Feds lift gain-of-function research pause, offer guidance (2017)(cidrap.umn.edu)
cidrap.umn.edu
Feds lift gain-of-function research pause, offer guidance (2017)
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/dual-use-research/feds-lift-gain-function-research-pause-offer-guidance
39 comments
Viruses will mutate. And we don’t understand them well enough, so one method to study them is gain of function research - you modify the virus and then you have a lab version you can design against. The risk is you risk releasing a new virus entirely unnecessarily, the benefit is you can study how to combat viruses that don’t yet exist. Imagine the counter example of covid. What if a covid type virus mutates in the wild but we already have a great vaccine sitting on ice ready to go.
Here's another way of looking at it: Many mutations are going to happen in the wild, but only a few will make the virus more viable in some host or hosts. Most of the mutations will be dead ends, or jump to another species and then mutate away. Only rarely could one emerge and jump all the way to humans, spread across the globe and cause a pandemic. Ebola couldn't, and SARS1 as well due to speed of mutation. (The only original SARS1 around any more is in laboratories, except when it has escaped.)
In GOF you speed that process up by orders of magnitude. You arrive at the viable mutation sooner, possibly infinitely sooner if random mutation would never have arrived. If you engineered part of it, there's a good chance it would never have emerged naturally. It might have come into the world in a few decades or centuries, or it might never have. But you have it now, and have to guard it perfectly as long as it remains in your lab.
Bottom line, it probably won't escape, but it probably never would have emerged naturally either. IMO, to make GoF a beneficial trade-off, it should be focused on viral species that are close to emerging naturally and do not need their genomes to be artificially manipulated in order to become dangerous.
In GOF you speed that process up by orders of magnitude. You arrive at the viable mutation sooner, possibly infinitely sooner if random mutation would never have arrived. If you engineered part of it, there's a good chance it would never have emerged naturally. It might have come into the world in a few decades or centuries, or it might never have. But you have it now, and have to guard it perfectly as long as it remains in your lab.
Bottom line, it probably won't escape, but it probably never would have emerged naturally either. IMO, to make GoF a beneficial trade-off, it should be focused on viral species that are close to emerging naturally and do not need their genomes to be artificially manipulated in order to become dangerous.
The mRNA vaccine took only a few days to design. So you'd save a few days, if the GoF virus happened to be exactly the same as the wild type.
There is no way to rush the rest of the process, unless you want to deliberately expose people to artificially created viruses that don't exist in the wild.
Small upside vs large downside of potentially creating a global pandemic.
Covid appeared on the Wuhan institute of virologies doorstep, with exactly the modification proposed in their grants. You would think this would be their time to shine but where was their help?
Right when the world needed the info they took all of their databases off-line and have never opened them again
There is no way to rush the rest of the process, unless you want to deliberately expose people to artificially created viruses that don't exist in the wild.
Small upside vs large downside of potentially creating a global pandemic.
Covid appeared on the Wuhan institute of virologies doorstep, with exactly the modification proposed in their grants. You would think this would be their time to shine but where was their help?
Right when the world needed the info they took all of their databases off-line and have never opened them again
"Covid appeared on the Wuhan institute of virologies doorstep, with exactly the modification proposed in their grants. You would think this would be their time to shine but where was their help?
Right when the world needed the info they took all of their databases off-line and have never opened them again"
This is by far the best take on this topic I've seen IMO. I've been so busy thinking about whether or not the WHV was ground zero for the pandemic, I forgot that the whole point of GOF SHOULD have made it ground zero for the cure.
Right when the world needed the info they took all of their databases off-line and have never opened them again"
This is by far the best take on this topic I've seen IMO. I've been so busy thinking about whether or not the WHV was ground zero for the pandemic, I forgot that the whole point of GOF SHOULD have made it ground zero for the cure.
> Covid appeared on the Wuhan institute of virologies doorstep, with exactly the modification proposed in their grants. You would think this would be their time to shine but where was their help?
Where indeed. What a crazy coincidence that they were proposing to edit the the furin cleavage site on the coronavirus's spike protein, and several months later a coronavirus emerged at that location with a novel furin cleavage site on its spike protein.
They should have been in a better position to help than anybody else, but perhaps their efforts were instead focused on distancing themselves from it. For some reason.
Where indeed. What a crazy coincidence that they were proposing to edit the the furin cleavage site on the coronavirus's spike protein, and several months later a coronavirus emerged at that location with a novel furin cleavage site on its spike protein.
They should have been in a better position to help than anybody else, but perhaps their efforts were instead focused on distancing themselves from it. For some reason.
