8 ms·

Feds lift gain-of-function research pause, offer guidance (2017)

76 points by sfusato 4y ago

jesusofnazarath 4y ago
[dead]
phkahler 4y ago
>> and responsible conduct of this type of research in a manner that maximizes the benefits to public health. What exactly is the benefit to public health? Serious question.
- aeternum 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - remarkEon 4y ago
    Honest question: is this actually possible in a non "Michael Crichton science fiction" kind of way? Even if it were possible to design a virus to target a specific person, wouldn't that virus just mutate eventually, and start infecting other people? Seems like a very risky, crude, and ultimately unwise way to plan an assassination. If you can get close enough to expose someone to the virus-assassin, why not just poison them? It doesn't make any sense to me.
    - actually_a_dog 4y ago
      No. That's not even remotely possible. In theory, the closest you could get is if you could design a virus that only really harmed people with some rare genetic variant, and that variant happened to be one that a person you wanted to target had. That's still pretty far out in terms of actual practice, but it's not so far out that it's crazy. Designer viruses that target one, single person is just crazy talk.
    - aeternum 4y ago
      This is heavily censored in the US, but is quite the popular theory in Russia: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/03/01/2-in-3-russians-believe-coronavirus-is-a-bioweapon-poll-a73101 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/03/01/2-in-3-russians-be... It does seem pretty far-fetched, but both countries have their propaganda machines in full force on this which at least makes it an interesting theory.
  - kmlx 4y ago
    > Targeting Putin for example could improve the public health of many Ukrainians. i think this is naive to say the least. only place i’ve seen this kind of messaging is in the west.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      This is true, for me, in the trivial sense that the only place I’ve seen that kind of messaging is in the grandparent post, and I’ve seen a lot of hot takes from every side of the Russia/Ukraine war.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    “Infect everyone with a disease that needs to spread and live through enough generations to reach the target, giving it plenty of opportunity to mutate” as an assassination weapon, is–and this is skipping over a lot of other problems practical, moral, and legal problems to focus on this one–a great way to accidentally produce a plague which wipes out a lot of the wrong people.
- Jemm 4y ago
  Apparently it is pure research. The history books will say, "They did it because they could."
- SilverBirch 4y ago
  Viruses will mutate. And we don’t understand them well enough, so one method to study them is gain of function research - you modify the virus and then you have a lab version you can design against. The risk is you risk releasing a new virus entirely unnecessarily, the benefit is you can study how to combat viruses that don’t yet exist. Imagine the counter example of covid. What if a covid type virus mutates in the wild but we already have a great vaccine sitting on ice ready to go.
  - haihaibye 4y ago
    The mRNA vaccine took only a few days to design. So you'd save a few days, if the GoF virus happened to be exactly the same as the wild type. There is no way to rush the rest of the process, unless you want to deliberately expose people to artificially created viruses that don't exist in the wild. Small upside vs large downside of potentially creating a global pandemic. Covid appeared on the Wuhan institute of virologies doorstep, with exactly the modification proposed in their grants. You would think this would be their time to shine but where was their help? Right when the world needed the info they took all of their databases off-line and have never opened them again
    - llamaLord 4y ago
      "Covid appeared on the Wuhan institute of virologies doorstep, with exactly the modification proposed in their grants. You would think this would be their time to shine but where was their help? Right when the world needed the info they took all of their databases off-line and have never opened them again" This is by far the best take on this topic I've seen IMO. I've been so busy thinking about whether or not the WHV was ground zero for the pandemic, I forgot that the whole point of GOF SHOULD have made it ground zero for the cure.
    - mcbits 4y ago
      The vaccines, while "better than nothing" and much cheaper than giving everyone a 6-month supply of N95 masks, were mostly a flop. We have a long way to go before we can just print up vaccines to head off emerging epidemics, but hopefully the lessons learned through this failure will lead to faster progress.
- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  Pandemics are really very good for public health funding! (this is a joke) In seriousness though, there's a strong evolutionary incentive that acts on organizations to not eliminate their raison d'être. Perhaps gain-of-function is some version of that because it ensures that there's something to do even when there's nothing to do.
thinkmcfly 4y ago
[flagged]
jacknews 4y ago
December 2017 What could possibly go wrong?
koprulusector 4y ago
Not sure I understand the point of sharing this? The other comments and this post’s title seem to imply this could relate to COVID-19. If that’s the case, then why doesn’t the article discuss COVID or even international relationships or funding, or even China for that matter. Further, the date of 2017 would imply the Trump administration itself holds some degree of responsibility, if Americans were funding Gain of Function research in Wuhan.
- reilly3000 4y ago
  So Gain of Function research enables scientists to tinker with viruses under some very specific conditions. In the early 2010's the practice was suspended due to risk of contagion. This article announces its resumption back in 2017, but doesn't provide any contemporary context. What is implied is that once gain-of-function was available again, somewhere between between 17-19 there was a lab-engineered virus in the Wuhan lab that escaped the containment procedures and became COVID-19. The lab was located in Wuhan strategically because it's a very central transit hub but also very close to the bat caves where thousands of coronavirus varieties are believed to emerge from. As one of the leading coronavirus focused virology labs in the world, they collaborated with universities, governments, and corporations to advance related research. Fauci's name was one the check for some US grant money connected with research that included Gain of Function practices, but again that was in the open, and one of many sponsors of this work. The "wet market" theory is politically useful to many parties, but scientifically unlikely. There is precedent for coronaviruses crossing to humans in public markets that sell live animals, sometimes closely packed together, notably SARS. The big question is: where are all the dead bats? There has been little evidence to support any lineage between a wet market and the outbreak. It's pretty tricky because they are within walking proximity of each other. I have no reason to think that this virus was engineered to cause a pandemic and intentionally released. Why would China use a super-virus in their own population first, right next to the wet market and coronavirus lab? Who would gain from this? Sure drug and testing companies did well, but why would they release a virus that they don't have a cure for? No one company had some monopoly on the cure- it was a global collaboration that brought forth several approaches and massive distribution/manufacturing. It wasn't some crackpot in a basement that put it together. The equipment needed to manipulate 100nm species doesn't come cheap, nor the people who know how to use them to engineer coronaviruses. None of these scenarios or others make sense to me relative to the Occam's razor version: Despite the rigorous controls associated with level 4 gain-of-function research, cleaning procedures, airlocks, etc someone made a mistake. Maybe someone had caught their hazmat suit on loose nail that ripped a small hole, then a few minutes later some shelf fell over, knocking over a bunch of crates that shattered some virus vial. The researcher rushed to clean up the mess and forgot about their breached gear. The walk home from work, fall ill a few days later and the rest is history. The fact is, whomever is to blame faces the weight of millions of deaths and trillions of losses of various currencies. If it's that scenario I just made up, who would be to blame? The researcher, or the facility? China didn't want to be liable for the insane damage, and it may not have been any one person or organization's fault. The GOF research was dangerous, they did it anyways, in the open, and got a lot of people killed. That was poor outcomes for a program that was intended to prevent pandemics, and there are a lot of people that could be blamed. At this point though, would anyone gain anything from a real smoking gun, other than poetic resolution?

