"Ok, we've proven that these reckless virologists killed tens of millions by negligently releasing an extremely dangerous virus, causing a giant global crisis. Who cares?"
Imagine it was just discovered that burning coal caused millions of deaths via air pollution. This would and should be big news! We would be able to do something about it, stop future deaths by finding alternative energy sources. And if it was known that key 'coal science researchers' had hidden this information for the benefits of their prestige and funding, we could do something about them too.
Even that understates the issue because coal is really useful, it sustains technological civilization. GoF research provides at best modest gains to research. It would be like discovering that ultra-high altitude balloons killed millions of people. Obviously you just ban the balloons.
Imagine it was just discovered that burning coal caused millions of deaths via air pollution. This would and should be big news! We would be able to do something about it, stop future deaths by finding alternative energy sources. And if it was known that key 'coal science researchers' had hidden this information for the benefits of their prestige and funding, we could do something about them too.
So we make lots of noise and grand plans then let China keep doing it?
So, which is it – gain-of-function research comparable to millions of deaths from coal burning or hypothetical high-altitude air balloons?
We don't have any data to actually make the switch in this comparison. It is just purely emotional. Gain-of-function might be only marginally useful (like high altitude balloons) or it could open ways to innovative technologies that will cure cancer or Alzheimer or whatever.
My argument is twofold - even if GoF was really valuable, we should still try hard to mitigate the risk. There are types of GoF research that are more or less risky - using humanized mice to acclimatize viruses to our biology is the most dangerous. That particular type is what people have been doing with COVID as recently as a couple of weeks ago. We could also have this work done somewhere extremely remote like St Helena's island or similar locations.
Furthermore, I'm confident that GoF is not valuable for society. We create a whole bunch of more dangerous viruses - what do we do with that information? There are hundreds, thousands, millions of combinations of deadly viruses from different animals and precursors. We can't create pre-emptive vaccines for all of them, for diseases that we invented. It's essentially busywork for virologists - of course they're in favour of it. And let's not pretend that there's no precedent for this stuff leaking. People studying COVID leaked it from a Taiwanese lab, there've been leaks of anthrax and smallpox. Let's not make novel, extremely dangerous diseases!
Of course, we should do GoF research very carefully and with proper safeguards. But saying that it should be banned completely is a different kind of proposal. I have no idea how valuable is GoF research as these things are very complicated but it is not always easy to predict future benefits.
I am less concerned about some occasional leaks. Covid might have leaked from the lab (with or without GoF research) but what I understand, potentially it could have arisen naturally too. Every walking immunosuppressed individual (e.g., HIV patient with poor adherence to medication or organ transplant recipient) is a breeding place of new viral mutations. In the past such people didn't live long. Today due to improved medical care their numbers are increasing significantly. I wouldn't suggest that we should stop providing medical care to such people and let them die as soon as possible out of fear that they could leak some kind of mutated supervirus.
Let's say 7 million died from COVID, which is about what the Worldometer figure is at. If there was even a 10% chance that this research caused the lab leak, then that's about 700,000 deaths! Plus a considerable amount of inconvenience, expense, rage and so on.
COVID was extremely bad, like dropping multiple high-yield nuclear bombs on major cities. There might be some unclear benefits from risky activities like flying armed nuclear bombers over major cities and hoping there's no accident. I could imagine that's convenient for the flight crew, they can use nearby airport infrastructure which is vaguely realistic if you want to disperse your nuclear forces and increase survivability...
But these benefits don't outweigh the gigantic costs and consequences! Unclear benefits don't cut it. We shouldn't be doing GoF work at all, let alone in the slapdash, devil-may-care way we've been doing it. You wouldn't leave nuclear bombs lying around at major airports without a very good reason.
I recall Fauci's interpretation of gain-of-function research was extremely narrow, Ron Paul had a spat with him about it. We had that Boston lab doing something very similar to gain-of-function research that meets my common-sense definition (since they were splicing two COVID viruses together) but probably not the official definition.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
RandomRanger 2yr ago
I don't think it really matters how GoF researchers and health officials choose to define it.
What matters is how a court defines it when the GoF researchers and funders get arrested (plus whether there is the will to actually prosecute).
Get someone who wants to stop this and can control the FBI into POTUS, tighten up the laws if necessary (which it's probably not), and it stops, because after you throw the first few people in jail the rest will decide 5 minutes of fame's probably not worth it.
It's pretty clear we didn't want this research to take place, but Fauci & Co. wanted it very much. So yeah, legalistic arguing over what the definition of "is" is is just the ticket.
