[eloff]

I wish the education system produced more people like you, rather than trying to force them to conform. Conformism hurts science specifically because to make a new discovery you must beleive something to be true which everyone else disagrees with you about. A lot of currently accepted scientific ideas were heretical when first proposed, and laughed out of the conversation.

If you want to see an example of this happening right now, look at how it's impossible to publish anything exploring a lab-origin hypothesis for Covid-19 in a peer-reviewed journal. Somehow that became heresy among virologists. Now maybe it has a natural origin, but you don't determine that by shutting down the conversation.

If you stop and think for a second, one must admit it's a rather large coincidence that this disease begins in the same city as the world's pre-eminent lab not just studying SARS coronaviruses, but actually conducting gain of function experiments with them. Now perhaps that's just a coincidence, but knowing nothing else, a-priori your assumption must be to favor the lab origin hypothesis. Now that the seafood market origin hypothesis has been found unlikely, the case grows stronger for a lab origin. But you still can't publish a paper making that case.

Some interesting analysis of the evidence for an against on github: https://project-evidence.github.io/

A recent non-peer reviewed paper on the subject: https://zenodo.org/record/4028830

[frafra]

Non-peer reviewed paper tied to Steve Bannon. https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/report-resurrects-baseless...

Comparing that to two times peer-reviewed paper made by NASA is insulting, and your captatio benevolentiae will not trick the user into considering them to be on the same level or tied to similar fundamental issues.

[eloff]

I don't intend to implicitly compare that paper to the work done by NASA. Two completely separate subjects. And I specifically pointed out that it is not peer reviewed, how can you peer review something if no journal would consider it in the first place?

The paper itself may turn out to be seriously flawed as your link suggests. But I think it's important to have the conversation.

[frafra]

Then I am sorry if I assumed you was trying to diverge from the main topic by comparing the struggle to advance in not-well-established scientific fields with a baseless paper made probably for political reasons. My bad.

[ceejayoz]

> look at how it's impossible to publish anything exploring a lab-origin hypothesis for Covid-19 in a peer-reviewed journal...

How do we "look at" that?

An absence of peer-reviewed articles in reputable journals could be an indicator that this is impossible due to a big conspiracy to hide the truth, but it's also exactly what you'd hope for if there is no good evidence for that hypothesis.

[eloff]

Yes, that could be the reason. The authors of the paper I linked specifically call out censorship by journals, but maybe it's just them left with that impression. They did give citations[1],[2] to backup that claim.

I don't think there is some grand conspiracy going on, just that the experts early on decided it's a natural origin and completely unrelated to the lab, without any evidence I might point out, and now there's a very real and all too human tendency to dismiss anything else as quackery. Whether or not this is actually the case here is debatable, but we know know it's all too common in science and elsewhere.

[1] Segreto, R. & Deigin, Y. Is considering a genetic manipulation origin for SARS CoV 2 a conspiracy theory that must be censored? Preprint (Researchgate)

[2] Robinson, C. Journals censor lab origin theory for SARS CoV 2: https://www.gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/19475-journals-c...

[ceejayoz]

> the experts early on decided it's a natural origin and completely unrelated to the lab, without any evidence I might point out

No, that's BS. There is evidence, a quick Google search away, published in Nature back in March.

https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2020/03/26/genomic-research-po...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

[eloff]

You misunderstand me. Lab origin does not imply engineered. That's a possibility, of course, but far more likely is it is a natural virus, possibly altered in experiments, where the mechanism can be a form of selection, not necessarily engineering of any kind.

Lab origin, to define the term clearly here, means a virus, natural or otherwise, that escaped a lab, likely by accident.

This is not farfetched, it happened with SARS-1 twice in Beijing: https://www.who.int/csr/don/2004_04_23/en/

It seems, just by the coincidental location of the emergence of SARS COV2 in Wuhan of all places, to be the most likely origin scenario, just on a probability standpoint.

[ceejayoz]

Demonstrating that - that it's a natural virus released (accidentally or intentionally) from a lab - would be the realm of an intelligence agency or police forensics, not a genetic analysis of the virus like the debunked article linked upthread.

[eloff]

I won't grant that. If you were to find a close enough genetic match to a strain known to be in a lab, that would indeed constitute strong evidence.

Now the "debunked article" cites 89% similarity to a published strain, but that's hardly a smoking gun. That's not to say genetic analysis cannot constitute proof, however.

I think the problem is, if there ever was such a strain in the Wuhan lab or elsewhere, it's very likely that the evidence had been intentionally destroyed by now, making it unlikely we'll ever know the truth.

It's not like you can prove it didn't leak from a lab either, at least not unless you're lucky enough to find a very close match in nature somewhere.

[eximius]

It's not a coincidence because they put the lab there because that's where SARS jumped before. So there is a reason, but it's far less interesting.

[eloff]

No, the SARS epidemic began in Foshan, Guangdong. That's 1000km south of Wuhan. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3323155/