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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

> doing gain of function research - deliberately creating new variants of viruses to study them

What do they learn from these studies? The drawbacks to GOF is clear - but what are the potential gains that makes the risks worthwhile?

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Disclaimer: I think the virus leaked from a lab because scientists are usually more stupid and reckless than what their funders think they are, so maybe I'm insane and you shouldn't listen to me because I can affect your mental health. Also what I will write may be very dangerous misinformation so be careful because if you keep reading you consent to being misinformed. This writing is known by the state of California to cause cancer.

There's two objectives of this type of research. One is that after you have the new virus you can try different drugs on it, so that if gets out you can rapidly control it. Usually the drugs you try are ones that the company you work for sell or have a patent for. I think creating a pathogen and then testing how you can cure it with stuff that you can sell for a big profit creates a conflict of interest if it's also your responsibility to be sure it's not released, but apparently I'm pretty alone in this conspiranoic belief.

The other objective is creating a bioweapon, or getting ready for one. The US allegedly withdrew from researching bioweapons in an offensive manner but offensive and defensive research are very similar in that field because you speculate what viruses your alleged adversaries have and then recreate them to try the vaccines against them.

Even if scientists are competent, virus can be leaked because of someone else stupidity. For example, look at blast in «Vector» lab, Novosibirsk, RF, Sep 16 2019, where Russian first responders entered into biosafety level 4 lab without protective equipment, then opened every door checking for fire and stole some equipment. How you protect your lab from that?

One other rationale I've seen is to create self-disseminating vaccines: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1254-y

Yeah but that's like a very long-term goal for which it's not even clear there's a legal framework or even a market for such products.

Do you mean it's a long term goal in terms of ability or in terms of policy? Cause as far as I know there's been at least one experiment doing this already, all the way back in 2001:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11483281/

Policy a bit but mostly market, I think it can be done. People already show with their wallets that they prefer to get either "meat products" where the origin of the meat is dubious and hidden so you are probably getting scraps and meat from factory farms, and on the other end they want free range no antibiotics products. This pathogen vaccine thing doesn't make sense in factory farming and would "polute" free range, and for a good reason.

Hmm, yeah idk about the industrial agriculture market either. But a lot of the papers about these argue that this stuff is necessary to prevent climate change driven zoonotic diseases. So I guess the "market" would be governments. The lack of clear legal framework might stop some countries from trying this stuff out but probably not all of them.

If it's going to be anything like GMO soy that Monsanto pushed into the Buenos Aires government in Argentina because "it was the future and we need it to feed the world after climate change" then maybe they'll try it on another third world "weak" or "cheap" government. Also BTW after that the US passed the law saying if something is GMO it needs to be on the label and there was a huge campaign against GMO foods so they pushed out the farmers using GMO in most of the third world out of the US market. Lovely.

I wouldn't be surprised if it goes the same way, push the little guy into trying it and then push everything else in the supply chain so that their meat can only be used for low margin cheap shit.

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