[kadoban]

That editorial advocates nothing of the sort. It's talking about studying viruses in the lab to improve our ability to fight them, and specifically mentions the risks involved and the need to keep these studies/viruses secure.

[cameldrv]

Yes, but these studies involve creating new, more dangerous viruses, that are not found in nature. We then depend on perfect containment to avoid sparking a pandemic, despite numerous examples of even high level containment failing.

[belltaco]

You could say the exact same thing about nuclear energy and nuclear weapons and yet they have seen massive and widespread use.

Dangerous things need to be contained really well, regardless of whether this virus leaked or not.

Natural dangerous respiratory virus outbreaks do occur from time to time so it's better to be ready against them which also steels us against lab leaks.

[cameldrv]

Personally, I think that on balance, nuclear energy is a positive thing. It generates a lot of carbon and pollution free electricity. When containment is lost, the consequences are at least mostly localized.

With this GoF research, the potential downside is extremely large. COVID was really bad. As it is, it's responsible for 3.5 million confirmed deaths so far. This is several orders of magnitude worse than Chernobyl.

This isn't even the worst case scenario though. GoF work has also been done with enhanced flu viruses that could have IFRs above 10%. With something like that you could be looking at upwards of 100 million deaths. Those are really extreme consequences, on par with a total nuclear exchange between the US and USSR.

And then, what do we get out of all of this? For all of the Coronavirus GoF research they did, how did any of that help us at all against COVID?

[kadoban]

It's still a _highly_ biased characterization of the editorial. Your take here is nuanced and fair, and I would not disagree at all. The comment I responded to was drastically different.

[loveistheanswer]

What is "biased" about calling dual use technologies such as artificially enhanced viruses weapons of mass destruction?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology#Biologic...

[kadoban]

Any hint of nuance or context is absent, it implies that he specifically advocates for their creation _as_ weapons of mass destruction when the opposite stance is evident in the article, it's paywalled so many people won't check, it has little to nothing to do with the HN story.

[rolph]

actually these studies involve discovering the transmission and heritability rules of; genetic traits of concern regarding human pathogenisis. these ^Are^ viruses found in nature manipulated so as to allow inferences to be made regarding origin and change of trait frequency distribution across the pathogens population .

[loveistheanswer]

The politically correct term that the editorial is advocating for is gain of function research.

Here's a quote from one of the referenced NIH studies in the editorial which makes it plain:

>"laboratory experiments that resulted in viruses with enhanced transmissibility in mammals"

Gain of function enhanced viruses are inherently dual use, so calling them biological weapons of mass destruction is not hyperbole.

[approxim8ion]

It's FUD.

[loveistheanswer]

What is?