It's also pretty clear that the unelected government does not view our laws as legitimate and will nullify them whenever it sees fit. Did anyone from the intelligence community go to prison for domestic spying after we passed a law against it? No. Just ask Martha Stewart, who went to prison for lying to FBI agents. The punishment for lying to us was to get hired by the mainstream media to amplify their voices.
My question was, albeit unclearly, not about "why would this be a bad thing", but rather: Conditional on the West recognising this as a true and obviously bad thing, what could even be done? "Just stop digging the hole", as reactionaries will know, is an incredibly difficult task at times.
I don’t want any increase of geopolitical tension between China and the west but I think there are substantial reasons to want this to become the widespread consensus.
Biotech is an existential risk that people and governments are not concerned enough about. I think it would be very good for that to be a more widespread concern.
A practical goal would be banning gain of function research. Or more realistically, banning gain of function research that claims to be being done in pursuit of some kind of medical goal. I don’t really think you’ll be able to stop it from happening in military labs. But research that dangerous shouldn’t have the veil of claiming that it is being done in order to protect against viruses. And, you shouldn't be able to do it in labs with the security levels of the Wuhan labs.
The smallest practical goal would be removing American funding from Chinese gain of function research. It appears to be undisputed that there was at least some money coming from America and funding labs in Wuhan that were researching novel coronaviruses. That should obviously stop.
That's not my understanding. I don't think it is illegal under US law and also not universally. Can you point at the exact laws you are referring to?
Seeing your other response in this thread:
We already banned gain-of-function research.
Why do you think Fauci & Co. had to outsource it to China and Ukraine?
I don't think we actually disagree here. I don't think it is as airtightly illegal in the US as you are implying. But regardless, the main point of my post seems to agree with you. No?
The difference is that these crimes are committed by top officials in our government. Journalists are supposed to be on top of this, ripping them a new asshole so that they're too scared to even try - but now they have turned their coats and now work for our enemy.
Look, this thing is hard to do oversight on because few understand this, and all who understand this have a similar set of incentives that includes getting money to do research.
Also, journalists ? Journalists understand nothing and are largely ineffective because they're self-selected for compliance and there's even now some amount of evidence that one of Twitter's function is to 'push their buttons' by selectively rewarding journalists with extra likes and views on their articles that are convenient to those who run Twitter bots.
EDIT:
Grandpa, what's a bad check?
Also you seem like an American, so how come you don't know about check fraud ?
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
Monicen 2yr ago
Huh. From this science critique from twitter linked from your second link, it looks like there’s no normal virological study reasons to use such a roundabout way of cutting-and-pasting to synthesize SARS-Cov-2. Virus researchers would normally use far more blatant cut-and-pastes.
My Crichton-Sense tells me that means either the virus was genuinely found in the wild (or genuinely naturally descended from such a virus without meddling), or was synthesized in such a way to make virus researchers believe it was natural, by someone planning to use it and keep its origins obscure.
Or evolved in a lab but without active genetic engineering. You can infect lab animals and select for more potent viruses. And I think that is something that is done under the auspices of discovering potentially dangerous mutations that might occur.
That wouldn't leave any of the telltale markers of snipping and inserting genes, but could still lead to the creation of something nasty. And it would mean it was possible for the virus to be the result of human meddling, but not the result of an explicit attempt to hide that meddling.
Actively hiding the meddling seems really unlikely in the Wuhan labs, so if that's necessary, I think we have to default to the first option you provide, that it was found in the wild.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
Crake 2yr ago
The technique is called serial passage - the Wikipedia article is good on the science but appears to be censored re. use in GoF research on human pathogens. Obviously if the technique has been successfully used to produce a strain of bird flu adapted to ferrets then the possibility exists of using it of using it to produce a bat coronavirus adapted to humans.
Early in the life cycle of the lab leak theory, there was some speculation that this was what had happened, but the furin cleavage site suggests otherwise.
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Notes -
...hm, could we use GoF to get rid of mosquitoes and other carriers of human diseases?
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Makes sense. But, if so, why both China and USA complicit in hiding it?
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It seems like this paper comes out every few months alleging genetic engineering and nothing ever comes of it .Maybe we will never know for sure.
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What's the point?No, really -- let's say you win. You've convinced the entirety of the western public that COVID-19 was made in a Chinese biolab. Okay, now what?I have 180°'d on my opinions, thanks.
"Ok, we've proven that these reckless virologists killed tens of millions by negligently releasing an extremely dangerous virus, causing a giant global crisis. Who cares?"
