5 ms·

Sigh. As I've said in other posts, if any experiment of this sort were the source of sars-cov-2, it would be -blindingly- obvious. The synthetic metagenomic e

Sigh. As I've said in other posts, if any experiment of this sort were the source of sars-cov-2, it would be -blindingly- obvious. The synthetic metagenomic experiments looking into spike, etc. leave completely obvious traces, number one being the use of known, characterized viral vectors. Using some random isolates as experimental vectors is not only methodologically pointless and counterproductive, it's vastly more difficult to do.

jiocrag 5y ago
This is like saying Apple couldn’t have possibly developed the iPhone in secrecy. China has massive incentive to both do this research and make said research as opaque as possible to the rest of the world.
tacitusarc 5y ago
Why is that? How would selecting for evolved inactivity be differentiable?
asdkjjjthrow 5y ago
I think this is very wishful thinking, or deliberately choosing how to interpret "lab-made" to be "sliced and diced and recombined". "Lab-made" still encompasses the whole of GoF research. That is, a virus can appear to have naturally evolved but have been evolved in lab under conditions by which it develops quicker, more efficiently, etc. If the virus was manufactured through some means then it was, by definition, lab-made. Even if it doesn't imply base-pair level manipulation by humans themselves. It has been clear for ~1 year that not only did the NIH fund some GoF research it also funded research by a lab that was researching this exact virus. It is also clear that the Obama administration early on tried to kill this type research because it's glaringly obvious its extremely dangerous. It is so unlikely such a novel, effective, and dangerous virus was created through bats sharing the same cave that it's not even worth considering. Similarly evolved viruses in nature rarely reach global pandemic levels. Even SARS v1 was weak in comparison. This all being said though, by the nature of GoF research, it would be impossible to tell anyway. At least as far as the MSM is concerned. The only question now, I think, is malevolence. It's more likely a researcher was infected in the sub-par lab in Wuhan and brought it home than it is to be any of the cover stories given in the beginning: pangolin soup, BBQ bats, or what have you. I doubt the leak was malicious. I am certain the leak was from the lab. Finally, this isn't a new occurrence. This has happened several times here in the US and thankfully it was caught it time to stop it because we don't have a population density near what China has and the standard we hold our labs to makes carelessness with such research extremely hard to do.
- 8note 5y ago
  It sounds like you'd consider the state of Florida being a lab to produce covid variants? The wet market theory is also then a lab made one, since putting sick Bata and pangolins and whatever together can promote viruses jumping species. Flu is mostly a lab made virus by this definition too. Put people close to chickens, and you help people catch new flu variants
  - asdkjjjthrow 5y ago
    This is a really dishonest form of argument and I don't think you actually read my post for context. There's a very large difference between the relatively small gaps in genomes between related virus species and the grand canyon sized gap between COVID and it's nearest neighbor. The difference between omicron and delta is very small, delta and alpha also very small. These would be "expected" differences much like influenza changing to be a little different every single year. If we are to believe that a cave of bats cooked up a super infectious, lethal, extremely novel variant of CoV-SARS-1 then shouldn't other animal born diseases be the same? H1N1? Swine flu? Shouldn't they all have had extremely novel pathways given just how many animals it infected? With the exception of certain hemorrhagic fevers I can't think of another virus that emerged from the wild with such extremely novel infection methods and I've been on this earth for a long time. Even H1N1, a big scare, wasn't THAT much different than it's neighbors. Yet here we have a virus with basically never before seen infection pathways and virulence. Something that might have been created through scientifically tested and studied evolutionary pressure in a petri dish. It's not that hard to imagine. Get some lung cells, get some starter culture of a virus, and start beating it up with various methods until it evolves. Take those, and keep the survivors, and repeat ad nauseum. In fact, this is exactly how GoF research works. If you view it altruistically this allows us to create novel vaccines for novel infection methods. Unfortunately, it also means a leak will create a pandemic. All of this could be cleared up in a month if China would allow regulators from the UN to investigate their lab and pull all the data associated with it. This is common procedure, and yet China appears to be railroading any attempt to do so going so far as to destroy related documents. Occam's razor, this isn't the action someone would take if it was a simple batch of bad bat soup. Logic would dictate you'd want to give up all the evidence of bad bat soup as fast as possible...yet 3 years later we have seen absolutely no evidence pointing to an animal borne infection pathway...
