27 ms·

Researchers’ tests of lab-made version of Covid virus draw scrutiny

217 points by russfink 4y ago

russfink 4y ago
Some snippets: The spike protein of an Omicron version of SARS-2 was fused to a virus of the Wuhan strain, the original version that emerged from China in 2020. The goal was to determine if the mutations in the Omicron spike protein were responsible for this variant’s increased ability to evade the immunity to SARS-2 that humans have built up, and whether the changes led to Omicron’s lower rate of severity. The testing actually showed, though, that the chimeric virus was more lethal to a type of lab mice than Omicron itself, killing 80% of the mice infected. Importantly, the original Wuhan strain killed 100% of mice it was tested in. The conclusion is that mutations in the spike protein of the Omicron variant are responsible for the strain’s ability to evade immunity people have built up via vaccination, infections, or both, but they are not responsible for the apparent decrease in severity of the Omicron viruses.
- cstejerean 4y ago
  If it went from 100% IFR (original strain) to 80% IFR (Original + Omicron spike) how did it not reduce the severity? Sure it's more severe than Omicron by itself so there were other factors as well, but it does seem like a decrease in severity to me.
  - algon33 4y ago
    Because it has Omicron's increased ability to avoid people's immunity. That would result in higher infectivity than just a copy of the wuhan strain, with near the same severity. Note that earlier Sars viruses had even higher severity than Sars Covid 2 (Wuhan strain), but weren't as infective and killed far fewer people. Which implies that a slight reduction in severity for a gain in infectivity is not a worthwhile tradeoff.
    - baja_blast 4y ago
      Exactly, for example Ebola has a mortality rate of around 50% but has only killed around 11 thousand people, SARS-CoV2 has less than 1% can has killed 20 million or more. Wild viruses like SARS1 and MERS are poorly adapted towards humans when the spillover happened making it possible to be contained. But SARS2 a which is a Sarbecovirus a family of gastrointestinal viruses some how was able to bind towards human airways with a binding affinity 20 times that for humans than for bats, all while leaving no traceable trail of mutations that researchers could trace back to the intermediate host. For context with SARS1 and MERS researchers were able to find the spill over animal within a few months. But after 3+ years we have yet to find an intermediate animal host. Also before anyone says "It took years to find the source for SARS1", but that is for the original bat virus, the intermediate animal where the cross over to humans happened was found within months. Additionally SARS1 and MERS had a rapid period of mutations as it adapted towards humans which allowed researchers to trace back to the source.
    - Izkata 4y ago
      You're confusing "severity" and "infectivity". Increased infectivity is not increased severity. The evidence they have shows reduced severity and an unknown (but theorized increased) infectivity.
  - thehappypm 4y ago
    Errorbars, probably. 80% and 100% might be samples of a true death rate of 90%.
    - Izkata 4y ago
      Indeed, beware of round numbers, they tend to indicate very low sample size and very large error range.
  - xyzzy123 4y ago
    The researchers could not be sure of this result before they did it, which is why I believe there's a reasonable case this should be considered GOF work even if the lethality of their chimera (in hu mice) was ultimately less than that of original strain. Furthermore, strictly speaking I don't believe we know the actual severity of this in humans. While it's possible to make a fairly confident guess, surprises are still possible.
AnnoyedComment 4y ago
AzzieElbab 4y ago
IMHO the real question is why would we do this? Just because we can? Is there a hidden bio arms race we can’t stay away from?
- stiiv 4y ago
  > The goal of the research was to determine if the mutations in the Omicron spike protein were responsible for this variant’s increased ability to evade the immunity to SARS-2 that humans have built up, and whether the changes led to Omicron’s lower rate of severity.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  Yes, but it's not hidden. On the one side of it: humanity, and our ability to explore, comprehend, and modify the reality around us. On the other side of it: naturally-evolved viruses. They have a couple billion years' practice overriding biological countermeasures and massive territory advantage. If we do nothing, odds are they will eventually mutate into something that drops us dead in our tracks or wrecks us slowly, as they have before (smallpox, 1918 flu, HIV). And in our modern, deeply-interconnected world, geographic defenses and population isolation no longer protect us as they did our ancestors. The main tools we have to avoid this are our ability to explore, comprehend, and modify. The capacity to change something and observe how the change affects it is something the viruses cannot do, and arguably our best chance of "outsmarting" them so that when they naturally mutate into a dangerous form, we already have the tools in place to mitigate or disassemble the danger.
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    Exactly how does modifying the virus help create prevention measures or treatments for it? Please provide real world examples.
- photochemsyn 4y ago
  The most banal reason is that groups of researchers generally coordinate to set up little bureaucratic power centers within the national research agencies to ensure themselves a steady stream of grants; this in turn allows them to get tenure at their universities (under 'publish or perish' which more practically means 'get your grant renewed or perish' and grant renewal relies on (1) a steady stream of publications and (2) ensuring the federal agency keeps earmarking funds for your area of research). This is all perhaps well and good if you're fighting for funds for studying, say, childhood leukemia, but in this case it's been a major disaster and has almost certainly played a central role in this recent global pandemic. Oops.
null_object 4y ago
> There is a lot of evidence that points to the virus spreading from a wet market in the city, not the Wuhan lab. But proving something didn’t happen three years after the fact is a challenge that may be impossible to meet. I find the anxious disclaimer about the Wuhan lab interesting, because of course there were a lot of things the lab itself could have done to clear any doubt at the time, including not muzzling researchers who worked there, and even releasing their virus database (which had been taken offline a couple months earlier, under the pretext that 'someone' had attempted to 'hack' it and has still not been made available three years later).
- tlear 4y ago
  - jimcavel888 4y ago
- soco 4y ago
  Important underline: the lab database is not available to us.
  - null_object 4y ago
    > Important underline: the lab database is not available to us Genuine question, as I'm not aware that it's been made externally available to anyone - do you mean it's available to researchers around the world but not the general public? Or do you mean it's available to Chinese labs?
    - mikeyouse 4y ago
      It's a dumb conspiracy theory about a rarely-used database that "went down" in September 2019 which was a smoking gun about how the Chinese knew about Covid. Except it turns out that it only came online in June 2019, it went down all the time from the view of the tracking website, was available into 2020, and has absolutely nothing useful to say about SarsCov2; https://twitter.com/flodebarre/status/1577401140345507859 https://twitter.com/flodebarre/status/1577401140345507859 I'm certain that everyone who used this as a prominent 'datapoint' for the LL hypothesis will immediately reconsider and update their priors.
SSJPython 4y ago
Why are we fucking with nature? Like literally what is the point of this? To show that we can? Some fucked up biological arms race with the other great powers? When you fuck with nature, nature wins. Always.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  > When you fuck with nature, nature wins. Always. There's, like, an entire human civilization on this planet right now that begs to differ. Ever been to Vegas? Not a single thing natural about that place; it's been there over 100 years.
  - salawat 4y ago
    Do you not understand Nature does not operate on the same timescales as humanity? Do you realize that place's entire existence is predicated on a massive logistical network that if left untrnded for a week would likely result in a completely inhospitable environment for the residents? Civilization as we know it is excruciatingly fragile, and maintained by active expenditure of human energy. Nature, is self'sustaining, closed loop, enthalpy decreasing and Just Frigging Works. It just may take a while for us to see/realize something that makes it click that, wow, nature finds a way. I'd think the modern hiccups in the supply chain recently would have provided sufficient examples of how fragile the entire artifice is...
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      Nature isn't magic, and our species has exterminated enough species and ecosystems to respect how fragile it is. And while you speak of nature at large, we tend to care more about subsets of it. Life, in the large, survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, but a rock from space could easily fuck with nature in a way that it wouldn't "bounce back" in any way relevant to us.
      - rhacker 4y ago
