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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 isn’t.
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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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