johncena33 5y ago
> Correction, October 25, 9:50 am: A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input) From https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22734496/genetic-engineering-attribution-biosecurity-forensics-biological-detective-work https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22734496/genetic-engineer.... So yes, your claim is false.
tripletao 5y ago
We already know that the EcoHealth Alliance sought funding for DEFUSE, which involved making chimeras of "random isolates" (novel coronaviruses collected by the WIV from nature) and certain known backbones. They proposed to do that work in North Carolina, not Wuhan, and the proposal was rejected for safety concerns; but it gives general insight to the kind of work they wanted to do, and might have continued with other funders. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop... So is it really that crazy to think they made a chimera of two "random isolates"? David Relman didn't think so: > This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29246 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29246 Of course the opportunities for a lab accident aren't limited to genetic engineering. SARS-CoV-2 could be a naturally-evolved virus, but one that was sitting harmlessly in a remote cave until WIV researchers collected it. SARS-CoV-2 could also be naturally-evolved, and spread to some hapless villager who then made a day trip to Wuhan; but the point is that we don't know, and all options require investigation until we do.
- alevskaya 5y ago
  Yeah, I used to engineer viruses and immune cells, etc. I've read that grant a few times. Again, a rejected _American_ grant for work to be done in Baric's lab in North Carolina. Most of the work outlined in it involved chimeric genomes that would be obvious. There's a few sentences about verifying properties of full-length quasispecies isolates, but the QS experiments aren't well outlined - a lot of chimeric experiments and re-syntheses, all which would likely leave pretty tell-tale signs. Of course it's possible to describe a physically possible route to sampling, lab accident, and infection. Anyone can come up with these just-so stories. Professors too! Making a chimera of random isolates is crazy story. It's incredibly annoying to mess with 30kb RNA viruses. You have no idea. That's just not how a skilled practitioner would go about asking these questions. There's a reason most work on these things are in characterized strains. These stories remain ludicrous when compared with the unambiguous epidemiological evidence for zoonosis that we have in hand. You're simultaneously alleging this tight collaboration between western scientists and WIV, but positing that somehow all these western scientists were in the dark about a conspiracy to do this massive amount of work without our knowledge, or an active conspiracy on the part of a significant percentage of western virology to hide it. All in a field that before the pandemic was a completely undramatic backwater of science! The power of "lab-leak" isn't its strength as an evidence-backed scientific hypothesis, it's its power as a compelling work of fiction, and I doubt any amount of hard evidence will kill it. The damage it does is distracting us from the unregulated wild-meat and fur industries that were the overwhelmingly likely cauldron for evolving these strains (as in SARS-1!). If we yet again fail to shut down those sources, we risk another pandemic just like this happening again in a few decades. That's where international attention and pressure should be applied, not this cockamamie distraction.
chaostheory 5y ago
The main problem with such evidence is that even in a lab-made virus it simply may not exist. Basically, a good genetic engineer can create a synthetic virus that would be indistinguishable from a natural one. Moreover, often researchers deliberately introduce some synonymous mutations into their designs so that later they can discern their strain from natural ones. But if the creators choose not to reveal these markers, it is impossible to distinguish them from natural mutations. https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...
scotty79 5y ago
Apparently seemless recombination was successfully attempted (search word seemless here https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...) Whole post is quite interesting despite author alluding from time to time to lab leak being likely. What I got from it is that lab leak is entirely possible but there are at least few indications that it would require mixture of ineptitude and pointless cunningness. And that natural origin is superbly likely because coronavirus are just amazing melting pot where same exact mutations popup in multiple unrelated species.

jiocrag 5y ago

This is like saying Apple couldn’t have possibly developed the iPhone in secrecy. China has massive incentive to both do this research and make said research as opaque as possible to the rest of the world.