Imagine it was just discovered that burning coal caused millions of deaths via air pollution. This would and should be big news! We would be able to do something about it, stop future deaths by finding alternative energy sources. And if it was known that key 'coal science researchers' had hidden this information for the benefits of their prestige and funding, we could do something about them too.
Even that understates the issue because coal is really useful, it sustains technological civilization. GoF research provides at best modest gains to research. It would be like discovering that ultra-high altitude balloons killed millions of people. Obviously you just ban the balloons.
So we make lots of noise and grand plans then let China keep doing it?
Well the Chinese are trying to move away from coal, in relative terms. They've got more investment in renewables than anyone else: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-top-10-countries-by-energy-transition-investment/
It's just that they're also the world's factory and they don't want to jeopardize their industry with expensive energy.
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So, which is it – gain-of-function research comparable to millions of deaths from coal burning or hypothetical high-altitude air balloons?
We don't have any data to actually make the switch in this comparison. It is just purely emotional. Gain-of-function might be only marginally useful (like high altitude balloons) or it could open ways to innovative technologies that will cure cancer or Alzheimer or whatever.
My argument is twofold - even if GoF was really valuable, we should still try hard to mitigate the risk. There are types of GoF research that are more or less risky - using humanized mice to acclimatize viruses to our biology is the most dangerous. That particular type is what people have been doing with COVID as recently as a couple of weeks ago. We could also have this work done somewhere extremely remote like St Helena's island or similar locations.
Furthermore, I'm confident that GoF is not valuable for society. We create a whole bunch of more dangerous viruses - what do we do with that information? There are hundreds, thousands, millions of combinations of deadly viruses from different animals and precursors. We can't create pre-emptive vaccines for all of them, for diseases that we invented. It's essentially busywork for virologists - of course they're in favour of it. And let's not pretend that there's no precedent for this stuff leaking. People studying COVID leaked it from a Taiwanese lab, there've been leaks of anthrax and smallpox. Let's not make novel, extremely dangerous diseases!
Of course, we should do GoF research very carefully and with proper safeguards. But saying that it should be banned completely is a different kind of proposal. I have no idea how valuable is GoF research as these things are very complicated but it is not always easy to predict future benefits.
I am less concerned about some occasional leaks. Covid might have leaked from the lab (with or without GoF research) but what I understand, potentially it could have arisen naturally too. Every walking immunosuppressed individual (e.g., HIV patient with poor adherence to medication or organ transplant recipient) is a breeding place of new viral mutations. In the past such people didn't live long. Today due to improved medical care their numbers are increasing significantly. I wouldn't suggest that we should stop providing medical care to such people and let them die as soon as possible out of fear that they could leak some kind of mutated supervirus.
Let's say 7 million died from COVID, which is about what the Worldometer figure is at. If there was even a 10% chance that this research caused the lab leak, then that's about 700,000 deaths! Plus a considerable amount of inconvenience, expense, rage and so on.
COVID was extremely bad, like dropping multiple high-yield nuclear bombs on major cities. There might be some unclear benefits from risky activities like flying armed nuclear bombers over major cities and hoping there's no accident. I could imagine that's convenient for the flight crew, they can use nearby airport infrastructure which is vaguely realistic if you want to disperse your nuclear forces and increase survivability...
But these benefits don't outweigh the gigantic costs and consequences! Unclear benefits don't cut it. We shouldn't be doing GoF work at all, let alone in the slapdash, devil-may-care way we've been doing it. You wouldn't leave nuclear bombs lying around at major airports without a very good reason.
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We already banned gain-of-function research.
Why do you think Fauci & Co. had to outsource it to China and Ukraine?
One week ago: https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/10/18/scientists-make-new-covid-variant-with-80-kill-rate-in-mice/
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I recall Fauci's interpretation of gain-of-function research was extremely narrow, Ron Paul had a spat with him about it. We had that Boston lab doing something very similar to gain-of-function research that meets my common-sense definition (since they were splicing two COVID viruses together) but probably not the official definition.
I don't think it really matters how GoF researchers and health officials choose to define it.
What matters is how a court defines it when the GoF researchers and funders get arrested (plus whether there is the will to actually prosecute).
Get someone who wants to stop this and can control the FBI into POTUS, tighten up the laws if necessary (which it's probably not), and it stops, because after you throw the first few people in jail the rest will decide 5 minutes of fame's probably not worth it.
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It's pretty clear we didn't want this research to take place, but Fauci & Co. wanted it very much. So yeah, legalistic arguing over what the definition of "is" is is just the ticket.