        But that's also a major problem. We have deemed life so unimportant, that if Russia wants San Francisco obliterated tomorrow, they have the power to do that. Literally nothing can stop them if they are hell-bent on that, damn the consequences. I think the only people that realize things like this are those that have lost others. Perhaps by mistake even- perhaps especially - his hand slipped and he is dead now. Someone's wife out there is thinking that ALL the time. Perhaps in a year we'll be mourning permanently for New York like that.
nsxwolf 4y ago
How there isn't a full on worldwide ban on this now is just beyond me. Our hubris and overconfidence could kill millions more.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  It may very well be riskier than not to ban research like that on an endemic airborne virus that has shown a proclivity to mutate. If no humans are running controlled experiments on the virus, there is still an experiment currently being run as a massive, randomized trial in the form of the natural mutative processes the virus undergoes in the infected human population. How much do we want to trust that it won't hit upon an HIV-category combinatoric mutation before we're aware it has the potential to do that? The risk tradeoff is difficult here, but we should keep in mind that the risk of doing no such research is way, way higher than zero.
  - nsxwolf 4y ago
    I find this very frustrating. If COVID-19 was a lab leak - wether it had involved gain of function related or just unwisely moving viruses from the animal kingdom into human spaces - what good did any of it do? Apparently our ability to create vaccines doesn't hinge on messing around with the viruses before they infect humans. COVID-19 vaccine was created after the fact, and it hardly prevented a major global catastrophe. I just don't see the argument. It sounds like pure imagination - by making viruses more dangerous or increasing the odds we'll expose ourselves to novel ones, someday we'll have the technology to prevent any pandemic. How many millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars wasted before that happens? When is it just not worth it? It seems not worth it to me now. If it's a bioweapons program, I don't see why we need to be playing along. It's not like nuclear deterrence - someone releases a weaponized virus, the whole world gets infected. It's like a nuke that blows up the entire world.
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      > Apparently our ability to create vaccines doesn't hinge on messing around with the viruses before they infect humans. The COVID vaccine built heavily on previous research with flu,. Zika, rabies, and cytomegalovirus.
snshn 4y ago
Humanity has peaked sometime around 1960s-1980s, it's all been downhill since then. My theory is that we're in a self-destructive mode now. The technology we possess keeps advancing while our control over it and intellectual abilities are diminishing, partially because we rely on tech so much (smartphones, automation, "AI"). So in retrospect, we were meant to go (mostly) extinct during the cold war, by some miracle it was narrowly avoided, so we survived past our peak, and now we're just existing on borrowed time, the whole planet is a ticking time bomb, and the question is if we manage to become multi-planetary species before then or go (mostly) extinct. I think Elon has the same view on things, that would explain Neuralink, Starlink, SpaceX.
- simple-thoughts 4y ago
  If by “humanity” you mean the United States’ population, possibly. But for most people in most countries, life is much better today than in the 1980s.
- mikkergp 4y ago
  > Humanity has peaked sometime around 1960s-1980s I'm 99% certain they would have said the same things in the 60's to 80's about the 20's to 40's (maybe stopping somewhere around 1939) and in the 20's they would certainly be reminiscing about the industrial revolution and gilded age.
photochemsyn 4y ago
In this snippet from the abstract, S stands for spike protein: > "We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor-binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S." https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.13.512134v1.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.13.512134v1.... See russfink comment above for the relative mortality compared to the original Wuhan strain (100% for Wuhan compared to 80% for this hybrid). So this researcher-generated strain appears to be intermediate in mortality between the original Wuhan strain and Omicron, BUT it escapes vaccination relative to the Wuhan strain, making it more dangerous in that regard and more likely to spread through a vaccinated population causing significant mortality. I'd classify this as reckless and irresponsible research. As far as the original Wuhan strain, we have about four theories of origin. (1) natural wild type with no lab research involvement, (2) natural wild type collected by a lab and accidentally released from that lab, (3) wild type 'heated up' by serial passage through mice and cloned human-type cells without explicit genetic engineering, and (4) deliberate engineering using a CRISPR system to insert a furan cleavage site in a collected wild-type virus, which allowed a bat virus to leap to a human host. Really (4) has the most evidence at this point, and note that this is not entirely the fault of the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology as the research concept was partially developed in the USA and continued (despite an Obama-era ban on gain-of-function research) in China with Ecohealth Alliance funding. As far as why doing gain-of-function research to predict 'emerging disease outbreaks' is a godawfully stupid idea, it's that it appears that almost any infectious animal virus can be converted to a human pathogen by selective transfer of human-receptor-binding motifs, even though such transfer would never take place under natural conditions. An immediate global ban on this kind of research (under the Biological Warfare Convention) is needed.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
rossdavidh 4y ago
1) talk about failure to read a room 2) even the alleged learning from the experiment: "The conclusion of the study is that mutations in the spike protein of the Omicron variant are responsible for the strain’s ability to evade immunity people have built up via vaccination, infections, or both, but they are not responsible for the apparent decrease in severity of the Omicron viruses." ...does not hold up, because this was in mice. Ordinary lab rats were immune to the original strain of covid-19, but not to Omicron, which shows that it is not at all unlikely for there to be significant differences in the resistance of rodents to one strain or the other, compared to humans. So, they made a hybrid covid-19 strain, that could conceivably have been as contagious as Omicron but as lethal as the original strain. Nice work, folks.
- baja_blast 4y ago
  Well the mice the researchers used were genetically modified mice to have human ACE2 receptors which is standard practice in Virology. But! I will say it 100% is not worth the risk, just last year a researcher in Taiwan got infected with the delta variant in the same level lab BSL3, so any dangerous or novel virus they create has a real possibility of escaping. Also it's not like this type of research helped us predict or even fight the pandemic. Millions have been spent on studying and modifying wild coronaviruses and it not only failed to predict this pandemic, but none of the research helped in anyway combating it. For example the Ecohealth Alliance the main collaborators with the WIV has still to this day refused to share research and data they have collected over the years. So either the research is worthless and thus why are we funding it despite the dangers, or they have something they want to hide.
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    This particular research helps to understand how important this particular variant of the spike protein is. When future virus variants are discovered and sequenced, this information helps understand what to expect. Because the virulence of new Variants can't be estimated for months after their first detection.
    - 4y ago
buscoquadnary 4y ago
Sweet maybe after this we can go ahead and extract DNA from a mosquito in amber and use that to make dinosaurs and open a theme park with them. Sounds like that is the next Chriton movie on the list now that we are checking of "The Andromeda Strain".
- dqpb 4y ago
  I'm totally in favor of bringing back dinosaurs. I'm also in favor of modifying animals to have more human-like brains. I understand that many/most people would oppose this on ethical grounds. I could probably even articulate those positions if I tried. But, deep down in my inner child, I think the world would be much more interesting if these things existed.
  - buscoquadnary 4y ago
    I will consent to your argument on the grounds that we provide equal funding and research to the construction of giant robots to fight the dinosaurs when they escape.
    - dqpb 4y ago
      Sounds like a win-win!
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Speaking of The Andromeda Strain, I used to assume the safety measures of real life labs for pathogen research were comparable to what Crichton described in that book. Well, probably not with nuclear bombs rigged to sterilize the facility in case of an accident, but at least built remote and with serious quarantine procedures. Apparently not. Apparently they build these places in the middle of cities and let workers go home every evening. Insanity.
mgamache 4y ago
"There is a lot of evidence that points to the virus spreading from a wet market in the city" Spreading, yes. Originating no. Note: This article uses two preprint papers one of which was changed before publication and the other doesn't support zoonotic origin: https://www.science.org/content/article/do-three-new-studies-add-proof-covid-19-s-origin-wuhan-animal-market https://www.science.org/content/article/do-three-new-studies...