76 points by sfusato 4y ago

[dead]

>> and responsible conduct of this type of research in a manner that maximizes the benefits to public health. What exactly is the benefit to public health? Serious question.

aeternum 4y ago
[flagged]
- remarkEon 4y ago
  Honest question: is this actually possible in a non "Michael Crichton science fiction" kind of way? Even if it were possible to design a virus to target a specific person, wouldn't that virus just mutate eventually, and start infecting other people? Seems like a very risky, crude, and ultimately unwise way to plan an assassination. If you can get close enough to expose someone to the virus-assassin, why not just poison them? It doesn't make any sense to me.
  - actually_a_dog 4y ago
    No. That's not even remotely possible. In theory, the closest you could get is if you could design a virus that only really harmed people with some rare genetic variant, and that variant happened to be one that a person you wanted to target had. That's still pretty far out in terms of actual practice, but it's not so far out that it's crazy. Designer viruses that target one, single person is just crazy talk.
  - aeternum 4y ago
    This is heavily censored in the US, but is quite the popular theory in Russia: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/03/01/2-in-3-russians-believe-coronavirus-is-a-bioweapon-poll-a73101 https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/03/01/2-in-3-russians-be... It does seem pretty far-fetched, but both countries have their propaganda machines in full force on this which at least makes it an interesting theory.
- kmlx 4y ago
  > Targeting Putin for example could improve the public health of many Ukrainians. i think this is naive to say the least. only place i’ve seen this kind of messaging is in the west.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    This is true, for me, in the trivial sense that the only place I’ve seen that kind of messaging is in the grandparent post, and I’ve seen a lot of hot takes from every side of the Russia/Ukraine war.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  “Infect everyone with a disease that needs to spread and live through enough generations to reach the target, giving it plenty of opportunity to mutate” as an assassination weapon, is–and this is skipping over a lot of other problems practical, moral, and legal problems to focus on this one–a great way to accidentally produce a plague which wipes out a lot of the wrong people.
Jemm 4y ago
Apparently it is pure research. The history books will say, "They did it because they could."
SilverBirch 4y ago
Viruses will mutate. And we don’t understand them well enough, so one method to study them is gain of function research - you modify the virus and then you have a lab version you can design against. The risk is you risk releasing a new virus entirely unnecessarily, the benefit is you can study how to combat viruses that don’t yet exist. Imagine the counter example of covid. What if a covid type virus mutates in the wild but we already have a great vaccine sitting on ice ready to go.
- haihaibye 4y ago
  The mRNA vaccine took only a few days to design. So you'd save a few days, if the GoF virus happened to be exactly the same as the wild type. There is no way to rush the rest of the process, unless you want to deliberately expose people to artificially created viruses that don't exist in the wild. Small upside vs large downside of potentially creating a global pandemic. Covid appeared on the Wuhan institute of virologies doorstep, with exactly the modification proposed in their grants. You would think this would be their time to shine but where was their help? Right when the world needed the info they took all of their databases off-line and have never opened them again
  - llamaLord 4y ago
    "Covid appeared on the Wuhan institute of virologies doorstep, with exactly the modification proposed in their grants. You would think this would be their time to shine but where was their help? Right when the world needed the info they took all of their databases off-line and have never opened them again" This is by far the best take on this topic I've seen IMO. I've been so busy thinking about whether or not the WHV was ground zero for the pandemic, I forgot that the whole point of GOF SHOULD have made it ground zero for the cure.
  - mcbits 4y ago
    The vaccines, while "better than nothing" and much cheaper than giving everyone a 6-month supply of N95 masks, were mostly a flop. We have a long way to go before we can just print up vaccines to head off emerging epidemics, but hopefully the lessons learned through this failure will lead to faster progress.
AbrahamParangi 4y ago
Pandemics are really very good for public health funding! (this is a joke) In seriousness though, there's a strong evolutionary incentive that acts on organizations to not eliminate their raison d'être. Perhaps gain-of-function is some version of that because it ensures that there's something to do even when there's nothing to do.

