3 ms·
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
by 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 agoExactly. 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 agoIt'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.