. Or it could be unrelated and there maybe some other explanation. My point is, when you want to charge someone with a serious crime, which I think this falls under, you need to come with some pretty strong evidence that directly ties whoever is involved to the events of the crime. This evidence may very well exist and it's not been shared publicly.
• subsubzero 5y ago
  I think the chain of evidence is suspicious to say the least. 1. In 2018 EcoHealth Alliance(Peter Dazsak and team) apply to a grant to darpa for viral modification research and highlight a change in "furin cleavage site" at the same location as covid-19's change, this change has never been seen before in nature. 2. In the darpa proposal is listed "Wuhan institute of virology" as a team member, this was a year before the covid-19 outbreak in wuhan in 2019. 3. Rather damning for Peter Dazsak is he publicly denied any plausibility in the idea of a lab created source for covid-19, while behind the scenes at the same time telling his two students to distance themselves from this darpa proposal as the virus was rapidly spreading through cities in the world. 4. Even more unusual is that Peter Daszak and Linfa Wang, two of the researchers who submitted the proposal, did not previously acknowledge it until now.
  • BioResearcher2 5y ago
    This is rather damning for other reasons that people may not even realize. DARPA is a rather fast moving agency, and DARPA grants can be fairly short term with a fast turnaround in comparison to say NIH or NSF. Thus for DARPA grants (and others, but especially DARPA), it's extremely common have already started some aspects of the research in order to make the timelines in the grant achievable. Thus as someone in a nearby field (not something with such hefty security issues, but bio-related), when I see it say that they wrote down they wanted to insert this site into the virus, that is a public admission that someone in some lab has already started gathering preliminary data showing that it could work.
• derbOac 5y ago
  There must have been something about the title that changed, so I'm responding to something that's maybe a bit different with context. However... Some other sites' coverage of this highlighted some of the grant content a bit more prominently. I agree it's not quite a smoking gun, but the content of the grant that was discussed was eerily similar to what's been put together by investigating organizations. It's akin to if you were trying to solve a burglary and concluded "if this happened, the suspects would have done A, B, D, and H", and then later you found some emails sent back and forth by the suspects saying "hey how about we do A, B, D, and H?" It's not proof they actually did it but it's about as close as you can get to a smoking gun without it being a smoking gun. The timing is also uncanny. I don't want to miscommunicate the extent to which I think the grant proposal proves anything, as I don't think it does, but it blurs the moral difference so much that I start to find myself wondering why as a society we shouldn't react with some things as if it did. That is, I don't think it rises to some level where I would say it definitely proves beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone did anything, but I do think it compels some deep reflection about the scientific-media-authority-academic-funding complex.
• willupowers 5y ago
  The leaks reveal the confidence of a proposal and path to accomplish the genetic manipulation that Daszak and his associates have been aggressively refuting. This information contradicts those previous statements. It appears Daszak may have conflicts of interest that need more investigation.
• dang 5y ago
  The submitted title ("New Leaked Documents Point to Engineered Lab Origin for SARS‑CoV‑2") broke the site guidelines badly by editorializing. Submitters: please don't do that—it will eventually cause you to lose submission privileges on HN. Instead, follow the site guidelines, which include: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (I'm assuming, of course, that it wasn't the article title that got subsequently changed. If that was the case, ignore the above.)
  • klyrs 5y ago
    > (I'm assuming, of course, that it wasn't the article title that got subsequently changed. If that was the case, ignore the above.) Not the first time I've seen you say this. Would it be worthwhile to fetch articles when they're submitted, if only for your own sanity?
    • dang 5y ago
      Fetching them in a way that information (like titles) can be meaningfully extracted from is a lot harder than it sounds - we've worked on it in the past and got bogged down in lots of details and corner cases etc. An easier way might be to rely on one of the archiving services, e.g. archive.org. If a snapshot could be taken at submission time than it would be there to refer to later. On the other hand, titles changing on the fly isn't that big a headache as far as sanity-affecting headaches go. NYT does it all the time, or used to. The main thing I don't like to do is scold someone for breaking the title guideline and then finding out later that it was the site, not the submitter, that changed it.
