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It is with great anger that I say they're doing it again. Indeed, they never stopped.
https://biosafetynow.substack.com/p/you-couldnt-make-body-bags-fast-enough
They're making super dangerous airborne diseases in ferrets... For no good reason at all. Would this be dangerous for people? Who knows? You'd have to test it which is ethically and logically even more dangerous. So there is no value to this research. All we know is that 'this specific disease could be super dangerous' and they helpfully put its genome up on the internet.
If the disease is dangerous to humans like it is for ferrets and does leak out, then we're in for COVID with huge lethality rates, 30% rather than a measly 0.3%.
I think there is a real blindspot about people's motivations that many don't fully appreciate. There were all these conspiracy theories going around about how COVID was a US bioweapons attack against China or Iran, a plot to shackle everyone with vaccines... But so far as I can tell nobody had anything to gain besides publishing some 'good' papers. These scientists were just doing science with complete disdain for the risks. They were going out to caves to gather these coronaviruses and bring them to Wuhan. Daszak/Ecohealth were using humanized mice (mice that behave immunologically like humans) to assess pandemic potential of bat coronaviruses. They wanted to insert some furin cleavage sites too.
Then we get a virus in Wuhan. It's closest ancestor was from Laos. How did it get to Wuhan? In a truck. How did Covid get so good at infecting people? It was engineered, with those humanized mice. How did it get that weird furin cleavage site? Artificially.
And naturally the Wuhan virology database disappears due to 'hacking attempts' just before this virus is released. So nobody quite knows what viruses they were working with... Ironically this completely undoes even the silly scientific angle, they made all this effort to make a database of viruses and then conceal it forever due to 'hacking'.
And none of this is even helpful in any serious way! Who cares? The amount of super-dangerous viruses that could possibly exist is beyond measure. At least with AI there are some positive usecases.
Claude choked up even thinking and researching about this stuff that human scientists are getting paid to do. They keep doing it, there is no sign that they've stopped, even after the last lab leak killed tens of millions of people and made a huge inconvenience for everyone on the planet, they somehow persuaded everyone it was low-class to conspiracize about it. Everyone was just supposed to get over the experts bringing us Torment Nexus 1, Torment Nexus 2, 3 and 4 are still in the works (funded by taxpayers). The experts find that the experts were not to blame, there was some bat pangolin farce instead. They'll do it again unless stopped. GOF bioresearchers delenda est.
This is the ultimate black pill.
Not that few thousands people (at most) are playing Russian roulette with gun pressed to the collective head of all mankind, but that the mankind as a whole DNGAF.
This is not like fossil fuel industry, that is absolute necessity or like AI that promises unlimited knowledge, wealth, power and control.
With gain of function, only thing it gains are some papers and articles published in prestigious journals no one will ever read.
And no one, including the most rich and powerful, sees problem with it, even when they could perish together with billions of plebes when the next oops happens.
It would not take much to end it. Imagine, for example, if someone close to Putin and trusted by him (yea, there is probably few such people, if any) explained to Vladimir Vladimirovich what is gain of function research and what it does.
It would be hard, VVP is Soviet boomer raised to worship science and experts, but he is legit most powerful individual in the world (or maybe second most powerful, no one knows what checks and balances actually exist in Chinese politburo. There are effectively none in Russia).
And VVP really does not want to die, not in nuclear war and even less while coughing his lungs off. It would not take more than few dozen scientists worldwide meeting unlucky accidents for the rest to give up and find some other work.
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I think this misunderstands what they are trying to do. There has been, for a long time, a large community studying virus evolution and spread. And if you monitor influenza, globally and in different species, you ideally would want to know what you're actually looking for. No use having petabytes of genetic data, but no way to actually analyze it, or really, make some useful predictions.
Gain of function research tries to help with that. Identify which changes/mutations are actually worth watching. Identify what will spread fast, what will go airborne, what will kill, and what might jump to humans. They hope that next time, we'll have a bit more advance warning, or maybe a vaccine approaching the effectiveness of the polio shot. Having so damn much antigenic drift won't safe influenza if the vaccine directly targets what makes this specific strain so successful.
And all this isn't just a "saving humanity" moonshot/insurance against a black swan event. There's very practical applications - it would be nice if we didn't have to destroy 100 million chickens every 5 years because the farms got infected with bird flue, again.
At least that's the dream. Whether that's actually doable and/or worth the risk is another question. Maybe those people should really be send to Antarctica, or onto a decommissioned oil rig only serviced by a very slow ship. Maybe their current security measures are fine, I haven't updated on the COVID lab leak story an a while. But during the thick of it, I found the arguments of the counter-side more convincing.
