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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   1862 thread views

Transnational Thursday for March 13, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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the public needs to be informed to give them a better understanding of the risks of research in this area. If you keep it a secret, you lose one of the most important levers to prevent further accidents.

I don't think this is a universal idea. It might be true, mostly, in the US, although I would doubt even that. But in places like China, no, not really. You do whatever it takes to prevent further accidents within the lab, and you do whatever it takes to control public opinion, but these are completely separate concerns.

Furthermore, if the research is dangerous but the government thinks it has to be done, I totally see the government deciding to do it anyway, in secrecy if necessary. Especially in China, but really in a lot of other places as well. Including the US.

but in medical research, and I don't get the impression that we've done anything at all to prevent further accidents

This is a valid argument, but only if you think that the likely safety recommendations following the accident would be applicable to your facility.

Second, given the unusual structure of the virus compared to its alleged progenitor, even a honest mistake lab leak does actually imply with overwhelming likelihood a non-natural origin.

It might come down to the definition of "natural origin" then. Does releasing a virus onto a population of (very much not natural) humanized mice and allowing it to naturally evolve in that population count as a natural origin to you? Especially if accidental.

For me, that's still very much natural origin. As opposed to engineering, as in deliberately adding specific sequences to the genome using genetic engineering tools. But I totally see some people classifying it as non-natural instead.

the virus first gets changed in the lab but then gets spread from a completely different point of origin

Just for reference, I think that the virus likely jumped species in the lab, but it was not the goal of the people working in the lab to make it do that.

I don't think this is a universal idea. It might be true, mostly, in the US, although I would doubt even that. But in places like China, no, not really. You do whatever it takes to prevent further accidents within the lab, and you do whatever it takes to control public opinion, but these are completely separate concerns.

Furthermore, if the research is dangerous but the government thinks it has to be done, I totally see the government deciding to do it anyway, in secrecy if necessary. Especially in China, but really in a lot of other places as well. Including the US.

No disagreements on China, but I don't think that's the measuring stick western politicians ought to be judged by.

It might come down to the definition of "natural origin" then. Does releasing a virus onto a population of (very much not natural) humanized mice and allowing it to naturally evolve in that population count as a natural origin to you? Especially if accidental.

Accidental or not, that's pretty clearly on the non-natural side for me, especially since it involves humanized mice. Genuinely lab-leak + natural + accidental for me would be collected in the wild where humans don't go normally, taken to the lab, and then a human gets infected directly from this sample while testing it and then spreads the disease unknowingly. Beyond that, it's mostly different degrees of non-natural. Maybe if you're just holding lots of bats for a long while and it develops unknowingly, but in a way that is plausible in the wild I'd also rule it natural.

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