zlacker

>>ruarai+(OP)
This is a great article explaining why a lab leak should always be a suspect. The alternative theory is that a virus traveled on its own (via bats or other animals) from bat caves 900km away to Wuhan where there are 2 labs researching bats. One of the labs is lesser known but is right next to the seafood market and the hospital where the outbreak was first known. [1]

This article points out that a lab outbreak could have happened in the United States and many places in the world. We need to avoid demonizing China over this if we want to ever find out the truth and learn how to prevent another pandemic outbreak.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200214144447/https://www.resea...

>>gregwe+pV1
It’s probably important to point out that a “lab leak” is a result of human-clumsiness or similar, and not the sci-fi movie bad guys engineering a virus. A lot of the non-HN crowd don’t get the difference.

>>nickt+sd2
I get what you're saying, but it seems slightly more nuanced. From my understanding WIV did do gain of function research. e.g. purposefully make virus' more deadly or infectious to study them.

Definitely not a super villain at least I hope/highly doubt the intention was a weapon (you could surely create a better weapon?).

I'm not judging the value of that research, it does sound valuable but maybe not more so than the (small?) risk of an accident.

There is also reporting WIV was doing top secret research for CCP military.

So bad guys depends on your worldview.

https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments...

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/08/josh-rogin...

>>dillon+rf2
Every BSL-certified lab should be doing gain of function research.

If leaks are a problem, then certifications should be better enforced.

Burying our head in the sand and waiting for nature to kill us is a losing move.

>>ethbr0+bz2
"Should" is a pretty strong statement. GoF studies, like social media-based disease surveillance, are one of those things that has a compelling "Just So" story justifying its existence, but has yet to show that it actually does what it's supposed to do.

Also, the alternative is not burying our head in the sand. It's monitoring and studying nature, instead of forcing the issue in a lab, and investing in infrastructure and capacity that work against a broad range of pathogen threats.

>>Fomite+MM2
What can be done, will be done.

Eventually, computational biological modeling is going to be good enough for mutation exploration purposes. From the papers I've seen during this pandemic, it largely already is.

At that point, it becomes straightforward (not easy, but not unknown) to share and realize those modeled organisms.

But at some point, we don't know what we don't know. And putting strains into biological models is important.

Investing in infrastructure and capability against a broad range of threats is important too. mRNA-based rapid vaccine platforms (and especially lipid encapsulation) will probably win a Nobel in a few years, and thank god we've spent the last 30+ years working on them.