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Comment by alfor | Hacker News Reader

Let’s try in a (safe) lab to make it more infectious, you know for science ! Hey, while we are doing this why not try on MERS, immagine the number of citation I could get for this !

Let’s think for one second the cost of a leak to the world population.

It seems to me that we are doomed to self destruction if we don’t get wiser fast.

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Yes, virus research does indeed come with trade offs that we have to balance. But it’s not like not researching these things don’t come with trade offs too; after all the worst viral outbreak in human history probably started in Kansas on a farm, not in a lab.

This is an argument for good regulation of safety protocols, not an outright ban.

i am not an expert, so correct me if i'm wrong..

but not all virus research is "gain of function" right?

what is the advantage of "gain of function" specifically, aside from biowarfare? are we trying to anticipate nature? are there any successful examples?

I’m a bit out over my skis here, but given that we’ve just seen an active pandemic mutate to become more infectious, it does make some sense to try and anticipate what else might happen next. This kind of research has obvious biowarfare implications, so it should obviously be carefully monitored and regulated internationally.

As far as successful examples, I’m not really sure. But I’m not convinced that I’d take a lack of examples as proof of unsuitability; we’re clearly in a new era of viral and immunology research. Given that researchers can literally sequence proteins for mRNA vaccine use, a ludicrous concept even a decade ago to most of us, I suspect that attempting to anticipate future mutations via gain of function research might yield more medicinal rewards than it would have in decades past.

So the story goes, before the first nuclear detonation, it was not fully agreed upon if the nuclear reaction ignite the whole of the atmosphere and destroy all life on Earth. The final say before giving it a go:

> "It is shown that, whatever the temperature to which a section of the atmosphere may be heated, no self-propagating chain of nuclear reactions is likely to be started. The energy losses to radiation always overcompensate the gains due to the reactions."

_is likely_.

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/09/12/the_fear_th...

And keep in mind that they got the lithium-7 calculation wrong (Castle Bravo). What if they had got nitrogen-14 wrong instead?

I’m not a nuclear chemist, what would’ve happened?

Really, really big boom. Nitrogen is in the air. I'm not sure you could make a reasonable counterfactual though, because it's not how the physics works.

In this particular case, the mutation being added to the original SARS-CoV-2 is one that was already present in Delta. So if someone were to replicate this with real virus (as opposed to the non-infectious particles the existing experiment used), and the virus were to escape, it seems like the new variant's infectiousness would likely be somewhere between the original and Delta. Which means it would get outcompeted by Delta and the effect on the population would be nil.

There's no guarantee of that, so biosafety is still critical, but as biosafety worst-case scenarios go it seems relatively ho-hum.

Viruses will always mutate. We can either let nature beat us to the punch or we can attempt to race nature. Also there’s a lot of literature on BSL 4 labs with crazy safety lapses (e.g. labs using duct tape to seal leaks and what not). If we wanted to treat BSL 4 with the same safety culture of modern nuclear technology we could. This is ultimately a policy problem, not a technical problem (e.g. shutting down dangerous labs and defunding the researchers running offending labs).

Viruses will not always successfully replicate, and failing that, have a hard time mutating. I'm not saying all gain of function research should automatically be precluded, but considering that a severe disease phenotype is (almost?) never directly selected for, deliberately bringing pathogens directly into danger zone is bound to often be go fetching trouble which would never have manifested on it's own.

I'm not convinced I'd feel much more comfortable with biosafety labs being handled according to the same safety culture as modern nuclear technology either, and that's by the argument that they both suffer from the circumstance that policy problems, and policy enforcement problems, do not rank anywhere near the top of a list, good to poor, of how humankind handles things.

The things with scientists (and all humans) is that we ignore what we don’t know.

Virus and humans have billions of year of coevolution.

What we do now with our thinkering with viruses could happen naturally, but it could also take billion of year to happen, or not happen at all.

We have to recognise that the risks of messing with viruses is very high, these are self replicating harm machines.

And if you have one chance in a million of a leak and do a millions of experiment...

Don’t forget to lie about it when you get caught.

The virus-like things they are making don't have any genetic material. If they get out nothing interesting happens.

To use an analogy with computer viruses, they have the part that given a target system exploits an unpatched vulnerability to load a payload onto the target, but their payload doesn't have the code to scan for other systems to infect.

That is just the first step, after that they did the real thing.

SARS CoV research is already banned in USA, so they paid China to do research. It helped China a lot to protect their country.

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