> Compare and contrast to activities that are very dangerous and have nearly infinite catastrophic risks but we do every day: driving, flying, operating nuclear power plants, refining oil, and much much more.

What? The risks for each of those, even the nuclear power plant operation, are extremely limited and localized. GoF research has potential near-extinction levels of risk. Nuclear weapons are the ony thing on remotely the same tier IMO. It's not to say that GoF is not a good idea, as clearly there is potential benefit. But to compare it to the risks of driving a car is apples to radioactive oranges.

I agree with your sentiment, but you are contradicting yourself

Nuclear accidents cannot be [1] limited and localized, and also [2] at the same tier as GoF (...since GoF outcomes are certainly not [1]).

Nuclear weapons vs. nuclear power plants. Even terrorist attacks on nuclear power plants or maximum meltdowns aren't GoF tier. Only nuclear war.

There was no contradiction. The difference was nuclear power plant vs nuclear weapons.

Stupid GoF research has those risks. Totally eliminating a research methodology because of possible bad actors is just like how nuclear energy was delayed for decades because of green ooze.

It’s not just about bad actors. It’s that the techniques (serial passaging) aren’t even controllable in the sense that we don’t know what will result.

GoF is often not lab engineering and the outcomes are not predictable and the range of possible danger is almost infinite. Even from perfectly well intentioned actors.

Not knowing the result is the point. You develop novel viruses that you may not be able to imagine and then study how they impact an organism. This is useful.

With all respect to nuclear threat. It doesn't self replicate.

I don't have any particular opinion on fauci and 2 years ago I'd have agreed on pretty much everything you said. The issue though is not necessarily the GoF research by itself. If the scientists involved did not try to completely silence everyone, cover their tracks and basically stonewall any potential investigation, I wouldn't see the problem.

From my point of view, you simply cannot assess the risk when the main party involved in taking and being responsible for said risk has proven itself to be so shady. We all know that there areinherent dangers to this type of research, but we can't account for human deception and tribal wagon circling on top of that.

The proponents of GoF could've come clean, been transparent and welcomed the scrutiny considering the insane magnitude of the situation. But they have not! Even if it turns out that this is purely zoonotic, the trust is rightfully broken imo. Maybe research should continue, even on GoF, but consequences should now be clear. The article details such a long pattern of deliberate obfuscation, gaslighting and outright manipulation that it's becomes impossible to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Also, considering that we went through the biggest pandemic of the past century during which most people have seen their lives literally dictated by arbitrary (and very low) risk thresholds that authorities have decided to follow... it would be a bit rich to now just say that we have to live with the risks of scientists fucking up and that we have to let the pros handle it. Yes screw ups happen, but asking billions of people to just live with the consequences won't work.

Again, 2 years ago I'd have said that we need to take the risk because it can have tremendous benefits. But as much as appealing to "commoners" might sound lazy, there's still something deeply wrong when we see a much stronger and visceral reactions/consequences to maskless "karens" than we do to the individuals involved with orgs like the EcoHealth alliance. Yes it's maybe a populist take, but at some point the elitism becomes so blatant that even populism makes sense

The tail risk of taking viruses and deliberately making them more dangerous is not even comparable to the tail risks of flying, driving, or (imo) operating nuclear power plants. This is either a profoundly ignorant statement or just disingenuous. Like seriously, this is a mind boggling statement you just made

Yep - we kept having near-misses with prior coronaviruses, so understandably, scientists were spending a ton of energy trying to figure out what makes them so pathogenic and how the animal-human jumps occur. Considering the fact that SARS and MERS both came from zoonotic origin (and IMO, Sarscov2 did as well) - we should really be spending our energy on the best research methods to prevent another pandemic, whether that's GoF research or something else.

Even if "we" figure out how the animal-jump can occur, it's not like "we" can stop it or even predict it.

And the probability that what is created in a lab will be close enough to what is naturally occurring in nature to be useful are none to zero.

> Even if "we" figure out how the animal-jump can occur, it's not like "we" can stop it or even predict it.

The first step is understanding. Until you understand how it happens, statements about whether or not you can prevent it do not make much sense to me.

For example: imagine you have not yet discovered that the unwashed hands of doctors are transmitting disease in a hospital. You might make a statement very similar to yours about how "even if we can figure out how people get sick, it's not like we can stop it".

The problem is, there's no real clinical benefit that comes out of gain of function research. Virologists claim that there is, but they can't point to examples of where it helped us actually treat or prevent something.

Basically they're creating bigger and bigger fires and claiming that doing so somehow helps firefighters. Next we'll have nuclear weapons researchers claiming that higher yields are good to know about so we can work out how to protect against stronger explosions.

The potential benefit is developing novel viruses. That's it. They will likely be infectious. Hopefully, ahem, your operating protocols prevent the release of that virus and you study it in model organisms to figure out metabolic pathways to fight it before such a real virus occurs naturally.

I suppose I'm operating from the belief that everyone cares about preventing possible virologic doomsday weapons. I'm sure quite a few people have not the slightest concern.

So, we need to do more research until we will find an ultimate weapon against viruses.

As an alternative, we need to stop development of new viruses, both naturally and in labs, including Russian and North Korean labs.

That's true, but whether the understanding is worth the risk is questionable. It seems likely that we've managed to cause rather than prevent a pandemic with this particular research.

> The first step is understanding.

This is a slogan with no logical value.

> Until you understand how it happens, statements about whether or not you can prevent it do not make much sense to me.

Except we do understand. It seems to me that you are lacking is basic scientific knowledge. Virus mutates naturally and become more virulent due to evolution.

> For example: imagine you have not yet discovered that the unwashed hands of doctors are transmitting disease in a hospital. You might make a statement very similar to yours about how "even if we can figure out how people get sick, it's not like we can stop it".

We can control our hands, we can't control viruses in nature.

I’m not sure how realistic your example is. Prior to discovering handwashing, were scientists doing things they knew had the potential to get literally everyone morbidly sick, just to try figuring out how it worked?

> Overall global research did in fact prep us for SARS-CoV-2.

Didn't feel like it.

We had a vaccine candidate within a few days as I recall. That's miraculous.

That was mostly due to advances in mRNA technology, no? Moderna was able to design the vaccine in days mostly because of it's RNA tech, not because it was prepared for a coronavirus pandemic.

Definitely mRNA advancements played a huge role, but it certainly sounds like coronavirus research played its part.

https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2021/0...

All that was needed was knowing spike is a target.

This is missing basic understanding risk management.

Parent is solely focused on probability, when what really matters is outcome.

Lets say that for every 10 years: 1) p of lab leak is 0.002% vs 2) p of nuclear accident is 0.03%

Although (2) is much more probable, from a risk management perspective, (1) is unacceptable because risks compound over time and critically, the domain of outcomes are vastly less localized and certain than (2).