[randm_sequence]

Two comments that I would like to make about this and a quick preface. As a preface, I was in the world of DARPA funded research projects. My last effort before leaving this career more than a decade ago was a project where we were predicting viral evolution in silico. I have read the DARPA proposal that was rejected and it reads like every other proposal that I have seen (ie, it reads as legitimate). I also know one of the reviewers that evaluated the proposal, and he vouched for its authencity (and the fact that it was quite close to getting funded).

Two comments:

1. When you construct a multi-million dollar proposal for one of these agencies, one tends not to pitch a pie-in-the-sky idea. Instead, teams pitch things that they know will work, often because they have already at least built the foundation if not outright developed a working example. If WIV pitched this idea of inserting furin cleavages into SARS viral backbones, it is almost 100% guaranteed that they had *already* done these experiments.

2. What many also don't understand is that there were two groups within virology. One group was adamant that the only way you could save humanity and prevent the next pandemic was to engineer terrifying viruses capable of destroying humanity in the lab. With example world-ending viruses, you could then create countermeasures - drugs and vaccines - and save the world. The rest of us, myself included, thought this group was (forgive the pun) "batshit" crazy because nothing in the lab stays in the lab forever. Lab leaks are large in number, even the ones that are public.