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Apparently, a lab in china has created a virus with a 100% kill rate in humanized mice. Combined with the fact that there's a decent chance that COVID was a lab leak, this sort of thing is extremely dangerous to be doing.
I'm not sure how best to make it so that people are not incentivized to do things like this, but ceasing to fund this variety of research (it looks like the US ended one program that was pushing this sort of thing last year), and instating some sort of legal liability on those who do this, and especially if they dispose of it badly, probably seem like good decisions.
Extremely dangerous diseases are among the top few things in being both disastrous to humanity (unlike climate change) and also relatively likely (unlike a massive asteroid hitting earth). Development of them is also something that is not excessively difficult to do. This is probably the closest thing we have so far to Bostrom's black ball metaphor. People joke about Yudkowskian airstrikes on data centers; would airstrikes on labs be similarly warranted? More seriously, though, there should be far more effort put into preventing this sort of thing than there currently is.
Bostrom's concerns should probably be something more important to be aware of. The ideal is just to not develop technology in specific fields to the point that killing millions is a cheap and easy thing to do. Of course, the tradeoff is totalitarianism, a terror of its own.
EDIT: Some of the comments have argued, relatively convincingly, that this particular news story was overblown and misleading.
My understanding of the problem with banning "gain of function" research is that the term is that any research on real viruses* is either (1) intentional bio-weapons research which we already have policies around (which generally read "Don't.") or (2) something that could reasonably be called "gain of function" because you can't do anything with viruses without allowing them to propagate and therefore evolve. And for (2) we already have rules about what experiments require what level BSL. Scientists tend to not approve of the proposal of "don't study real viruses".
*As opposed to pseudovirus models of some kind where you've ripped out most of the virus so you're pretty sure it's not dangerous. But, oh, yeah, to do that, you've changed the function of the virus. Has it gained function? Who's defining "gain" here? Truly not trying to play semantics games here: if only some experiments are "gain" of function, what's your process for deciding which ones those are? What happens if they're wrong? How is this any different from the current system?
There are more or less dangerous incarnations of gain-of-function. The most dangerous is testing animal viruses on humanized mice, evolving them to be proficient at infecting human tissue. This is of that kind, as was the stuff Daszak was doing in Wuhan. He admitted as such in a tweet: https://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/50-SARSr-CoVs.png
There's no need for strict, legalistic accuracy: the US has drone-striked and tortured people on much hazier grounds like 'some Afghans said he was a terrorist' or 'there were weird-looking tubes in his car'. The definition of terrorism swings around like a weather-vane in a hurricane, depending on who's serving who's interests at any given point. You can be arrested for thoughtcrime if you stand still too long, silently praying, near a UK abortion clinic. Trivial matters get grossly authoritarian treatment.
Daszak, Bat Lady and the humanized mice brigade aren't serving anyone's interests. They're not creating vaccines for real viruses killing in real time, they're conjuring up new threats. The best interests of humanity are served by liquidating them and sending a clear, unambiguous message that this sort of thing is not to be tolerated, no matter what word-games are played it'll lead to a sticky end.
Those threats exist, they just haven't reached the human population yet. It sounds like your position is that surveillance for pandemic-potential viruses shouldn't be done as you believe it's not worth the risk, and we should instead wait for the spillover to happen before studying a virus? Does this include not studying known pandemic-potential viruses like H5N1? Who defines what counts as a distinct virus (the link you gave talks about "SARS-related CoVs" after all, and was posted well after the SARS spillover)? Actually, until you've collected and analyzed the viruses, how do you even know if there's novel ones in your sample; should we stop collecting viruses from non-humans all-together? What about research on viruses affecting agriculture (see H5N1)? Or maybe I'm drawing the line at the wrong place and you think no research should be done with humanized animal models, in which case I don't know how you're going to develop any vaccines.
No they don't exist or at least they didn't exist until they were artificially created by the GoF brigade. An animal virus is not a threat (except for farmers), an animal virus that infects humans is a threat.
It should be done but surveillance does not equal creating pandemic-potential viruses, which is what they did and what they're still doing all over the world.
Yes, this is how cause and effect works. We can only study a virus after it emerges.
Collect them, study them, don't stick them in humanized mice and make them dangerous to humans!
Go read my last paragraph again, Daszak wasn't conducting vaccine research because vaccine research can only be done after the virus emerges. The idea that these people are going to predict what viruses emerge and have vaccines ready for them is insane. There are so many potential combinations of dangerous viruses and not nearly enough money to develop vaccines for them.
And even if they did pick the right viruses and do preliminary research, it still isn't helpful. Vaccine development is quite fast already, the issue is with safety, testing, mass production, logistics and politics - not the basic science.
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