      • SquishyPanda23 5y ago
        > information (like titles) can be meaningfully extracted From a technical perspective it's probably simpler to just grep the page for the user-submitted title.
        • 5y ago
• ramraj07 5y ago
  Professors never make proposals that they’re not sure would work nowadays. It’s too risky with an already uncertain grant system so most (especially successful) labs only write in proposals things they have already proven but not fully disclosed. They’ll then use the money they get to test and finish half of the next project and then write the next proposal with that knowledge. Thus it’s very likely they already did this research a good way through when this proposal was submitted. While this doesn’t prove they made and leaked the virus, it doesn’t exonerate them either. A proper investigation is needed. When you say you rely on experts, you should definitely listen to them but unfortunately when people are defending their colleagues it’s much harder to do this. Further, many scientists would take any questioning of this persons ethics as castigation of the whole scientific establishment and become defensive. Even otherwise, it looks like the tide is changing among experts now, more and more are agreeing the lab leak is a viable hypothesis.
• fredgrott 5y ago
  short biology explanation as I do not know how much the HN readers has. We did not have the tools to do genetic manipulation as far s the physical techniques until recently...ie they were not around when I took biochem in 1990s. HOWEVER, we still do not have enough concrete knowledge about this domain to reliably design anything on purpose including viruses organs ,etc. Anybody that states otherwise is a danger to themselves and others. Blunt as I can put that.
• JPKab 5y ago
  There is a long chain of improbable coincidences required to believe that the virus came directly to humans from animal reservoirs in nature. Coincidence 1.) Wuhan is roughly 1800 KM away from the caves in Yunnan province where previous bat-borne coronaviruses jumped to humans harvesting bat guano in earlier SARS outbreaks. It is a massive metropolitan area, and far more cosmopolitan than many westerners believe. They don't eat bats in Wuhan, and bats were never present at wet markets. Possible for a virus to jump from bats to humans here, but unlikely based on priors and the realities of horseshoe bats being highly unlikely to come into contact with urbanized humans at a level to transmit a virus that isn't adapted to human lung receptors. Coincidence 2.) Wuhan has 2 different facilities where bat-borne coronavirus research took place. There are only a few of these labs in the entire world, and none others in all of China. Coincidence 3. ) Unlike both SARS-1 and MERS, where animal reservoirs for both were found within months, almost 2 years later, no animal reservoir has been identified for SARS-2. Unlike both MERS and SARS-1, SARS-2 has never been particularly infectious to other animal species. SARS-1 in its early stages was still highly transmissible between bats. SARS-2 never exhibited this characteristic. Coincidence 4. ) The evidence that would have easily exonerated the labs was deliberately destroyed by the CCP early in the pandemic, with extensive blocking of access to any and all foreign investigators. Coincidence 5.) The same city where this outbreak occurred was a known location, based on other grants to EcoHealth Alliance, of researching bat coronavirus experiments involving the use of "humanized mice". No, "humanized" isn't some novel, sci-fi or conspiracy theory idea. They are genetically modified mice which are routinely used in research. The variety used in the lab were engineered to have human ACE-2 receptors lining their respiratory tissue. Sounds crazy, I know, but here's the grant summary (it was awarded) for the research, and notice the "humanized mice" at the very end of the text: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/project-details/9491676 https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje... All of this evidence is circumstantial, but every day that goes by where no zoonotic reservoir is identified (the CCP isn't looking at all, because they know the answer) increasingly points to this being a lab accident and a subsequent coverup by a paranoid authoritarian regime, along with a scientific community desperate to prevent virology from being impacted the way nuclear energy research was by Chernobyl.
• markdown 5y ago
  > that there was some foul business going on here The lab leak hypothesis isn't a hypothesis that foul business went on.
  • chrsw 5y ago
    What about a possible cover-up of legitimate business that went haywire?