thinkmcfly 4y ago

[flagged]

jacknews 4y ago

December 2017 What could possibly go wrong?

koprulusector 4y ago

Not sure I understand the point of sharing this? The other comments and this post’s title seem to imply this could relate to COVID-19. If that’s the case, then why doesn’t the article discuss COVID or even international relationships or funding, or even China for that matter. Further, the date of 2017 would imply the Trump administration itself holds some degree of responsibility, if Americans were funding Gain of Function research in Wuhan.

reilly3000 4y ago
So Gain of Function research enables scientists to tinker with viruses under some very specific conditions. In the early 2010's the practice was suspended due to risk of contagion. This article announces its resumption back in 2017, but doesn't provide any contemporary context. What is implied is that once gain-of-function was available again, somewhere between between 17-19 there was a lab-engineered virus in the Wuhan lab that escaped the containment procedures and became COVID-19. The lab was located in Wuhan strategically because it's a very central transit hub but also very close to the bat caves where thousands of coronavirus varieties are believed to emerge from. As one of the leading coronavirus focused virology labs in the world, they collaborated with universities, governments, and corporations to advance related research. Fauci's name was one the check for some US grant money connected with research that included Gain of Function practices, but again that was in the open, and one of many sponsors of this work. The "wet market" theory is politically useful to many parties, but scientifically unlikely. There is precedent for coronaviruses crossing to humans in public markets that sell live animals, sometimes closely packed together, notably SARS. The big question is: where are all the dead bats? There has been little evidence to support any lineage between a wet market and the outbreak. It's pretty tricky because they are within walking proximity of each other. I have no reason to think that this virus was engineered to cause a pandemic and intentionally released. Why would China use a super-virus in their own population first, right next to the wet market and coronavirus lab? Who would gain from this? Sure drug and testing companies did well, but why would they release a virus that they don't have a cure for? No one company had some monopoly on the cure- it was a global collaboration that brought forth several approaches and massive distribution/manufacturing. It wasn't some crackpot in a basement that put it together. The equipment needed to manipulate 100nm species doesn't come cheap, nor the people who know how to use them to engineer coronaviruses. None of these scenarios or others make sense to me relative to the Occam's razor version: Despite the rigorous controls associated with level 4 gain-of-function research, cleaning procedures, airlocks, etc someone made a mistake. Maybe someone had caught their hazmat suit on loose nail that ripped a small hole, then a few minutes later some shelf fell over, knocking over a bunch of crates that shattered some virus vial. The researcher rushed to clean up the mess and forgot about their breached gear. The walk home from work, fall ill a few days later and the rest is history. The fact is, whomever is to blame faces the weight of millions of deaths and trillions of losses of various currencies. If it's that scenario I just made up, who would be to blame? The researcher, or the facility? China didn't want to be liable for the insane damage, and it may not have been any one person or organization's fault. The GOF research was dangerous, they did it anyways, in the open, and got a lot of people killed. That was poor outcomes for a program that was intended to prevent pandemics, and there are a lot of people that could be blamed. At this point though, would anyone gain anything from a real smoking gun, other than poetic resolution?