tacitusarc 5y ago

Why is that? How would selecting for evolved inactivity be differentiable?

asdkjjjthrow 5y ago

I think this is very wishful thinking, or deliberately choosing how to interpret "lab-made" to be "sliced and diced and recombined". "Lab-made" still encompasses the whole of GoF research. That is, a virus can appear to have naturally evolved but have been evolved in lab under conditions by which it develops quicker, more efficiently, etc. If the virus was manufactured through some means then it was, by definition, lab-made. Even if it doesn't imply base-pair level manipulation by humans themselves. It has been clear for ~1 year that not only did the NIH fund some GoF research it also funded research by a lab that was researching this exact virus. It is also clear that the Obama administration early on tried to kill this type research because it's glaringly obvious its extremely dangerous. It is so unlikely such a novel, effective, and dangerous virus was created through bats sharing the same cave that it's not even worth considering. Similarly evolved viruses in nature rarely reach global pandemic levels. Even SARS v1 was weak in comparison. This all being said though, by the nature of GoF research, it would be impossible to tell anyway. At least as far as the MSM is concerned. The only question now, I think, is malevolence. It's more likely a researcher was infected in the sub-par lab in Wuhan and brought it home than it is to be any of the cover stories given in the beginning: pangolin soup, BBQ bats, or what have you. I doubt the leak was malicious. I am certain the leak was from the lab. Finally, this isn't a new occurrence. This has happened several times here in the US and thankfully it was caught it time to stop it because we don't have a population density near what China has and the standard we hold our labs to makes carelessness with such research extremely hard to do.

8note 5y ago
It sounds like you'd consider the state of Florida being a lab to produce covid variants? The wet market theory is also then a lab made one, since putting sick Bata and pangolins and whatever together can promote viruses jumping species. Flu is mostly a lab made virus by this definition too. Put people close to chickens, and you help people catch new flu variants
- asdkjjjthrow 5y ago
  This is a really dishonest form of argument and I don't think you actually read my post for context. There's a very large difference between the relatively small gaps in genomes between related virus species and the grand canyon sized gap between COVID and it's nearest neighbor. The difference between omicron and delta is very small, delta and alpha also very small. These would be "expected" differences much like influenza changing to be a little different every single year. If we are to believe that a cave of bats cooked up a super infectious, lethal, extremely novel variant of CoV-SARS-1 then shouldn't other animal born diseases be the same? H1N1? Swine flu? Shouldn't they all have had extremely novel pathways given just how many animals it infected? With the exception of certain hemorrhagic fevers I can't think of another virus that emerged from the wild with such extremely novel infection methods and I've been on this earth for a long time. Even H1N1, a big scare, wasn't THAT much different than it's neighbors. Yet here we have a virus with basically never before seen infection pathways and virulence. Something that might have been created through scientifically tested and studied evolutionary pressure in a petri dish. It's not that hard to imagine. Get some lung cells, get some starter culture of a virus, and start beating it up with various methods until it evolves. Take those, and keep the survivors, and repeat ad nauseum. In fact, this is exactly how GoF research works. If you view it altruistically this allows us to create novel vaccines for novel infection methods. Unfortunately, it also means a leak will create a pandemic. All of this could be cleared up in a month if China would allow regulators from the UN to investigate their lab and pull all the data associated with it. This is common procedure, and yet China appears to be railroading any attempt to do so going so far as to destroy related documents. Occam's razor, this isn't the action someone would take if it was a simple batch of bad bat soup. Logic would dictate you'd want to give up all the evidence of bad bat soup as fast as possible...yet 3 years later we have seen absolutely no evidence pointing to an animal borne infection pathway...

johncena33 5y ago

> Correction, October 25, 9:50 am: A previous version of this story stated that SARS-CoV-2 had been definitively proven not to be a bioengineered virus. While an August 2021 US intelligence report concluded, “Most agencies … assess with low confidence that SARS-CoV-2 probably was not genetically engineered,” and many scientists agree with that assessment, it was an overstatement to claim that the theory has been definitively ruled out. The introduction and conclusion of the story have been updated to reflect this lower level of certainty. (h/t to Alina Chan, biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, for her critique and input) From https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22734496/genetic-engineering-attribution-biosecurity-forensics-biological-detective-work https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22734496/genetic-engineer.... So yes, your claim is false.