The vaccines, while "better than nothing" and much cheaper than giving everyone a 6-month supply of N95 masks, were mostly a flop. We have a long way to go before we can just print up vaccines to head off emerging epidemics, but hopefully the lessons learned through this failure will lead to faster progress.
That’s a novel take I hadn’t heard before. What data are you looking at to come to that conclusion?
N95 masks were going for upwards of $50 during the shortage, but even at a nominal $1 apiece (and not including emergency capital investment to increase production), it would have cost $182.50 to $365 per person for 1-2 masks a day for 6 months.
Moderna was given $1 billion for the vaccine development, or about $3 per person, and then $1.5 billion for 100 million doses, or $15 per dose, totaling about $48 for 3 doses at that rate.
You can dig into the other rounds of funding if you're still skeptical, but clearly the vaccines were much cheaper than 6 months of the type of masks that, unlike the vaccines, are actually effective at preventing transmission of the virus.
Moderna was given $1 billion for the vaccine development, or about $3 per person, and then $1.5 billion for 100 million doses, or $15 per dose, totaling about $48 for 3 doses at that rate.
You can dig into the other rounds of funding if you're still skeptical, but clearly the vaccines were much cheaper than 6 months of the type of masks that, unlike the vaccines, are actually effective at preventing transmission of the virus.
Vaccines were wildly successful at preventing deaths even though the virus continue to circulate. Omicron isn't milder - Covid variants in general are milder on vaccinated people, and today there's a lot of vaccinated people.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/13/health/covid-19-vaccines-...
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/13/health/covid-19-vaccines-...
Even with almost everyone vaccinated and/or repeatedly exposed to the virus to refresh their immunity, the virus killed over 70,000 in the US in that last 6 months and over 250,000 in the last year.
In the first months of the pandemic, healthcare workers spent 14-hour shifts surrounded by deathly ill patients and still only rarely caught it themselves thanks to their PPE, in particular the masks that were invented for this very purpose.
It's obvious what could actually eradicate this virus that has multiplied the flu (which was already an annual crisis) ten-fold. Maybe next time a rapidly developed and deployed vaccine will do it, but not this time.
In the first months of the pandemic, healthcare workers spent 14-hour shifts surrounded by deathly ill patients and still only rarely caught it themselves thanks to their PPE, in particular the masks that were invented for this very purpose.
It's obvious what could actually eradicate this virus that has multiplied the flu (which was already an annual crisis) ten-fold. Maybe next time a rapidly developed and deployed vaccine will do it, but not this time.
It's obvious that nothing could actually eradicate this virus. Even if you somehow magically eliminated it from every human there are still multiple animal reservoirs that are impossible to control. Someone would just catch it from another mammal again and the pandemic would restart.
It is? Or did you leave out a "not"?
"Everyone wearing PPE all the time" is hardly an "obvious" solution...
Not all the time and only for a few months. It would have worked in 2020 if people had access to real PPE (not bandanas and chin straps). And if we didn't have large employers like Publix and the NY Dept of Corrections prohibiting their employees from wearing the PPE that they already had. Many lessons are available to be learned by those willing.
That is an oversimplified solution. Access to masks was only a small part of the problem. Many people were simply unwilling to wear them. Access to N95 or kn95 masks became quite available within a few months of the shortages and people continued to wear bandanas and home made cloth.
This seems to be china's approach, plenty of masking and social distancing and lock downs still. And yet it has failed to stop the virus. It is notable that china's traditional vaccine has been less effective than the mRNA and they are sitting at 9,000 deaths a day compared to a few hundred for the us right now.
China doesn't have widespread free (K)N95 mask use either. There's not enough production even in China. Yet they're still faring better than the US so far.
Adjusting for population, the US peaked at the equivalent of 15,000/day after vaccination was underway and most places got rid of mask mandates, followed by a peak at the equivalent of 8,500/day after more than half the population was vaccinated, and another one around 12,000/day with 2/3 to 3/4 of the population being partially to fully vaccinated. Now it's been steadily the equivalent of 1,200 to 2,000/day going on 9 months even though almost everyone should have plenty of immunity from both vaccination and repeated exposure. The numbers are lower than they would be without vaccination, but this isn't sustainable. We know what does work.
Adjusting for population, the US peaked at the equivalent of 15,000/day after vaccination was underway and most places got rid of mask mandates, followed by a peak at the equivalent of 8,500/day after more than half the population was vaccinated, and another one around 12,000/day with 2/3 to 3/4 of the population being partially to fully vaccinated. Now it's been steadily the equivalent of 1,200 to 2,000/day going on 9 months even though almost everyone should have plenty of immunity from both vaccination and repeated exposure. The numbers are lower than they would be without vaccination, but this isn't sustainable. We know what does work.