jacknews 4y ago
'Ask for forgiveness, not permission' is really not something we want in biotech.
derstander 4y ago
The linked article mentions a BU response via email. There’s also one via the web [0]. The preprint is way outside of my field of expertise so I can’t confidently evaluate the news stories against the preprint. But if journalists misinterpreted scientific research it would certainly not be the first time. [0] https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/neidl-researchers-refute-uk-article-about-covid-strain/ https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/neidl-researchers-refute-uk...
- tripletao 4y ago
  That response is an exercise in obfuscation. For example: > Corley says the line pulled out of context actually had nothing to do with the virus’ effect on humans. The study began in a tissue culture, then moved to an animal model. So they're saying we don't know if their lab-created chimera is actually more dangerous in live humans, because they (fortunately!) haven't tested in live humans. That completely misses the point of those models, though--the reason why tissue cultures and animals are used is that they're often predictive of the effect in humans. By that standard in their mice, their chimera is possibly less deadly than the original Wuhan wild type, but definitely more deadly than omicron. They didn't study the effect on transmissibility, but we know that's determined mostly by the spike. So their chimera may combine most of the deadliness of the Wuhan wild type with the transmissibility of omicron. We can't prove that without experiments in live humans that I hope will never be conducted, but that sure sounds like a gain of function research of concern to me.
neilv 4y ago
Around a decade ago, when Boston University was trying (successfully) to have its campus be the site of a BSL-4 lab, there were protests (articles, even outdoor demonstrations) -- over the risks of a lab leak of the world's nastiest pathogens, in an dense urban area. In that dialogue, the public heard a lot about histories of safety incidents at other BSL-4 labs, which generally seemed due to negligence. Today, given all the presumed awareness of lab leak risks, from the BU BSL-4 protests, and from the subsequent Covid pandemic-- I don't know why anyone at BU would risk modifying Covid without the utmost precautions, including at least using BSL-4 rather than BSL-3.
- giantg2 4y ago
  It seems stupid to have these sites in urban areas. If we want to do this sort of stuff, build the facility in the desert, with little population, little wildlife population, and environmental factors inhospitable to long lifetime if there is escape. But I guess safety measures like that are too inconvenient.
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    Might be difficult to get people to work there.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      Endangering billions of people because virologists prefer to be urbanite yuppies. Research so important that such a risk is accepted, but not so important that it would make sense to simply pay virologists 5x more to live somewhere remote. This is madness.
      - rhacker 4y ago
        MichaelCollins 4y ago
giantg2 4y ago
Whether natural or escaping from a lab, I fully expect a mass casualty disease in my lifetime. We saw what a shitshow covid was, and it wasn't even that bad. Fast global travel is spreading the endemic ranges of many diseases and make it essentially impossible to stop many diseases depending on the traits of the disease. A potential lab leak of many types of diseases is more of a threat and will likely kill more people than a limited nuclear deployment. At least with the nuclear issue someone has to push the button. With the lab leak it's almost a certainty that equipment will fail in some unprecedented way, or someone will absent-mindedly violate protocol. It's a lot harder to keep track of a microbe than a warhead.
- bigdollopenergy 4y ago
  I don't think so. I think Covid was unique in that it occupied a sweet-spot in it's severity. A more severe virus would play out very differently. I don't think we'd see such a huge conspiracy movement around it and much greater compliance from the population. The danger of the covid virus was concentrated in specific demographics such that a lot of people didn't directly see how dangerous it was. This created a disconnect between what was being reported vs what people saw with their own eyes, creating the perfect environment for conspiracy theories to run rampant. For example, I don't know anyone that died or had a bad time with it, nor does anyone else in my family/close circle. But that's because I don't really know any old or medically vulnerable people, but with our aging populations in the western world this group is actually huge. We had people dropping like flies in certain sub-groups while in others nothing much happened and only where the groups intersected was it visible how bad it really was (healthcare workers, people with old grandparents not taking it seriously). It also doesn't help that older demographics almost always have something else wrong with them and Covid a lot of the time was one contributing factor that pushed them over the edge, this really fueled the conspiracy theorists narrative of falsely attributing causes of death to "inflate" numbers. I also think the media took a wrong turn in it's messaging and told too many noble lies. It was really important that the young and healthy also thought that this might be real threat to them personally so they'd actually take it seriously and stop spreading it. But young people would lookup the statistics for their own risk and would see fatality/complication rates of sub 1%, and also note that those affected were primarily the morbidly obese and immuno-compromised. I recall seeing a lot of articles indicating that there was a surge of young people in ER and articles showing obituaries of young people in order to hammer home the message that it was a real danger to them too. The problem is the official statistics didn't back that message up to the degree that it needed to, so you had this big disconnect that was exploited heavily by conspiracy theorists. IMO this was likely a misguided effort directed towards reducing spread, because it was determined that quarantining to save other people wasn't a strong enough incentive to curb risky behavior (which is depressing), but backfired heavily and likely caused more harm than good. If a more serious virus came around that had fatality rates in the double digits, I don't think conspiracy theories would be able to form. Because very quickly people would see people they know in their lives dying/becoming extremely sick. There's no uncertainly/disconnect to exploit in that scenario like there was with covid.
bayesian_horse 4y ago
Lab-made viruses like that have a close to zero chance of being more successful in the wild, even if the researchers had attempted that goal. Evolution can try gazillions of variations. Humans can't. No, computer simulation doesn't help that much. No, drawing conclusions from differences in natural strains also doesn't help.
- ARandomerDude 4y ago
  Because...? I'm not saying you're wrong, just that most of us aren't virologists.
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    I'm neither. But basically designing a Virus would mean composing a 30k long string of RNA (in this case) which creates the proteins and RNA molecules which do all the things a Virus does. And it does more than you'd think. It makes the cell copy the Virus, make the proteins, often interferes with other processes in the cell. Copying the genome is easy. Making specific modifications isn't even that hard, as long as you don't have the illusion to know the result beforehand. But for the Virus to change its behavior in a meaningful/useful way requires multiple changes. The best someone could do is recombine changed parts from multiple variants. But they don't necessarily fit together. And the recombination also happens in nature, probably a lot more often than in the lab.
    - baja_blast 4y ago
      And yet H5N1 virus has yet to spread between mammals, but an airborne version of H5N1 that can spread between ferrets(and by extension humans) was achieved in a lab: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1213362?cookieSet=1 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1213362?cookieSe....
      - bayesian_horse 4y ago
        Yes. It has spread. And was very non-virulent. And they got valuable data on what to do when H5N1 does become transmissible in Humans. However, had this Virus escaped, it would have fizzled. Showing airborne transmission does not mean the Virus would spread among ferrets and Humans under normal conditions. Mammalian H5N1 viruses might have already existed but failed to survive subsequent passage and thus did not evolve to become transmissible enough. Such lab experiments only add a minuscule risk to the much bigger risk of such a Virus occurring naturally.
dinvlad 4y ago
Considering all the negative comments here, I'd say we should be just as careful trusting "science" news reporting as we think science itself should be (which it is). The official statement from BU makes a good point on that [0]. The sensationalism perpetuated by far right-wing news outlets is in fact the main danger here. Yes, there's always room for improvement, but if we are not experts able to understand the research as it was actually conducted, imho we should not jump to conclusions and blame the scientists etc. This only serves one goal (of those far-right orgs) to further diminish trust in science among the general public. [0] https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/neidl-researchers-refute-uk-article-about-covid-strain/ https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/neidl-researchers-refute-uk...