tripletao 5y ago

We already know that the EcoHealth Alliance sought funding for DEFUSE, which involved making chimeras of "random isolates" (novel coronaviruses collected by the WIV from nature) and certain known backbones. They proposed to do that work in North Carolina, not Wuhan, and the proposal was rejected for safety concerns; but it gives general insight to the kind of work they wanted to do, and might have continued with other funders. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-prop... So is it really that crazy to think they made a chimera of two "random isolates"? David Relman didn't think so: > This argument fails to acknowledge the possibility that two or more as yet undisclosed ancestors (i.e., more proximal ancestors than RaTG13 and RmYN02) had already been discovered and were being studied in a laboratory—for example, one with the SARS-CoV-2 backbone and spike protein receptor-binding domain, and the other with the SARS-CoV-2 polybasic furin cleavage site. It would have been a logical next step to wonder about the properties of a recombinant virus and then create it in the laboratory. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29246 https://www.pnas.org/content/117/47/29246 Of course the opportunities for a lab accident aren't limited to genetic engineering. SARS-CoV-2 could be a naturally-evolved virus, but one that was sitting harmlessly in a remote cave until WIV researchers collected it. SARS-CoV-2 could also be naturally-evolved, and spread to some hapless villager who then made a day trip to Wuhan; but the point is that we don't know, and all options require investigation until we do.

alevskaya 5y ago
Yeah, I used to engineer viruses and immune cells, etc. I've read that grant a few times. Again, a rejected _American_ grant for work to be done in Baric's lab in North Carolina. Most of the work outlined in it involved chimeric genomes that would be obvious. There's a few sentences about verifying properties of full-length quasispecies isolates, but the QS experiments aren't well outlined - a lot of chimeric experiments and re-syntheses, all which would likely leave pretty tell-tale signs. Of course it's possible to describe a physically possible route to sampling, lab accident, and infection. Anyone can come up with these just-so stories. Professors too! Making a chimera of random isolates is crazy story. It's incredibly annoying to mess with 30kb RNA viruses. You have no idea. That's just not how a skilled practitioner would go about asking these questions. There's a reason most work on these things are in characterized strains. These stories remain ludicrous when compared with the unambiguous epidemiological evidence for zoonosis that we have in hand. You're simultaneously alleging this tight collaboration between western scientists and WIV, but positing that somehow all these western scientists were in the dark about a conspiracy to do this massive amount of work without our knowledge, or an active conspiracy on the part of a significant percentage of western virology to hide it. All in a field that before the pandemic was a completely undramatic backwater of science! The power of "lab-leak" isn't its strength as an evidence-backed scientific hypothesis, it's its power as a compelling work of fiction, and I doubt any amount of hard evidence will kill it. The damage it does is distracting us from the unregulated wild-meat and fur industries that were the overwhelmingly likely cauldron for evolving these strains (as in SARS-1!). If we yet again fail to shut down those sources, we risk another pandemic just like this happening again in a few decades. That's where international attention and pressure should be applied, not this cockamamie distraction.

chaostheory 5y ago

The main problem with such evidence is that even in a lab-made virus it simply may not exist. Basically, a good genetic engineer can create a synthetic virus that would be indistinguishable from a natural one. Moreover, often researchers deliberately introduce some synonymous mutations into their designs so that later they can discern their strain from natural ones. But if the creators choose not to reveal these markers, it is impossible to distinguish them from natural mutations. https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...

scotty79 5y ago

Apparently seemless recombination was successfully attempted (search word seemless here https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 https://yurideigin.medium.com/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-throug...) Whole post is quite interesting despite author alluding from time to time to lab leak being likely. What I got from it is that lab leak is entirely possible but there are at least few indications that it would require mixture of ineptitude and pointless cunningness. And that natural origin is superbly likely because coronavirus are just amazing melting pot where same exact mutations popup in multiple unrelated species.