Correct. The problem is that prominent researchers care more about socialization than safety, and laugh at the idea.
?? These were the people pushing for hard lockdowns during the China virus freak out.
I didn't say they were consistent!
I don't recall the exact episode so take my memory with as much salt as you like, but I was thinking of an episode of This Week in Virology where the virologists in question were discussing basically this proposal- that BSL4 and/or GOF labs should be, at best, in the middle of the desert with movement protocols- and they laughed it off because you wouldn't get anyone competent willing to work in the middle of nowhere.
Maybe we should pay them more in exchange, if their research is so useful.
Or ban it, if it isnβt.
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No, that's not the problem. "Prominent researchers" don't ever get close to the contagious ferrets unless it's necessary for a press photo to go with the release of their most recent Nature paper... The people producing the data on the oil rig lab, or in the antarctic darkness or who are stuck on the slow quarantine supply boat are grad students and lab techs. They'll do it for the paper, the title, the story and the love of the game.
The problem is that oil rigs and research labs in Antarctica are more expensive than university basements in cities.
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While I am far from 100% certain that Covid was a lab leak, I take the possibility seriously. I share your frustration with GOF research, there is no way in hell that the potential benefits are proportional to the risks.
Unless the lab is working in Antarctica, or at least a highly isolated environment with strict screening and quarantine for all workers (weeks to months) and far from population centers, it is a stupid game played for stupid prizes. If your primary motivation is a well stuffed CV, then I would not object if you were hit by a car. If the people doing it genuinely believe they are acting in the public interest, I am dismayed, and would still seek lawsuits for unconscionable negligence.
The best place to intentionally make hyper virulent and lethal novel pathogens is somewhere in the orbit of the Moon. If you can't do that yet, it's best not to try in the first place.
GOF is dangerous, but it's not useless. The Ebola vaccine was developed on top of GOF research on Ebola (including making an airborne variant)
I have not heard of this, but a quick perusal of the literature has not turned up anything that supports your claims.
There's no airborne variant of Ebola, even an artificial one, AFAIK. There were experiments on aerosolizing it, and the VSV vaccine was tested for ability to protect from aerosol exposure in Macaques, as a proxy for protection against bioterrorism.
I do not see a reason to phrase the claim the way you do, there appears to be little to support the claim that GOF helped with the vaccine (beyond the usual need to test the vaccine on the actual pathogen), let alone that GOF was strictly necessary for the purpose of making a vaccine. We make vaccines all the time without GOF, I do not see how it is a requisite. Ebola is not that special as a disease.
I do not want to jump to claiming that you are intentionally lying or being misleading, but I do still think you are factually incorrect, and I must insist on citations.
Edit: To be clear, I am specifically talking about GOF for virulence and lethality.
Out of curiosity, are airborne and droplet borne viruses that structurally similar to contact or food/water borne viruses? Is airborne Ebola like worrying about cars suddenly flying like planes, or are we talking a few base pairs for smaller adaptations?
Roughly, yes, depending how wide your lens is and precisely what you mean by structure. Most airborne viruses are RNA based, but many bloodborne pathogens (Ebola, HIV, HCV, etc) are also RNA viruses. If you meant shape, icosahedral is most common but there's plenty of variety and overlap between bloodborne/airborne (Ebola is long and filamentous).
More than 'structure' (depending what you meant by that), you should pay attention to tropism. Ebola expresses surface proteins that enable it to initially infect immune cells, then various endothelial (blood vessel) and other structural cells which are not accessible in the airways. COVID has a surface protein that binds ACE2, which is expressed on the surfaces of airways, part of the gut, etc. Other viral proteins are also key for proliferating in a given cell type, but you can get a lot of mileage out of just looking at the spike proteins and which receptors they bind.
Could you make turbo airborne Ebola by grafting COVID spike protein onto the surface of the Ebola capsid, and misting some into a volunteers face? Hey, sounds like a Nature paper to me!
...but also probably not, I doubt it would work without a pretty significant engineering effort beyond that simple change. So more akin to cars flying like planes. I'm not aware of any viruses that are known to have drastically changed routes of transmission like that.
I was thinking things like size, envelope, and things like that. IIRC norovirus is physically robust as viruses go: is that a trade off against airborne transmission? But it's been a long time since I took a biology class.
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I am probably not the right person to ask for an authoritative answer here, but since you did:
There is immense selection pressure for any pathogen to become one that spreads through airborne routes. I imagine the typical virus or bacteria would be very happy to not need direct contact or very close proximity.
But the fact that this almost never happens is strongly suggestive of the innate difficulty involved. Millions of people have caught and transmitted HIV for several generations, but it has yet to figure it a way to fly. Fucking is a far poorer alternative, but it's what the virus has. Flying fucks? Can't say.
