Can someone enlighten me about the value of this theory? It just seems like another vector of anti-establishment distrust discourse with a more intelligent veneer; easy to profit off of (clicks, book sales, etc) and doesn't require a conclusion.
"Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab,” said Chan. “This definitely tips the scales for me. And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.”
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses."
And then what's more, they sat on the fact that they had requested funding for this research for the last 18 months, when the world has been desperately trying to find any relevant information on the virus' origins. The fact that they did not put this forward themselves in in and of itself suspect.
Regarding what should be done: stop giving money to China for GoF research would be a great start...
What you're saying is worth looking deeper into, but it's not enough to start making claims yet, imo. There are probably hundreds or thousands of proposals and papers floating around now that talk about different things one can do with genetic engineering. If something should arise that is related to the concepts in some of those papers you wouldn't necessarily jump to the conclusion that there's a causal connection. Not without more information, anyway.
"it is the aspect of the genome which is hardest to square with a natural origin" This doesn't tell me it's artificially created. The most this tells me is it's not well understood.
"The fact that they did not put this forward themselves in in and of itself suspect." It could be related. Or it could be unrelated and there maybe some other explanation. My point is, when you want to charge someone with a serious crime, which I think this falls under, you need to come with some pretty strong evidence that directly ties whoever is involved to the events of the crime. This evidence may very well exist and it's not been shared publicly.
"Leaked DARPA proposals adds weight to lab-engineered sars-cov-2 hypothesis"
...or something along those lines. The problem is that "points to" is a pretty strong direct relationship. But these docs aren't directly related apparently (since the research was rejected by DARPA). It just shows that labs were potentially interested in creating such viruses. But that does hint that such a scenario could have been possible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(I'm assuming, of course, that it wasn't the article title that got subsequently changed. If that was the case, ignore the above.)
If China caused this and then lied about it, there would absolutely be geopolitical will to organize and extract concessions.
1. In 2018 EcoHealth Alliance(Peter Dazsak and team) apply to a grant to darpa for viral modification research and highlight a change in "furin cleavage site" at the same location as covid-19's change, this change has never been seen before in nature.
2. In the darpa proposal is listed "Wuhan institute of virology" as a team member, this was a year before the covid-19 outbreak in wuhan in 2019.
3. Rather damning for Peter Dazsak is he publicly denied any plausibility in the idea of a lab created source for covid-19, while behind the scenes at the same time telling his two students to distance themselves from this darpa proposal as the virus was rapidly spreading through cities in the world.
4. Even more unusual is that Peter Daszak and Linfa Wang, two of the researchers who submitted the proposal, did not previously acknowledge it until now.
Some other sites' coverage of this highlighted some of the grant content a bit more prominently. I agree it's not quite a smoking gun, but the content of the grant that was discussed was eerily similar to what's been put together by investigating organizations. It's akin to if you were trying to solve a burglary and concluded "if this happened, the suspects would have done A, B, D, and H", and then later you found some emails sent back and forth by the suspects saying "hey how about we do A, B, D, and H?" It's not proof they actually did it but it's about as close as you can get to a smoking gun without it being a smoking gun.
The timing is also uncanny.
I don't want to miscommunicate the extent to which I think the grant proposal proves anything, as I don't think it does, but it blurs the moral difference so much that I start to find myself wondering why as a society we shouldn't react with some things as if it did. That is, I don't think it rises to some level where I would say it definitely proves beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone did anything, but I do think it compels some deep reflection about the scientific-media-authority-academic-funding complex.
If it came from a lab - hell, even if it DIDN'T come from a lab, but could have - then we need to globally think about what sort of things we're doing and how safely we can do them.
We did not have the tools to do genetic manipulation as far s the physical techniques until recently...ie they were not around when I took biochem in 1990s.
HOWEVER, we still do not have enough concrete knowledge about this domain to reliably design anything on purpose including viruses organs ,etc.
Anybody that states otherwise is a danger to themselves and others. Blunt as I can put that.
Coincidence 1.) Wuhan is roughly 1800 KM away from the caves in Yunnan province where previous bat-borne coronaviruses jumped to humans harvesting bat guano in earlier SARS outbreaks. It is a massive metropolitan area, and far more cosmopolitan than many westerners believe. They don't eat bats in Wuhan, and bats were never present at wet markets. Possible for a virus to jump from bats to humans here, but unlikely based on priors and the realities of horseshoe bats being highly unlikely to come into contact with urbanized humans at a level to transmit a virus that isn't adapted to human lung receptors.
Coincidence 2.) Wuhan has 2 different facilities where bat-borne coronavirus research took place. There are only a few of these labs in the entire world, and none others in all of China.
Coincidence 3. ) Unlike both SARS-1 and MERS, where animal reservoirs for both were found within months, almost 2 years later, no animal reservoir has been identified for SARS-2. Unlike both MERS and SARS-1, SARS-2 has never been particularly infectious to other animal species. SARS-1 in its early stages was still highly transmissible between bats. SARS-2 never exhibited this characteristic.
Coincidence 4. ) The evidence that would have easily exonerated the labs was deliberately destroyed by the CCP early in the pandemic, with extensive blocking of access to any and all foreign investigators.
Coincidence 5.) The same city where this outbreak occurred was a known location, based on other grants to EcoHealth Alliance, of researching bat coronavirus experiments involving the use of "humanized mice". No, "humanized" isn't some novel, sci-fi or conspiracy theory idea. They are genetically modified mice which are routinely used in research. The variety used in the lab were engineered to have human ACE-2 receptors lining their respiratory tissue. Sounds crazy, I know, but here's the grant summary (it was awarded) for the research, and notice the "humanized mice" at the very end of the text: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/proje...