- TMWNN 4y ago
  First, Statnews is not a "far right-wing news outlet". Second, quoting from said Statnews article: >But it has become apparent that the research team did not clear the work with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was one of the funders of the project. The agency indicated it is going to be looking for some answers as to why it first learned of the work through media reports. >Emily Erbelding, director of NIAID’s division of microbiology and infectious diseases, said the BU team’s original grant applications did not specify that the scientists wanted to do this precise work. Nor did the group make clear that it was doing experiments that might involve enhancing a pathogen of pandemic potential in the progress reports it provided to NIAID. >“I think we’re going to have conversations over upcoming days,” Erbelding told STAT in an interview. The BU press release does not address this at all.
  - dinvlad 4y ago
    Yes, but the initial report was in Daily Mail, which is far-right. This is what I was referring to. They picked up a story and sensationalized it. Without that report, this wouldn’t be a story because this kind of research is done all the time and no one makes a big deal out of it.
flobosg 4y ago
See also Derek Lowe’s article about the preprint: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function-not-so-fast https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function-not-...
marshray 4y ago
It's not the possibility that a simple lab accident could kill a billion people, the headline is that it "draws scrutiny".
seattle_spring 4y ago
muaytimbo 4y ago
This is an interesting case, making chimeras can always be thought of as "gain-of-function" research because you really only know if you succeeded after you've created and tested the new organism, and there might be failures along the way if indeed creating a more lethal organism is your goal. In this case there is some handwaving about 80% mortality vs 100% mortality in a mouse host about it technically not being more lethal than the original. But what if the testing revealed 100% mortality plus some other metric of increased transmissibility or something similar after the fact. It would've been unknown to the researchers at the time of synthesis and fit every definition of "gain-of-function" research. I think in light of this inability to know apriori if a virus is going to be more/less lethal we're splitting hairs when we say this is not technically "gain-of-function" research.
- alchemist1e9 4y ago
  Exactly. Lowe is using a really horrible argument, he is trying to use the results to justify the experiment, but the entire point is it was an experiment and they had no idea how it would turn out. It’s entirely possible it could have been 100% as the result and that somehow this chimera found a spike mutation that provided human immune escape and a lab worker was accidentally infected as patient zero. It’s not what happened obviously but the idea he can use the experiments results to justify the experiment is absurd. He is a dangerous apologist, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.
  - muaytimbo 4y ago
    It's unfortunate because I like reading Lowe usually, but these pieces that obfuscate and explain to us how we should feel about something so obvious is telling.
lamontcg 4y ago
This involves testing the Omicron spike on a Wuhan-Hu-1 backbone. Damn near every single person in this comment thread has antibodies and T-cells to Omicron spike and everyone naturally infected has T-cells for the original strain as well because T-cell epitopes aren't immune escape targets. Chances of this "escaping" the lab and producing another coronavirus wave are zero because that already happened. Like Derek Lowe pointed out nature already did a similar experiment with an Omicron spike and a Delta backbone because coronaviruses undergo recombination naturally: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function-not-so-fast https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function-not-... Nobody has heard of the XD strain because there was so much immunity to it that it never really went anywhere.
- tripletao 4y ago
  > Chances of this "escaping" the lab and producing another coronavirus wave are zero because that already happened. Are you aware of any situation where the omicron spike and Wuhan backbone could have recombined naturally? As far as I know, the latter was extinct in the wild by the time the former emerged. It's good that the omicron/delta variant didn't blow up in humans. The omicron/Wuhan variant seems like another throw of the dice, though, and even a very small probability times millions of potential deaths is significant.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    You didn't read carefully what I wrote. The T-cell epitopes in all strains of SARS-CoV-2 are not subject to immune escape and there are thousands of them. Even the neutralizing antibodies to Wu-Hu-1 spike will cross react with omicron still. Nobody at this point is immune naive to this combination. And the most recent pandemic strain of SARS-CoV-2 was Omicron. If this Omicron spike containing virus escaped into the wild then it will encounter a human race with substantial neutralizing antibody activity to this exact spike protein sequence. And there isn't any "but maybe by splicing them together it literally changes everything, you can't possibly prove that isn't true" argument. This isn't science fiction. Inside the cell all of these proteins are diced up into small hexamers and displayed on MHC and it doesn't matter what the combination of the spike and the backbone are, the T-cell epitopes are going to be the same. Omicron spike will have Omicron antibody epitopes and Omicron T-cell epitopes, doen't matter what backbone you splice it onto. If you want to create a new pandemic, particularly one with "millions of potential deaths" you need to change this virus sufficiently that it is no longer identified as SARS-CoV-2 by our T-cells and you don't get that just by combining two different variants.
dirtyid 4y ago
Seems like this kind of work, if deemed neccessary, should at least be done somewhere remote.
obert 4y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33244592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33244592
somenameforme 4y ago
Many people seem to believe that lab leaks are exceptionally rare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity... That page offers "only" dozens of examples in recent times, but that is certainly going to be non-exhaustive and the potential magnitude of impact of a single of these incidents is difficult to overstate. Notably while the biosafety levels for each leak are not stated, at least two came from BSL-4 labs - the highest safety standard there is.
- justinpombrio 4y ago
  Covid has killed something like 20 million people (taken from Wikipedia, estimated based on excess deaths). It's plausible that it came from a lab leak. How bloody fucking valuable do you have to think "making viruses more deadly and studying them" is for this to be worthwhile? Oh, actually you can calculate this, assuming you're utilitarian and think risking innocent lives is OK as long as it saves that many lives in expectation. If you think there's a 10% chance that Covid came from a lab leak, then the "making viruses more deadly" research that we've done so far ought to have saved more than 10% * 20 million = 2 million people. Did it? From what I've heard it's done fuck-all. I stand by my pissed off voice here. I think it's appropriate to be pissed off about risking millions of lives for hypothetical benefits. (To be clear, I'm only talking about research that studies deadly extinct viruses and deadly lab-created viruses. We should absolutely continue to study viruses in general.)
  - alchemist1e9 4y ago
    It’s taken 2 years for logic to finally overcome political polarization and you can now express a logical opinion without being removed from the internet! Progress.
    - president 4y ago
      I don't think it ever went away. You see people getting massively flagged or downvoted and called "Republican" for going against the grain everyday here on HN.
alfiedotwtf 4y ago
Why have one pandemic when you can have two pandemics for twice the price
- tjpnz 4y ago
  Don't let China have all the fun.
kbos87 4y ago
I live right around the corner from here and pass this place daily. There was a lot of concern when this place was built in the heart of a major city and I understand the concern (though I’m guessing the risk a place like this poses is really in that an individual who works there gets infected with something and goes out into society - which means the location doesn’t matter much.) On the flipside, I also understand that research like this needs to happen for us to learn and make progress. All that being said, this just comes off as sloppy, which is exactly the feeling I don’t want to have about a BSL-3 lab in my neighborhood.
- addingadimensio 4y ago
  Just like the progress when they invented nonstick fireproof and water proof forever chemicals
  - kbos87 4y ago
    Not wrong, but it all depends on how you look at it. It’s also progress that got us life-saving vaccines and medications within a year of a deadly pandemic emerging.
extantproject 4y ago
https://archive.ph/neAYI https://archive.ph/neAYI
ratsmack 4y ago
>There is no evidence the work, performed under biosecurity level 3 precautions in BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, was conducted improperly or unsafely. In fact, it was approved by an internal biosafety review committee and Boston’s Public Health Commission, the university said Monday night. Theat doesn't mean it can't be accidentally released, it just means there is less of a chance.