This is just conjecture. The vaccines were a huge success at preventing severe illness and saved millions of lives.
Many people working in hospital environments wore N95 masks, gowns, and face shields. You might as well just say that vaccines were a failure because we could have just asked the world public to go on a diet and lose weight. It would be about as likely as getting the whole world to walk around in hazmat suits.
Many people working in hospital environments wore N95 masks, gowns, and face shields. You might as well just say that vaccines were a failure because we could have just asked the world public to go on a diet and lose weight. It would be about as likely as getting the whole world to walk around in hazmat suits.
Gowns and face shields (and gloves) are extra layers of defense, but the masks provide almost all of the benefit. People aren't getting infected in substantial numbers through their eyes or ears or skin, although we couldn't be sure of that at first.
Pandemics are really very good for public health funding! (this is a joke)
In seriousness though, there's a strong evolutionary incentive that acts on organizations to not eliminate their raison d'être. Perhaps gain-of-function is some version of that because it ensures that there's something to do even when there's nothing to do.
In seriousness though, there's a strong evolutionary incentive that acts on organizations to not eliminate their raison d'être. Perhaps gain-of-function is some version of that because it ensures that there's something to do even when there's nothing to do.
aeternum(3)
Apparently it is pure research. The history books will say, "They did it because they could."
December 2017
What could possibly go wrong?
What could possibly go wrong?
Not sure I understand the point of sharing this?
The other comments and this post’s title seem to imply this could relate to COVID-19.
If that’s the case, then why doesn’t the article discuss COVID or even international relationships or funding, or even China for that matter.
Further, the date of 2017 would imply the Trump administration itself holds some degree of responsibility, if Americans were funding Gain of Function research in Wuhan.
The other comments and this post’s title seem to imply this could relate to COVID-19.
If that’s the case, then why doesn’t the article discuss COVID or even international relationships or funding, or even China for that matter.
Further, the date of 2017 would imply the Trump administration itself holds some degree of responsibility, if Americans were funding Gain of Function research in Wuhan.
> If that’s the case, then why doesn’t the article discuss COVID
It's because the article was written before Covid
It's because the article was written before Covid
Check mate. /s
So Gain of Function research enables scientists to tinker with viruses under some very specific conditions. In the early 2010's the practice was suspended due to risk of contagion. This article announces its resumption back in 2017, but doesn't provide any contemporary context. What is implied is that once gain-of-function was available again, somewhere between between 17-19 there was a lab-engineered virus in the Wuhan lab that escaped the containment procedures and became COVID-19.
The lab was located in Wuhan strategically because it's a very central transit hub but also very close to the bat caves where thousands of coronavirus varieties are believed to emerge from. As one of the leading coronavirus focused virology labs in the world, they collaborated with universities, governments, and corporations to advance related research. Fauci's name was one the check for some US grant money connected with research that included Gain of Function practices, but again that was in the open, and one of many sponsors of this work.
The "wet market" theory is politically useful to many parties, but scientifically unlikely. There is precedent for coronaviruses crossing to humans in public markets that sell live animals, sometimes closely packed together, notably SARS. The big question is: where are all the dead bats? There has been little evidence to support any lineage between a wet market and the outbreak. It's pretty tricky because they are within walking proximity of each other.
I have no reason to think that this virus was engineered to cause a pandemic and intentionally released. Why would China use a super-virus in their own population first, right next to the wet market and coronavirus lab? Who would gain from this? Sure drug and testing companies did well, but why would they release a virus that they don't have a cure for? No one company had some monopoly on the cure- it was a global collaboration that brought forth several approaches and massive distribution/manufacturing. It wasn't some crackpot in a basement that put it together. The equipment needed to manipulate 100nm species doesn't come cheap, nor the people who know how to use them to engineer coronaviruses. None of these scenarios or others make sense to me relative to the Occam's razor version:
Despite the rigorous controls associated with level 4 gain-of-function research, cleaning procedures, airlocks, etc someone made a mistake. Maybe someone had caught their hazmat suit on loose nail that ripped a small hole, then a few minutes later some shelf fell over, knocking over a bunch of crates that shattered some virus vial. The researcher rushed to clean up the mess and forgot about their breached gear. The walk home from work, fall ill a few days later and the rest is history.