All of this evidence is circumstantial, but every day that goes by where no zoonotic reservoir is identified (the CCP isn't looking at all, because they know the answer) increasingly points to this being a lab accident and a subsequent coverup by a paranoid authoritarian regime, along with a scientific community desperate to prevent virology from being impacted the way nuclear energy research was by Chernobyl.
Not the first time I've seen you say this. Would it be worthwhile to fetch articles when they're submitted, if only for your own sanity?
On the other hand, titles changing on the fly isn't that big a headache as far as sanity-affecting headaches go. NYT does it all the time, or used to. The main thing I don't like to do is scold someone for breaking the title guideline and then finding out later that it was the site, not the submitter, that changed it.
Probably not worth the effort on HN to try to automate vs just treating it case by case. It doesn't usually seem to be a problem. "Pre-optimization is the root of all evil" and all that.
Edit: or archive.org as dang says, but I don't know if even they see all versions of a page if there is a simultest situation. Regrettably seems pretty SOP on even reputable places.
They didn't just "sit on it". EcoHealth and Peter Daszak deliberately and aggressively attacked anyone who pointed to lab-leak origins as conspiracy theorists and bigots. They did so in an article in The Lancet journal where they also stated they had no conflicts of interest.
Reading this statement, knowing what you know now, and it becomes very clear how sinister and calculated the misdirection was:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
And look at the end of the letter, at the sentence: "We declare no competing interests." That's a blatant lie, as we now know.
Those of us who have been seeing this for a long time were attacked, bullied, and tarred as bigots because of these irresponsible scientists desperately trying to cling to their grant funding. My comment history on HN has numerous comments, from months and months ago, where I was attacked, downvoted, and called an anti-Asian bigot for saying what is now obvious. Talking about this before the 2020 election resulted in immediate accusations of being a Trump sycophant/white nationalist, along with banning and deletions from social media. As a lifelong heterodox thinker, I always sort of shrugged my shoulders at being surrounded by people who predominantly just go with the herd on things. But this entire situation has now made me actively despise the "herd". After being a lifelong liberal Democrat who got demonized, bullied, and yes, beaten up for opposing the Iraq war in the conservative area I grew up in, I was shocked to realize that the other side isn't any different. Just a little more sophisticated. They don't physically assault you, but they'll try to get you fired, and equate you with a Nazi in a heartbeat.
As a result of this pandemic, my mother-in-law and aunt are dead, a friend took his own life when his charter fishing business went under, and my wife's mental health has been crushed. I myself was infected a month before I was eligible for the vaccine. Luckily it was a mild case, but I still don't have my sense of smell. Billions around the world had it worse than me, and it is unforgivable that the media, big tech, and the scientific community have colluded to obfuscate the true origins of this manmade disaster. The Soviets would have dreamed of having this kind of cover as Chernobyl spewed radiation into the atmosphere.
Like me, you probably viewed it as a deliberate attempt to distract from his administration's incompetence. Like me, you probably decided right then and there that it was a natural virus and recognized that a bulk of the people saying otherwise just HAPPENED to be people who wanted Trump re-elected.
There comes a point where you have to recognize that you have made decisions with incomplete information and emotional biases, and that those decisions sometimes need to be completely cast out, with an objective, reasoned look at the latest facts.
At this point, the evidence that you reasonably state needs to be found has long been eradicated by the second most powerful nation state the world has ever seen. An authoritarian one, with the ability to make any critic disappear. There will never be an actual smoking gun, because the CCP had months of knowledge of what they had accidentally released before the rest of the planet knew it existed. All of the evidence was within their borders. The eradication of this evidence is itself an incredibly strong indication of guilt, particularly combined with the mountains of circumstantial evidence that point to this being a lab leak. If a detective walks into a suspected murderers bedroom, and finds that all of the surfaces have been bleached and the carpet has been ripped up, he doesn't have definitive evidence that the suspect is a murderer. But he does have evidence that they are trying to hide something.
From a technical perspective it's probably simpler to just grep the page for the user-submitted title.
The lab leak hypothesis isn't a hypothesis that foul business went on.
But most paywall sites do display the title so that you know what great journalism you're being asked to pay for. I suspect that the typical SPA shows titles as well. So greping should work in those cases.
But my point was while title extraction is a hard problem requiring you to solve lots of corner cases, title greping is simple and handles the vast majority of cases. The corner cases are then handled by humans (as, IIUC, all cases are currently).
Accepting a user-generated title and comparing it to the text gives you a boolean. If they don't match you can just ask the user to affirm that what they submitted is really the title. Then, if you like, you can have a "this title may be dodgy" icon on posts that don't match.
I really don't understand why a site that wants people to actually read the article and discuss the contents promotes articles that at least 90% of readers won't be able to (easily) access.
While this doesn’t prove they made and leaked the virus, it doesn’t exonerate them either. A proper investigation is needed. When you say you rely on experts, you should definitely listen to them but unfortunately when people are defending their colleagues it’s much harder to do this. Further, many scientists would take any questioning of this persons ethics as castigation of the whole scientific establishment and become defensive. Even otherwise, it looks like the tide is changing among experts now, more and more are agreeing the lab leak is a viable hypothesis.
I’ve found some hope among opponents with disagreeing beliefs, and I think remaining optimistic (reasonably) is an important piece of retaining the power to drive forward change in this area. Let’s remain supportive and hopeful in ultimately the same goal as our opponents: caring for and providing safety, love and compassion for all humans.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-should-we-make-of...
I have access to both LSD and psilocybin mushrooms and I'd be curious to see if I could alleviate my anosmia. At this point it's been 7 months and although I have some sense of smell restored there are massive parts of my spectrum that I have not recovered.
I recently accidentally drank spoiled orange juice because I couldn't tell at all that it was spoiled from the smell and even the taste.