217 points by russfink 4y ago

Some snippets: The spike protein of an Omicron version of SARS-2 was fused to a virus of the Wuhan strain, the original version that emerged from China in 2020. The goal was to determine if the mutations in the Omicron spike protein were responsible for this variant’s increased ability to evade the immunity to SARS-2 that humans have built up, and whether the changes led to Omicron’s lower rate of severity. The testing actually showed, though, that the chimeric virus was more lethal to a type of lab mice than Omicron itself, killing 80% of the mice infected. Importantly, the original Wuhan strain killed 100% of mice it was tested in. The conclusion is that mutations in the spike protein of the Omicron variant are responsible for the strain’s ability to evade immunity people have built up via vaccination, infections, or both, but they are not responsible for the apparent decrease in severity of the Omicron viruses.

cstejerean 4y ago
If it went from 100% IFR (original strain) to 80% IFR (Original + Omicron spike) how did it not reduce the severity? Sure it's more severe than Omicron by itself so there were other factors as well, but it does seem like a decrease in severity to me.
- algon33 4y ago
  Because it has Omicron's increased ability to avoid people's immunity. That would result in higher infectivity than just a copy of the wuhan strain, with near the same severity. Note that earlier Sars viruses had even higher severity than Sars Covid 2 (Wuhan strain), but weren't as infective and killed far fewer people. Which implies that a slight reduction in severity for a gain in infectivity is not a worthwhile tradeoff.
  - baja_blast 4y ago
    Exactly, for example Ebola has a mortality rate of around 50% but has only killed around 11 thousand people, SARS-CoV2 has less than 1% can has killed 20 million or more. Wild viruses like SARS1 and MERS are poorly adapted towards humans when the spillover happened making it possible to be contained. But SARS2 a which is a Sarbecovirus a family of gastrointestinal viruses some how was able to bind towards human airways with a binding affinity 20 times that for humans than for bats, all while leaving no traceable trail of mutations that researchers could trace back to the intermediate host. For context with SARS1 and MERS researchers were able to find the spill over animal within a few months. But after 3+ years we have yet to find an intermediate animal host. Also before anyone says "It took years to find the source for SARS1", but that is for the original bat virus, the intermediate animal where the cross over to humans happened was found within months. Additionally SARS1 and MERS had a rapid period of mutations as it adapted towards humans which allowed researchers to trace back to the source.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    You're confusing "severity" and "infectivity". Increased infectivity is not increased severity. The evidence they have shows reduced severity and an unknown (but theorized increased) infectivity.
- thehappypm 4y ago
  Errorbars, probably. 80% and 100% might be samples of a true death rate of 90%.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    Indeed, beware of round numbers, they tend to indicate very low sample size and very large error range.
- xyzzy123 4y ago
  The researchers could not be sure of this result before they did it, which is why I believe there's a reasonable case this should be considered GOF work even if the lethality of their chimera (in hu mice) was ultimately less than that of original strain. Furthermore, strictly speaking I don't believe we know the actual severity of this in humans. While it's possible to make a fairly confident guess, surprises are still possible.

AnnoyedComment 4y ago

AzzieElbab 4y ago

IMHO the real question is why would we do this? Just because we can? Is there a hidden bio arms race we can’t stay away from?

stiiv 4y ago
> The goal of the research was to determine if the mutations in the Omicron spike protein were responsible for this variant’s increased ability to evade the immunity to SARS-2 that humans have built up, and whether the changes led to Omicron’s lower rate of severity.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Yes, but it's not hidden. On the one side of it: humanity, and our ability to explore, comprehend, and modify the reality around us. On the other side of it: naturally-evolved viruses. They have a couple billion years' practice overriding biological countermeasures and massive territory advantage. If we do nothing, odds are they will eventually mutate into something that drops us dead in our tracks or wrecks us slowly, as they have before (smallpox, 1918 flu, HIV). And in our modern, deeply-interconnected world, geographic defenses and population isolation no longer protect us as they did our ancestors. The main tools we have to avoid this are our ability to explore, comprehend, and modify. The capacity to change something and observe how the change affects it is something the viruses cannot do, and arguably our best chance of "outsmarting" them so that when they naturally mutate into a dangerous form, we already have the tools in place to mitigate or disassemble the danger.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Exactly how does modifying the virus help create prevention measures or treatments for it? Please provide real world examples.
photochemsyn 4y ago
The most banal reason is that groups of researchers generally coordinate to set up little bureaucratic power centers within the national research agencies to ensure themselves a steady stream of grants; this in turn allows them to get tenure at their universities (under 'publish or perish' which more practically means 'get your grant renewed or perish' and grant renewal relies on (1) a steady stream of publications and (2) ensuring the federal agency keeps earmarking funds for your area of research). This is all perhaps well and good if you're fighting for funds for studying, say, childhood leukemia, but in this case it's been a major disaster and has almost certainly played a central role in this recent global pandemic. Oops.

null_object 4y ago

> There is a lot of evidence that points to the virus spreading from a wet market in the city, not the Wuhan lab. But proving something didn’t happen three years after the fact is a challenge that may be impossible to meet. I find the anxious disclaimer about the Wuhan lab interesting, because of course there were a lot of things the lab itself could have done to clear any doubt at the time, including not muzzling researchers who worked there, and even releasing their virus database (which had been taken offline a couple months earlier, under the pretext that 'someone' had attempted to 'hack' it and has still not been made available three years later).

tlear 4y ago
- jimcavel888 4y ago
soco 4y ago
Important underline: the lab database is not available to us.
- null_object 4y ago
  > Important underline: the lab database is not available to us Genuine question, as I'm not aware that it's been made externally available to anyone - do you mean it's available to researchers around the world but not the general public? Or do you mean it's available to Chinese labs?
  - mikeyouse 4y ago
    It's a dumb conspiracy theory about a rarely-used database that "went down" in September 2019 which was a smoking gun about how the Chinese knew about Covid. Except it turns out that it only came online in June 2019, it went down all the time from the view of the tracking website, was available into 2020, and has absolutely nothing useful to say about SarsCov2; https://twitter.com/flodebarre/status/1577401140345507859 https://twitter.com/flodebarre/status/1577401140345507859 I'm certain that everyone who used this as a prominent 'datapoint' for the LL hypothesis will immediately reconsider and update their priors.

SSJPython 4y ago

Why are we fucking with nature? Like literally what is the point of this? To show that we can? Some fucked up biological arms race with the other great powers? When you fuck with nature, nature wins. Always.

shadowgovt 4y ago
> When you fuck with nature, nature wins. Always. There's, like, an entire human civilization on this planet right now that begs to differ. Ever been to Vegas? Not a single thing natural about that place; it's been there over 100 years.
- salawat 4y ago
  Do you not understand Nature does not operate on the same timescales as humanity? Do you realize that place's entire existence is predicated on a massive logistical network that if left untrnded for a week would likely result in a completely inhospitable environment for the residents? Civilization as we know it is excruciatingly fragile, and maintained by active expenditure of human energy. Nature, is self'sustaining, closed loop, enthalpy decreasing and Just Frigging Works. It just may take a while for us to see/realize something that makes it click that, wow, nature finds a way. I'd think the modern hiccups in the supply chain recently would have provided sufficient examples of how fragile the entire artifice is...
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    Nature isn't magic, and our species has exterminated enough species and ecosystems to respect how fragile it is. And while you speak of nature at large, we tend to care more about subsets of it. Life, in the large, survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, but a rock from space could easily fuck with nature in a way that it wouldn't "bounce back" in any way relevant to us.
    - rhacker 4y ago
      But that's also a major problem. We have deemed life so unimportant, that if Russia wants San Francisco obliterated tomorrow, they have the power to do that. Literally nothing can stop them if they are hell-bent on that, damn the consequences. I think the only people that realize things like this are those that have lost others. Perhaps by mistake even- perhaps especially - his hand slipped and he is dead now. Someone's wife out there is thinking that ALL the time. Perhaps in a year we'll be mourning permanently for New York like that.