It's also pretty clear that the unelected government does not view our laws as legitimate and will nullify them whenever it sees fit. Did anyone from the intelligence community go to prison for domestic spying after we passed a law against it? No. Just ask Martha Stewart, who went to prison for lying to FBI agents. The punishment for lying to us was to get hired by the mainstream media to amplify their voices.
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My question was, albeit unclearly, not about "why would this be a bad thing", but rather: Conditional on the West recognising this as a true and obviously bad thing, what could even be done? "Just stop digging the hole", as reactionaries will know, is an incredibly difficult task at times.
But @crake has answered that question well.
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I don’t want any increase of geopolitical tension between China and the west but I think there are substantial reasons to want this to become the widespread consensus.
Biotech is an existential risk that people and governments are not concerned enough about. I think it would be very good for that to be a more widespread concern.
A practical goal would be banning gain of function research. Or more realistically, banning gain of function research that claims to be being done in pursuit of some kind of medical goal. I don’t really think you’ll be able to stop it from happening in military labs. But research that dangerous shouldn’t have the veil of claiming that it is being done in order to protect against viruses. And, you shouldn't be able to do it in labs with the security levels of the Wuhan labs.
The smallest practical goal would be removing American funding from Chinese gain of function research. It appears to be undisputed that there was at least some money coming from America and funding labs in Wuhan that were researching novel coronaviruses. That should obviously stop.
We did.
That's not my understanding. I don't think it is illegal under US law and also not universally. Can you point at the exact laws you are referring to?
Seeing your other response in this thread:
I don't think we actually disagree here. I don't think it is as airtightly illegal in the US as you are implying. But regardless, the main point of my post seems to agree with you. No?
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Robbery, rape and passing bad checks are banned. These never happen anymore.
Grandpa, what's a bad check?
The difference is that these crimes are committed by top officials in our government. Journalists are supposed to be on top of this, ripping them a new asshole so that they're too scared to even try - but now they have turned their coats and now work for our enemy.
Look, this thing is hard to do oversight on because few understand this, and all who understand this have a similar set of incentives that includes getting money to do research.
Also, journalists ? Journalists understand nothing and are largely ineffective because they're self-selected for compliance and there's even now some amount of evidence that one of Twitter's function is to 'push their buttons' by selectively rewarding journalists with extra likes and views on their articles that are convenient to those who run Twitter bots.
EDIT:
Also you seem like an American, so how come you don't know about check fraud ?
Apparenlty a thing in the US, somehow.
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I'm confused about both you and stiffly stance here. Are either of you disagreeing with me that having this be more of a public concern would be bad?
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This is a great response.
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@beej67 — "I have, however, seen behavior which I consider to be fear driven, and typical of that of an expert challenged." AKA the "Popcorn gonna pop" post. His TL;DR argument is that expertise is often tainted by experts' desire to defend their reputation when their analysis fails.
Hopefully he start posting again if the muse strikes him.
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Not the best by any means, but here's yours truly on belief regeneration pipeline (bonus) plus links to other posts (e.g. Sizzle50) there.
Sean Last on trusting academic experts.
Greenwald on expertocracy.
gwern on politics and deletionism in Wikipedia is also relevant.
Funny academic link: “Conspiracy theory”: The case for being critically receptive.
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Huh. From this science critique from twitter linked from your second link, it looks like there’s no normal virological study reasons to use such a roundabout way of cutting-and-pasting to synthesize SARS-Cov-2. Virus researchers would normally use far more blatant cut-and-pastes.
My Crichton-Sense tells me that means either the virus was genuinely found in the wild (or genuinely naturally descended from such a virus without meddling), or was synthesized in such a way to make virus researchers believe it was natural, by someone planning to use it and keep its origins obscure.
Or evolved in a lab but without active genetic engineering. You can infect lab animals and select for more potent viruses. And I think that is something that is done under the auspices of discovering potentially dangerous mutations that might occur.
That wouldn't leave any of the telltale markers of snipping and inserting genes, but could still lead to the creation of something nasty. And it would mean it was possible for the virus to be the result of human meddling, but not the result of an explicit attempt to hide that meddling.
Actively hiding the meddling seems really unlikely in the Wuhan labs, so if that's necessary, I think we have to default to the first option you provide, that it was found in the wild.
The technique is called serial passage - the Wikipedia article is good on the science but appears to be censored re. use in GoF research on human pathogens. Obviously if the technique has been successfully used to produce a strain of bird flu adapted to ferrets then the possibility exists of using it of using it to produce a bat coronavirus adapted to humans.
Early in the life cycle of the lab leak theory, there was some speculation that this was what had happened, but the furin cleavage site suggests otherwise.
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