I suspect that this is mostly because evolution is retarded and doesn't think ahead, and diseases become strongly optimized for whatever mode of transmission they started with. Plus factors like sunlight or heat are not kind to airborne pathogens, UV light reliably kills most of them. The sheer volume of air around dilutes them to the point that they struggle to reach critical mass by the time they reach the respiratory tract of the potential host.
Look at the amount of adaptation that fungal spores require to survive for more than few minutes while floating, it takes a lot of work.
Also, and very importantly, there is a rather artificial distinction made between airborne vs aerosol spread/direct deposition. Aerosol spread disease particles are suspended in air, they just tend to settle or disperse beyond close proximity.
I think the risk of Ebola naturally evolving to the point it spread primarily through air for more than a dozen feet and not very close proximity or contamination is negligible in our lifetime. We'd be so fucking screwed if the average disease could pull that off, so the fact we're still around is insightful in of itself.
(I wrote all of this myself, and later used ChatGPT to check in case I was making some kind of stupid mistake. ChatGPT tells me I'm basically right, though it's scolding me for leaving out some nuance. It can piss off, it's not the boss of me.)
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The Reston variant has been hypothesised, but not confirmed, to be airborne; it is to our great fortune that it is not pathogenic in humans.
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Technically it wasn't airborne Ebola; rather, they transplanted suspected virulence genes from Ebola into a replication-incompetent adenovirus. This adenovirus caused Ebola symptoms, confirming that these genes were the virulence genes.
I see that there's research out there where they did use modified adenoviruses to demonstrate pathology seen in Ebola.
But that is not the technique used to make the only FDA approved vaccine, ERVEBO. That was made through recombinant VSV. I will grant that they did try and make a an adenoviral-derived vaccine, which kinda sorta worked okay in monkeys.
Also, I am not claiming that GOF has zero utility, my core contention is that whatever actual and potential utility it might have is more than canceled out by the risks.
These researchers seem to have tried to produce only a single Ebola protein, they didn't try to make super-Ebola spread through sneezing. They didn't select for virulence or transmissibility, which is what people usually complain about when criticizing GOF. At least I do.
Also, I do not think you have supported your original claim. You said that "the" vaccine was made through GOF, which it was not. I would believe that those specific choice of words strongly implies the only vaccine actually being given to people. And making a modified adenovirus is very, very far from "airborne Ebola". Nothing of that sort seems to exist. I would go so far as to say it's misleading, a very large stretch of the facts as far as I can see them.
It wasn't the technique used to make the vaccine; it was the technique used to identify the virulence genes. I said the vaccine was "developed on top of GOF research on Ebola".
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Just to reiterate those proportions: 7.1 million confirmed deaths, estimated 19-36 million deaths. Make the math easy and call it 10 million deaths. If you think there is a 1% chance it was lab leak then that is 100k deaths caused by lab leak.
My mother is a PhD microbiologist. She hasn't actively worked in the field in decades. Last time she did lab work it was for Monsanto's agriculture/husbandry products. I've argued with her about GoF research. She got upset with Rand Paul when he was grilling Fauci about GoF research. I felt at the time it was more of a circle the wagons type reaction, aka she saw a Scientist getting attacked by a politician and blue tribe brain had her reflexively defending the scientist. Never-mind the facts that Fauci is more of an administrator, and Rand Paul was an MD for longer than Fauci did anything resembling lab work.
In separate conversations I removed the names and political events and she agreed on the danger of these medical experiments. She even added additional reasons to be scared. Her descriptions of labs she worked in were not what you'd hope for with people handling potentially dangerous biological samples. But even agreeing on the danger of the experiments she didn't think they should be banned. Her objection is that "Gain of Function" research is way too broad of a term and could ban far more useful research. For example, messing around with Yeast so that it can ferment an additional fruit or vegetable for alcohol consumption could be considered "gain of function" research.
I respond back 'well then just ban working with the deadly pathogens'. She hits back that E. coli can be very dangerous but is used in a bunch of research simply because its ease of use.
It goes on: Ok, how about just banning GoF related to transmissibility or virulence. Well apparently that might ban vaccine research for existing viruses.
You end up in a situation where the people best suited to recognize and stop the dangerous forms of microbiological research are the same people that want to conduct it in the first place. Which is where we were 2019.
I generally think that its ok to trust scientists and that they can self regulate with their dangerous toys, and that was my viewpoint for biological research back then. Now I'm in alignment with everyone here, fuck this research, it needs to end and we can't trust you with these dangerous toys. Scientists, you had your chance to self regulate. Sorry if we are wrong about the cause, but we can't trust you to investigate yourself, and even a 1% chance of lab leak means you killed 100k people. I still can't convince my mom though.