nsxwolf 4y ago

How there isn't a full on worldwide ban on this now is just beyond me. Our hubris and overconfidence could kill millions more.

shadowgovt 4y ago
It may very well be riskier than not to ban research like that on an endemic airborne virus that has shown a proclivity to mutate. If no humans are running controlled experiments on the virus, there is still an experiment currently being run as a massive, randomized trial in the form of the natural mutative processes the virus undergoes in the infected human population. How much do we want to trust that it won't hit upon an HIV-category combinatoric mutation before we're aware it has the potential to do that? The risk tradeoff is difficult here, but we should keep in mind that the risk of doing no such research is way, way higher than zero.
- nsxwolf 4y ago
  I find this very frustrating. If COVID-19 was a lab leak - wether it had involved gain of function related or just unwisely moving viruses from the animal kingdom into human spaces - what good did any of it do? Apparently our ability to create vaccines doesn't hinge on messing around with the viruses before they infect humans. COVID-19 vaccine was created after the fact, and it hardly prevented a major global catastrophe. I just don't see the argument. It sounds like pure imagination - by making viruses more dangerous or increasing the odds we'll expose ourselves to novel ones, someday we'll have the technology to prevent any pandemic. How many millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars wasted before that happens? When is it just not worth it? It seems not worth it to me now. If it's a bioweapons program, I don't see why we need to be playing along. It's not like nuclear deterrence - someone releases a weaponized virus, the whole world gets infected. It's like a nuke that blows up the entire world.
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    > Apparently our ability to create vaccines doesn't hinge on messing around with the viruses before they infect humans. The COVID vaccine built heavily on previous research with flu,. Zika, rabies, and cytomegalovirus.

snshn 4y ago

Humanity has peaked sometime around 1960s-1980s, it's all been downhill since then. My theory is that we're in a self-destructive mode now. The technology we possess keeps advancing while our control over it and intellectual abilities are diminishing, partially because we rely on tech so much (smartphones, automation, "AI"). So in retrospect, we were meant to go (mostly) extinct during the cold war, by some miracle it was narrowly avoided, so we survived past our peak, and now we're just existing on borrowed time, the whole planet is a ticking time bomb, and the question is if we manage to become multi-planetary species before then or go (mostly) extinct. I think Elon has the same view on things, that would explain Neuralink, Starlink, SpaceX.

simple-thoughts 4y ago
If by “humanity” you mean the United States’ population, possibly. But for most people in most countries, life is much better today than in the 1980s.
mikkergp 4y ago
> Humanity has peaked sometime around 1960s-1980s I'm 99% certain they would have said the same things in the 60's to 80's about the 20's to 40's (maybe stopping somewhere around 1939) and in the 20's they would certainly be reminiscing about the industrial revolution and gilded age.

photochemsyn 4y ago

In this snippet from the abstract, S stands for spike protein: > "We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor-binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S." https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.13.512134v1.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.13.512134v1.... See russfink comment above for the relative mortality compared to the original Wuhan strain (100% for Wuhan compared to 80% for this hybrid). So this researcher-generated strain appears to be intermediate in mortality between the original Wuhan strain and Omicron, BUT it escapes vaccination relative to the Wuhan strain, making it more dangerous in that regard and more likely to spread through a vaccinated population causing significant mortality. I'd classify this as reckless and irresponsible research. As far as the original Wuhan strain, we have about four theories of origin. (1) natural wild type with no lab research involvement, (2) natural wild type collected by a lab and accidentally released from that lab, (3) wild type 'heated up' by serial passage through mice and cloned human-type cells without explicit genetic engineering, and (4) deliberate engineering using a CRISPR system to insert a furan cleavage site in a collected wild-type virus, which allowed a bat virus to leap to a human host. Really (4) has the most evidence at this point, and note that this is not entirely the fault of the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology as the research concept was partially developed in the USA and continued (despite an Obama-era ban on gain-of-function research) in China with Ecohealth Alliance funding. As far as why doing gain-of-function research to predict 'emerging disease outbreaks' is a godawfully stupid idea, it's that it appears that almost any infectious animal virus can be converted to a human pathogen by selective transfer of human-receptor-binding motifs, even though such transfer would never take place under natural conditions. An immediate global ban on this kind of research (under the Biological Warfare Convention) is needed.

shadowgovt 4y ago

rossdavidh 4y ago

1) talk about failure to read a room 2) even the alleged learning from the experiment: "The conclusion of the study is that mutations in the spike protein of the Omicron variant are responsible for the strain’s ability to evade immunity people have built up via vaccination, infections, or both, but they are not responsible for the apparent decrease in severity of the Omicron viruses." ...does not hold up, because this was in mice. Ordinary lab rats were immune to the original strain of covid-19, but not to Omicron, which shows that it is not at all unlikely for there to be significant differences in the resistance of rodents to one strain or the other, compared to humans. So, they made a hybrid covid-19 strain, that could conceivably have been as contagious as Omicron but as lethal as the original strain. Nice work, folks.

baja_blast 4y ago
Well the mice the researchers used were genetically modified mice to have human ACE2 receptors which is standard practice in Virology. But! I will say it 100% is not worth the risk, just last year a researcher in Taiwan got infected with the delta variant in the same level lab BSL3, so any dangerous or novel virus they create has a real possibility of escaping. Also it's not like this type of research helped us predict or even fight the pandemic. Millions have been spent on studying and modifying wild coronaviruses and it not only failed to predict this pandemic, but none of the research helped in anyway combating it. For example the Ecohealth Alliance the main collaborators with the WIV has still to this day refused to share research and data they have collected over the years. So either the research is worthless and thus why are we funding it despite the dangers, or they have something they want to hide.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  This particular research helps to understand how important this particular variant of the spike protein is. When future virus variants are discovered and sequenced, this information helps understand what to expect. Because the virulence of new Variants can't be estimated for months after their first detection.
  - 4y ago

buscoquadnary 4y ago

Sweet maybe after this we can go ahead and extract DNA from a mosquito in amber and use that to make dinosaurs and open a theme park with them. Sounds like that is the next Chriton movie on the list now that we are checking of "The Andromeda Strain".

dqpb 4y ago
I'm totally in favor of bringing back dinosaurs. I'm also in favor of modifying animals to have more human-like brains. I understand that many/most people would oppose this on ethical grounds. I could probably even articulate those positions if I tried. But, deep down in my inner child, I think the world would be much more interesting if these things existed.
- buscoquadnary 4y ago
  I will consent to your argument on the grounds that we provide equal funding and research to the construction of giant robots to fight the dinosaurs when they escape.
  - dqpb 4y ago
    Sounds like a win-win!
MichaelCollins 4y ago
Speaking of The Andromeda Strain, I used to assume the safety measures of real life labs for pathogen research were comparable to what Crichton described in that book. Well, probably not with nuclear bombs rigged to sterilize the facility in case of an accident, but at least built remote and with serious quarantine procedures. Apparently not. Apparently they build these places in the middle of cities and let workers go home every evening. Insanity.

