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Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

nytimes.com

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Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#141

Post by rurp »

tootie wrote: post #116
earthboundkid wrote: post #80

I mean, good? They did cause a global pandemic costing trillions of dollars and millions of lives, so maybe they should just chill TF out for a while?

Everyone in this thread seems awfully convinced. There is as of yet no proof that's the case. Nor that GoF created the strain. Both are just conjecture. Seems pretty foolish to end valuable research to appease people who fear things they don't understand.

We don't know if the virus came from a market either, so why would that be the default position? Especially since that position requires accepting a hell of a coincidence that the virus just happened to emerge near a lab working on gain of function research for that type of virus. China's lack of openness to investigating this should also skew us against giving them the benefit of the doubt, rather than the opposite.

Given that lab escapes have happened multiple times and might have caused a global pandemic, the burden of proof should be on showing that the research is worth the significant risk it carries.

Defaulting to assuming that the risks are negligible and everyone concerned is scared for no reason is an absurd and dangerous take.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#142

Post by cbsmith »

kosievdmerwe wrote: post #112
sterlind wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you actually need GoF research to prevent animal spillovers? Did GoF research help us develop the COVID vaccines? Or does GoF research mostly demonstrate the risks of spillover? Because I think we're now well aware of the risks, and ought to avoid poking the bear any further.

I literally can't think of a more dangerous kind of research that we could be doing as a species than messing around and making viruses more dangerous. If we really have to do it, then we can do it in the middle of a desert with quarantine procedures instead of near/in population centers.

> I literally can't think of a more dangerous kind of research that we could be doing as a species than messing around and making viruses more dangerous.

You have a very limited imagination. ;-) I assure you that extensive research into biological (not involving viruses), chemical, and nuclear weapons... and really a wide variety of weapons research is easily more dangerous. There's plenty of opportunity in other areas like materials science, genetics, etc., as well.

> If we really have to do it, then we can do it in the middle of a desert with quarantine procedures instead of near/in population centers.

Now you'll want to have an ultra-secure means of transporting highly dangerous biological samples, not to mention research teams & observers, at very high speeds to the middle of a desert. Are you sure you've improved the risk profile?

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#144

Post by kazinator »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #51
JoshTko wrote: post #24

Any benefit from research of gain of function research is clearly outweighed by risk of lab leak. I.e if the estimated incremental realized benefit of better planning, better mitigation from a single gain of function research equaled X; the cost of a lab leak seems to be 100X~10,000X.

Gain of function research is the kind of experiment that could develop a disease that kills billions. It isn't a game we should be playing lightly if at all. The argument is that eventually biology could make the same mutation. The thing is, it is extremely unlikely that Ebola becomes air born naturally, for example. But that is the kind of thing that gain of function seeks to develop, you know, just in case.

> kills billions

That would either save the planet, or go a long way in that direction.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#145

Post by cbsmith »

akira2501 wrote: post #67
fabian2k wrote: post #11

One thing the pandemic certainly has shown is just how dangerous an otherwise unremarkable animal virus can be if it gains the ability to infect humans. Simply because nobody has a pre-existing immunity it gains enormous advantages in its ability to spread compared to similar viruses that are already endemic. I think previous candidates for new pandemic viruses did mislead us as those never got far enough to become a…

> Simply because nobody has a pre-existing immunity There is good evidence that those who had SARS-CoV-1 had immunity that covered SARS-CoV-2. This immunity lasted for more than a decade. > What I found scary about SARS-CoV2 is just how much it improved between variants. Perhaps a leaky spike only vaccine was a particularly bad choice and the extent to which it drove these variants is not clear. There is additional d…

> I simply do not trust for profit drug companies to do this work. I certainly don't trust governments to do it either.

But you trust nature to do this work? ;-)

> Further, the idea that we can correctly estimate how nature is going to perform and then front run those outcomes in the laboratory is entirely insane and is explicitly anti-science.

Well, this eliminates a great deal of research areas completely outside virology. Climatologists aren't needed. Seismologists aren't needed. Meteorologists become largely irrelevant. Much of cancer research, forestry, etc. isn't needed. Certainly no need to take measures for forecasted hurricanes or tsunamis.

We do just fine estimating how nature is going to perform and identifying what to do in anticipation of it. There's a lot of variables involved, so we don't always get it exactly right, but we sure do a lot better making forecasts and reacting to them than when we don't.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#146

Post by sterlind »

dhdudbd wrote: post #119
sterlind wrote: post #107

Another lesson we should learn from the pandemic, aside from the risks of GoF research, is that searching for novel viruses in animals can be extremely dangerous. WIV collected samples from bat populations to find novel coronaviruses. Processing those samples was not done in a BSL-4 facility, but instead in BSL-2 labs. Some of those samples, like RaTG13, were as close as 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2. Even if COVID didn'…

>96% similar what does this mean

the SARS-CoV-2 genome is ~29.8K nucleotides long. 96% of that sequence is identical to the genome of RaTG13, i.e. all but ~1200 match. for reference, SARS-CoV-1 is only 82% similar to SARS-CoV-2. at a mutation rate of 8*10^-4, this means the current strains of COVID are ~97% identical to the original 2019 sequence.

so, darned close honestly. to be clear, I'm not saying RaTG13 is the source of the lab leak - it's just too different - but I am saying that it's much closer than the original SARS, and thus had no business being analyzed in a BSL-2 lab.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#147

Post by ALittleLight »

xracy wrote: post #17
ALittleLight wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One huge problem is the "safe and reasonable" part. Gain of function has killed millions in a recent lab leak you may have heard of (high likelihood). That doesn't seem safe to me.

citation needed

No, actually. COVID originated at the location of a lab doing gain of function research on coronaviruses and the lab had a sketchy safety record. If you need someone to tell you the most likely origin of COVID given these circumstances you have a fundamental inability to reason and a citation wouldn't help you because you lack the ability to comprehend.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#148

Post by cbsmith »

JoshTko wrote: post #24

Any benefit from research of gain of function research is clearly outweighed by risk of lab leak. I.e if the estimated incremental realized benefit of better planning, better mitigation from a single gain of function research equaled X; the cost of a lab leak seems to be 100X~10,000X.

I'm not sure you establish the 100X-10,000X measure. How did you calculate the realized benefit? How do you quantify the relative impact of extinction?

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#149

Post by jiggawatts »

saalweachter wrote: post #136
michaelmrose wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This logic is as incorrect as the folks who say we are due for an earthquake. It discounts all factors we are ignoring and pretends we can establish an accurate duration between rare events with a few occurrences

Eh, more incorrect, probably. With earthquakes you at least have stress accumulating over time, even if the stress is not necessarily accumulating or being released at a constant rate. A zoonotic spillover is pure repeated throws of the dice, no accumulated pressure.

Not quite true: zoonotic crossover events become more likely as more animals are brought together.

Large-scale wet markets or bushmeat markets increase the chances because there are more rolls of the dice.

Re: Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

#150

Post by cbsmith »

ilamont wrote: post #6

Long before Covid there was pushback against these projects, particularly near population centers. Boston University built its National Emerging Infectious Diseases center right in the middle of the city, which was approved by local regulators ( https://www.bu.edu/articles/2017/neidl-bsl-4-lab-approved ) but strongly criticized by neighbors when they learned that Ebola and Marburg were studied there. Covid research a…

NIMBYism isn't exactly a good measure of whether something should or shouldn't be done.
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