The fact is, whomever is to blame faces the weight of millions of deaths and trillions of losses of various currencies. If it's that scenario I just made up, who would be to blame? The researcher, or the facility? China didn't want to be liable for the insane damage, and it may not have been any one person or organization's fault. The GOF research was dangerous, they did it anyways, in the open, and got a lot of people killed. That was poor outcomes for a program that was intended to prevent pandemics, and there are a lot of people that could be blamed. At this point though, would anyone gain anything from a real smoking gun, other than poetic resolution?
The lab was located in Wuhan strategically because it's a very central transit hub but also very close to the bat caves where thousands of coronavirus varieties are believed to emerge from. As one of the leading coronavirus focused virology labs in the world, they collaborated with universities, governments, and corporations to advance related research. Fauci's name was one the check for some US grant money connected with research that included Gain of Function practices, but again that was in the open, and one of many sponsors of this work.
The "wet market" theory is politically useful to many parties, but scientifically unlikely. There is precedent for coronaviruses crossing to humans in public markets that sell live animals, sometimes closely packed together, notably SARS. The big question is: where are all the dead bats? There has been little evidence to support any lineage between a wet market and the outbreak. It's pretty tricky because they are within walking proximity of each other.
I have no reason to think that this virus was engineered to cause a pandemic and intentionally released. Why would China use a super-virus in their own population first, right next to the wet market and coronavirus lab? Who would gain from this? Sure drug and testing companies did well, but why would they release a virus that they don't have a cure for? No one company had some monopoly on the cure- it was a global collaboration that brought forth several approaches and massive distribution/manufacturing. It wasn't some crackpot in a basement that put it together. The equipment needed to manipulate 100nm species doesn't come cheap, nor the people who know how to use them to engineer coronaviruses. None of these scenarios or others make sense to me relative to the Occam's razor version:
Despite the rigorous controls associated with level 4 gain-of-function research, cleaning procedures, airlocks, etc someone made a mistake. Maybe someone had caught their hazmat suit on loose nail that ripped a small hole, then a few minutes later some shelf fell over, knocking over a bunch of crates that shattered some virus vial. The researcher rushed to clean up the mess and forgot about their breached gear. The walk home from work, fall ill a few days later and the rest is history.
The fact is, whomever is to blame faces the weight of millions of deaths and trillions of losses of various currencies. If it's that scenario I just made up, who would be to blame? The researcher, or the facility? China didn't want to be liable for the insane damage, and it may not have been any one person or organization's fault. The GOF research was dangerous, they did it anyways, in the open, and got a lot of people killed. That was poor outcomes for a program that was intended to prevent pandemics, and there are a lot of people that could be blamed. At this point though, would anyone gain anything from a real smoking gun, other than poetic resolution?
> At this point though, would anyone gain anything from a real smoking gun, other than poetic resolution?
Oh, maybe humanity could put a stop to gain of function research forever? That would be at least some compensation for this colossal error.
If only we took it as seriously as we take nuclear bombs, which are far less deadly in comparison.
Oh, maybe humanity could put a stop to gain of function research forever? That would be at least some compensation for this colossal error.
If only we took it as seriously as we take nuclear bombs, which are far less deadly in comparison.
I think it’s a great idea, and I think that’s the direction things are heading but I just googled and found this horrible bit of WTFery:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2022/10/24/gain-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2022/10/24/gain-...
> The lab was located in Wuhan strategically because it's a very central transit hub but also very close to the bat caves where thousands of coronavirus varieties are believed to emerge from.
This alone is enough to explain a lab leak if they were sampling a lot of bats to look for viruses and someone was careless. Unless there's a genetic smoking gun or someone admits it, I think it's a big leap to assume gain-of-function research is to blame. But in the off chance it does turn out to be a result of such research, we should probably take another look at the original SARS and MERS and any other related outbreaks.
This alone is enough to explain a lab leak if they were sampling a lot of bats to look for viruses and someone was careless. Unless there's a genetic smoking gun or someone admits it, I think it's a big leap to assume gain-of-function research is to blame. But in the off chance it does turn out to be a result of such research, we should probably take another look at the original SARS and MERS and any other related outbreaks.
>The lab was located in Wuhan strategically because it's a very central transit hub but also very close to the bat caves where thousands of coronavirus varieties are believed to emerge from. As one of the leading coronavirus focused virology labs in the world, they collaborated with universities, governments, and corporations to advance related research.
Important to note that COVID-19 is not believed to have come from the caves close to Wuhan, but from the caves in the south of China, very far from Wuhan.
That doesn't contradict anything you posted, just an added level of detail.
Important to note that COVID-19 is not believed to have come from the caves close to Wuhan, but from the caves in the south of China, very far from Wuhan.
That doesn't contradict anything you posted, just an added level of detail.
What exactly is the benefit to public health? Serious question.