mgamache 4y ago

"There is a lot of evidence that points to the virus spreading from a wet market in the city" Spreading, yes. Originating no. Note: This article uses two preprint papers one of which was changed before publication and the other doesn't support zoonotic origin: https://www.science.org/content/article/do-three-new-studies-add-proof-covid-19-s-origin-wuhan-animal-market https://www.science.org/content/article/do-three-new-studies...

jacknews 4y ago

'Ask for forgiveness, not permission' is really not something we want in biotech.

derstander 4y ago

The linked article mentions a BU response via email. There’s also one via the web [0]. The preprint is way outside of my field of expertise so I can’t confidently evaluate the news stories against the preprint. But if journalists misinterpreted scientific research it would certainly not be the first time. [0] https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/neidl-researchers-refute-uk-article-about-covid-strain/ https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/neidl-researchers-refute-uk...

tripletao 4y ago
That response is an exercise in obfuscation. For example: > Corley says the line pulled out of context actually had nothing to do with the virus’ effect on humans. The study began in a tissue culture, then moved to an animal model. So they're saying we don't know if their lab-created chimera is actually more dangerous in live humans, because they (fortunately!) haven't tested in live humans. That completely misses the point of those models, though--the reason why tissue cultures and animals are used is that they're often predictive of the effect in humans. By that standard in their mice, their chimera is possibly less deadly than the original Wuhan wild type, but definitely more deadly than omicron. They didn't study the effect on transmissibility, but we know that's determined mostly by the spike. So their chimera may combine most of the deadliness of the Wuhan wild type with the transmissibility of omicron. We can't prove that without experiments in live humans that I hope will never be conducted, but that sure sounds like a gain of function research of concern to me.

neilv 4y ago

Around a decade ago, when Boston University was trying (successfully) to have its campus be the site of a BSL-4 lab, there were protests (articles, even outdoor demonstrations) -- over the risks of a lab leak of the world's nastiest pathogens, in an dense urban area. In that dialogue, the public heard a lot about histories of safety incidents at other BSL-4 labs, which generally seemed due to negligence. Today, given all the presumed awareness of lab leak risks, from the BU BSL-4 protests, and from the subsequent Covid pandemic-- I don't know why anyone at BU would risk modifying Covid without the utmost precautions, including at least using BSL-4 rather than BSL-3.

giantg2 4y ago
It seems stupid to have these sites in urban areas. If we want to do this sort of stuff, build the facility in the desert, with little population, little wildlife population, and environmental factors inhospitable to long lifetime if there is escape. But I guess safety measures like that are too inconvenient.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  Might be difficult to get people to work there.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Endangering billions of people because virologists prefer to be urbanite yuppies. Research so important that such a risk is accepted, but not so important that it would make sense to simply pay virologists 5x more to live somewhere remote. This is madness.
    - rhacker 4y ago
      - MichaelCollins 4y ago

giantg2 4y ago

Whether natural or escaping from a lab, I fully expect a mass casualty disease in my lifetime. We saw what a shitshow covid was, and it wasn't even that bad. Fast global travel is spreading the endemic ranges of many diseases and make it essentially impossible to stop many diseases depending on the traits of the disease. A potential lab leak of many types of diseases is more of a threat and will likely kill more people than a limited nuclear deployment. At least with the nuclear issue someone has to push the button. With the lab leak it's almost a certainty that equipment will fail in some unprecedented way, or someone will absent-mindedly violate protocol. It's a lot harder to keep track of a microbe than a warhead.

bigdollopenergy 4y ago
I don't think so. I think Covid was unique in that it occupied a sweet-spot in it's severity. A more severe virus would play out very differently. I don't think we'd see such a huge conspiracy movement around it and much greater compliance from the population. The danger of the covid virus was concentrated in specific demographics such that a lot of people didn't directly see how dangerous it was. This created a disconnect between what was being reported vs what people saw with their own eyes, creating the perfect environment for conspiracy theories to run rampant. For example, I don't know anyone that died or had a bad time with it, nor does anyone else in my family/close circle. But that's because I don't really know any old or medically vulnerable people, but with our aging populations in the western world this group is actually huge. We had people dropping like flies in certain sub-groups while in others nothing much happened and only where the groups intersected was it visible how bad it really was (healthcare workers, people with old grandparents not taking it seriously). It also doesn't help that older demographics almost always have something else wrong with them and Covid a lot of the time was one contributing factor that pushed them over the edge, this really fueled the conspiracy theorists narrative of falsely attributing causes of death to "inflate" numbers. I also think the media took a wrong turn in it's messaging and told too many noble lies. It was really important that the young and healthy also thought that this might be real threat to them personally so they'd actually take it seriously and stop spreading it. But young people would lookup the statistics for their own risk and would see fatality/complication rates of sub 1%, and also note that those affected were primarily the morbidly obese and immuno-compromised. I recall seeing a lot of articles indicating that there was a surge of young people in ER and articles showing obituaries of young people in order to hammer home the message that it was a real danger to them too. The problem is the official statistics didn't back that message up to the degree that it needed to, so you had this big disconnect that was exploited heavily by conspiracy theorists. IMO this was likely a misguided effort directed towards reducing spread, because it was determined that quarantining to save other people wasn't a strong enough incentive to curb risky behavior (which is depressing), but backfired heavily and likely caused more harm than good. If a more serious virus came around that had fatality rates in the double digits, I don't think conspiracy theories would be able to form. Because very quickly people would see people they know in their lives dying/becoming extremely sick. There's no uncertainly/disconnect to exploit in that scenario like there was with covid.

bayesian_horse 4y ago

Lab-made viruses like that have a close to zero chance of being more successful in the wild, even if the researchers had attempted that goal. Evolution can try gazillions of variations. Humans can't. No, computer simulation doesn't help that much. No, drawing conclusions from differences in natural strains also doesn't help.

ARandomerDude 4y ago
Because...? I'm not saying you're wrong, just that most of us aren't virologists.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  I'm neither. But basically designing a Virus would mean composing a 30k long string of RNA (in this case) which creates the proteins and RNA molecules which do all the things a Virus does. And it does more than you'd think. It makes the cell copy the Virus, make the proteins, often interferes with other processes in the cell. Copying the genome is easy. Making specific modifications isn't even that hard, as long as you don't have the illusion to know the result beforehand. But for the Virus to change its behavior in a meaningful/useful way requires multiple changes. The best someone could do is recombine changed parts from multiple variants. But they don't necessarily fit together. And the recombination also happens in nature, probably a lot more often than in the lab.
  - baja_blast 4y ago
    And yet H5N1 virus has yet to spread between mammals, but an airborne version of H5N1 that can spread between ferrets(and by extension humans) was achieved in a lab: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1213362?cookieSet=1 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1213362?cookieSe....
    - bayesian_horse 4y ago
      Yes. It has spread. And was very non-virulent. And they got valuable data on what to do when H5N1 does become transmissible in Humans. However, had this Virus escaped, it would have fizzled. Showing airborne transmission does not mean the Virus would spread among ferrets and Humans under normal conditions. Mammalian H5N1 viruses might have already existed but failed to survive subsequent passage and thus did not evolve to become transmissible enough. Such lab experiments only add a minuscule risk to the much bigger risk of such a Virus occurring naturally.

dinvlad 4y ago

Considering all the negative comments here, I'd say we should be just as careful trusting "science" news reporting as we think science itself should be (which it is). The official statement from BU makes a good point on that [0]. The sensationalism perpetuated by far right-wing news outlets is in fact the main danger here. Yes, there's always room for improvement, but if we are not experts able to understand the research as it was actually conducted, imho we should not jump to conclusions and blame the scientists etc. This only serves one goal (of those far-right orgs) to further diminish trust in science among the general public. [0] https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/neidl-researchers-refute-uk-article-about-covid-strain/ https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/neidl-researchers-refute-uk...