A permanent end to such research would cost us the possibility of spotting potential pandemics before they occur naturally, and having preparations in place to stop them, thus condemning the Human Race to forever living under the Sword of Damocles of pandemics with death tolls in the 7-/8-digit range at best, and 9/10 digits at worst. (I once came across a story of a post-collapse society which believed that preventing people from dying of infectious disease was morally wrong because it 'interfered with the balance of Nature', i. e. denying her the ability to commit mass homicide whenever she felt like it; it was at that moment that I realised that I understood the meaning of the word 'cuck', and that my disagreement with the frog-posters was a matter of my considering the relevant 'race' to be one that includes Charlemagne, Sejong, Mansa Musa, Hiawatha, and all 400+ of these people.)
However, recent progress in spaceflight has opened the possibility that dangerous research could be conducted away from inhabited planets; thus potentially hazardous biological experiments do not need to be permanently ended, merely delayed until a secure bio-lab can be constructed in a heliocentric orbit away from earth.
We can build a bio lab on a disused container ship parked in the middle of the Pacific Ocean right now if we want to, and for all practical purposes thats pretty similar.
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I don't think that is true at all. Some of the most likely crossover diseases are from livestock. And tracking livestock diseases would not fall under the umbrella of GoF research.
Assessing a livestock disease seems as safe as having livestock in the first place, so there is no added risk.
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I agree, but I think it's necessary to consider potential and confirmed upside when doing a cost-benefit analysis. Now, from memory, I can't think of anything good coming out of GOF for virulence or lethality, but I am not a microbiologist nor have I done a comprehensive literature review. But from own adjacent professional knowledge, as well as the criticisms raised by people like Scott and Zvi, I am still strongly negative. It would have to be damn strong positive evidence in favor to outweigh even theoretical deaths or damage, and I have not seen anything nearly as robust. They'd have to demonstrate that the benefits could not be achieved through a route that isn't GOF.
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The paper you're citing is 12 years old. Although I guess you're directionally correct in that you could probably find papers published by someone in the academy that you would call GoF.
I don't follow Dr. Perez or the field, but amusingly he was on a paper last year describing a safe platform for doing the kind of work you're talking about.
You might disagree with them, you may be so cynical as to believe that scientists only care about publishing some 'good' papers, but I can guarantee that most people doing this kind of work believe they're making the world a better place. They believe in a future free from infectious disease. Try some mistake theory and charity for a change.
An important caveat, that the people doing the work are probably not the same ones popularizing the work, signing open letters, hosting podcasts, et cetera, and as such outsiders will have a rather different view of the field available.
Occasionally when you try that, the New York Times publishes an article where your enemy declares they're exactly as evil and stupid as you originally thought before trying mistake theory. At that point you're allowed to stop the charade and accept reality.
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Yeah, well, I don't. Their whole field of study needs to be nixed and made illegal.
That's a bit excessive; just postpone gain-of-function research until they've gotten
the Big Falcon RocketStarship working, and then put it in a distant orbit.And with robots doing sll of the work via remote control so that there is a literal zero percent risk of escape.
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Finally, someone who gets it!
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Antarctic research station should be sufficient, no?
Even "don't do GOF research in a dense 10M+ megacity" would reduce the risk a lot.
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I'm sure there's at least one disaster novel or movie about a frozen disease being thawed and killing everyone.
Aren't some of the known Spanish Flu gene sequences from exhumed victims in polar regions? I don't think we have any other source for that data.
Yeah, but Spanish Flu wouldn't do much nowadays, most likely (not that I'd care to test that). Its descendants have been circulating as seasonal flus ever since. You'd need something much older or from an isolated population.
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Mistake theory has to be rejected for high stakes because it's gameable both on a conscious and unconscious level.
I agree there is some predictive and curiosity satiating value to this kind of work but not worth the risk.
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I admit I didn't perceive that it was an old paper. They certainly are continuing to do this kind of research nevertheless. Nobody has been held accountable.
And after all these many years, what have been the fruits of this research? Has it led to anything good or useful? Just general 'advancing theoretical science will lead to future unknown applications'? Could the money have been reallocated to other fields instead which would also have unknown future applications without the risk of creating deadly diseases?
After the first few million deaths it's time to stop giving out charity. If a nuclear power plant melts down, kills 20 million people and dislocates the whole of society for a couple of years, then nobody would be in a charitable mood for the people who slipped up making it. Regardless of intentions they demonstrated appalling negligence. If you're making something that can kill tens of millions of people you must be very careful and rigorously justify the value of your work.
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