TMWNN 4y ago
First, Statnews is not a "far right-wing news outlet". Second, quoting from said Statnews article: >But it has become apparent that the research team did not clear the work with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was one of the funders of the project. The agency indicated it is going to be looking for some answers as to why it first learned of the work through media reports. >Emily Erbelding, director of NIAID’s division of microbiology and infectious diseases, said the BU team’s original grant applications did not specify that the scientists wanted to do this precise work. Nor did the group make clear that it was doing experiments that might involve enhancing a pathogen of pandemic potential in the progress reports it provided to NIAID. >“I think we’re going to have conversations over upcoming days,” Erbelding told STAT in an interview. The BU press release does not address this at all.
- dinvlad 4y ago
  Yes, but the initial report was in Daily Mail, which is far-right. This is what I was referring to. They picked up a story and sensationalized it. Without that report, this wouldn’t be a story because this kind of research is done all the time and no one makes a big deal out of it.

flobosg 4y ago

See also Derek Lowe’s article about the preprint: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function-not-so-fast https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function-not-...

marshray 4y ago

It's not the possibility that a simple lab accident could kill a billion people, the headline is that it "draws scrutiny".

seattle_spring 4y ago

muaytimbo 4y ago

This is an interesting case, making chimeras can always be thought of as "gain-of-function" research because you really only know if you succeeded after you've created and tested the new organism, and there might be failures along the way if indeed creating a more lethal organism is your goal. In this case there is some handwaving about 80% mortality vs 100% mortality in a mouse host about it technically not being more lethal than the original. But what if the testing revealed 100% mortality plus some other metric of increased transmissibility or something similar after the fact. It would've been unknown to the researchers at the time of synthesis and fit every definition of "gain-of-function" research. I think in light of this inability to know apriori if a virus is going to be more/less lethal we're splitting hairs when we say this is not technically "gain-of-function" research.

alchemist1e9 4y ago
Exactly. Lowe is using a really horrible argument, he is trying to use the results to justify the experiment, but the entire point is it was an experiment and they had no idea how it would turn out. It’s entirely possible it could have been 100% as the result and that somehow this chimera found a spike mutation that provided human immune escape and a lab worker was accidentally infected as patient zero. It’s not what happened obviously but the idea he can use the experiments results to justify the experiment is absurd. He is a dangerous apologist, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.
- muaytimbo 4y ago
  It's unfortunate because I like reading Lowe usually, but these pieces that obfuscate and explain to us how we should feel about something so obvious is telling.

lamontcg 4y ago

This involves testing the Omicron spike on a Wuhan-Hu-1 backbone. Damn near every single person in this comment thread has antibodies and T-cells to Omicron spike and everyone naturally infected has T-cells for the original strain as well because T-cell epitopes aren't immune escape targets. Chances of this "escaping" the lab and producing another coronavirus wave are zero because that already happened. Like Derek Lowe pointed out nature already did a similar experiment with an Omicron spike and a Delta backbone because coronaviruses undergo recombination naturally: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function-not-so-fast https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function-not-... Nobody has heard of the XD strain because there was so much immunity to it that it never really went anywhere.

tripletao 4y ago
> Chances of this "escaping" the lab and producing another coronavirus wave are zero because that already happened. Are you aware of any situation where the omicron spike and Wuhan backbone could have recombined naturally? As far as I know, the latter was extinct in the wild by the time the former emerged. It's good that the omicron/delta variant didn't blow up in humans. The omicron/Wuhan variant seems like another throw of the dice, though, and even a very small probability times millions of potential deaths is significant.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  You didn't read carefully what I wrote. The T-cell epitopes in all strains of SARS-CoV-2 are not subject to immune escape and there are thousands of them. Even the neutralizing antibodies to Wu-Hu-1 spike will cross react with omicron still. Nobody at this point is immune naive to this combination. And the most recent pandemic strain of SARS-CoV-2 was Omicron. If this Omicron spike containing virus escaped into the wild then it will encounter a human race with substantial neutralizing antibody activity to this exact spike protein sequence. And there isn't any "but maybe by splicing them together it literally changes everything, you can't possibly prove that isn't true" argument. This isn't science fiction. Inside the cell all of these proteins are diced up into small hexamers and displayed on MHC and it doesn't matter what the combination of the spike and the backbone are, the T-cell epitopes are going to be the same. Omicron spike will have Omicron antibody epitopes and Omicron T-cell epitopes, doen't matter what backbone you splice it onto. If you want to create a new pandemic, particularly one with "millions of potential deaths" you need to change this virus sufficiently that it is no longer identified as SARS-CoV-2 by our T-cells and you don't get that just by combining two different variants.

dirtyid 4y ago

Seems like this kind of work, if deemed neccessary, should at least be done somewhere remote.

obert 4y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33244592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33244592

somenameforme 4y ago

Many people seem to believe that lab leaks are exceptionally rare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity... That page offers "only" dozens of examples in recent times, but that is certainly going to be non-exhaustive and the potential magnitude of impact of a single of these incidents is difficult to overstate. Notably while the biosafety levels for each leak are not stated, at least two came from BSL-4 labs - the highest safety standard there is.

justinpombrio 4y ago
Covid has killed something like 20 million people (taken from Wikipedia, estimated based on excess deaths). It's plausible that it came from a lab leak. How bloody fucking valuable do you have to think "making viruses more deadly and studying them" is for this to be worthwhile? Oh, actually you can calculate this, assuming you're utilitarian and think risking innocent lives is OK as long as it saves that many lives in expectation. If you think there's a 10% chance that Covid came from a lab leak, then the "making viruses more deadly" research that we've done so far ought to have saved more than 10% * 20 million = 2 million people. Did it? From what I've heard it's done fuck-all. I stand by my pissed off voice here. I think it's appropriate to be pissed off about risking millions of lives for hypothetical benefits. (To be clear, I'm only talking about research that studies deadly extinct viruses and deadly lab-created viruses. We should absolutely continue to study viruses in general.)
- alchemist1e9 4y ago
  It’s taken 2 years for logic to finally overcome political polarization and you can now express a logical opinion without being removed from the internet! Progress.
  - president 4y ago
    I don't think it ever went away. You see people getting massively flagged or downvoted and called "Republican" for going against the grain everyday here on HN.

alfiedotwtf 4y ago

Why have one pandemic when you can have two pandemics for twice the price

tjpnz 4y ago
Don't let China have all the fun.

kbos87 4y ago

I live right around the corner from here and pass this place daily. There was a lot of concern when this place was built in the heart of a major city and I understand the concern (though I’m guessing the risk a place like this poses is really in that an individual who works there gets infected with something and goes out into society - which means the location doesn’t matter much.) On the flipside, I also understand that research like this needs to happen for us to learn and make progress. All that being said, this just comes off as sloppy, which is exactly the feeling I don’t want to have about a BSL-3 lab in my neighborhood.

addingadimensio 4y ago
Just like the progress when they invented nonstick fireproof and water proof forever chemicals
- kbos87 4y ago
  Not wrong, but it all depends on how you look at it. It’s also progress that got us life-saving vaccines and medications within a year of a deadly pandemic emerging.

extantproject 4y ago

https://archive.ph/neAYI https://archive.ph/neAYI

ratsmack 4y ago

>There is no evidence the work, performed under biosecurity level 3 precautions in BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, was conducted improperly or unsafely. In fact, it was approved by an internal biosafety review committee and Boston’s Public Health Commission, the university said Monday night. Theat doesn't mean it can't be accidentally released, it just means there is less of a chance.