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Gain of Function

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Gain of Function (GoF) is a laboratory process applied to viruses to increase their ability to transmit. One method is Genetic Engineering when the scientists build a new virus from RNA and proteins. The second is to change the environment around existing viruses, multiple times, to encourage mutations. This technique is called Serial Passage. It effectively speeds up nature. Genetic Engineering leaves a signature that is clearly ‘man-made’ but Serial Passage does not.

GoF is meant to enable studies into how pandemics develop. However, the usefulness of the studies is dubious. They do not help in the development of vaccines, for example, and haven’t helped improve pandemic defences. There are dangers, too. The, often lethal, viruses need to be very carefully contained in laboratories, maintained to an extremely high standard. Even so, accidents do happen.

In 2011, research into H5N1 Avian Flu Virus provoked some alarm. Add to that increased reports of leakage at secure laboratories and the US banned GoF research into MERS, SARS and Avian Flu between 2014 and 2017. However, Gain of Function studies into how bat coronaviruses could mutate to infect humans continued to be funded by the American authorities. One laboratory to receive grants, the last as recently as 2019, is The Wuhan Institute of Virology (HIV), where there is easy access to a wide variety of bats.

Is it possible, then, that there was a coronavirus developed in China with increased human-to-human transmission and increased mortality? Could it have been accidentally introduced into the local community and, then, the world?

The American scientists who granted the funds to WIV, declare that Covid-19 is not man-made. One of those scientists is Dr Fauci, who has been a supporter of GoF research since AIDS in 1984. As a whole, the scientific community support this view. However, no-one has properly addressed the possibility of Covid-19 arising from Serial Passage experiments, which would not look man-made.

The world is in the midst of a terrible crisis and I’m staring into the barrel of an existential breakdown. Could it be that Medical Science has caused this pandemic? Did the Americans pay the Chinese recklessly? Is the blessed Fauci not to be trusted? Has Donald Trump been right all along?

My brain hurts.

Elvis Costello – Accidents Will Happen

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Comments

  1. I think it’s wise to keep an open mind at present. There must be good reasons why the current scientific consensus is against the lab leak theory, although that consensus may well change if and when new facts emerge. I haven’t explored the scientific reasoning on this in any depth, so I can’t add anything, but there must be lots of stuff out there in the virology literature and the more reputable scientific blogs. I do actually think it is incumbent on our governments and media to try and communicate the current scientific theory behind the latest thinking. Silence simply leaves a giant space for some hysterical (in a bad way) speculation and conspiracy, which the populist media seem happy to stir. Having said that, many folks don’t seem particularly understanding towards the nuanced arguments that typify scientific consensus.

    I don’t see Trump as particularly relevant to the story. He wasn’t the originator of the idea, just a populist bandwagon jumper, and if he turns out to be right it’s purely by chance. No doubt he’ll milk it though if it turns out to be true, because that’s the kind of person he is.

    Interesting that this lab leak theory has provoked an existential crisis, because my wife brought it up the other day, with similar reasoning. For me it doesn’t particularly stand out because there are so many other things queuing up to bring me down. I guess it’s more personal to you, being in the medical profession. Where do you rank it next to the UK adding 80 new warheads to its nuclear arsenal while removing a sizeable chunk from its foreign aid budget?

    • I’m disappointed in the scientists and their advice at the start of the pandemic. At first, how it got into human transmission was irrelevant. We saw what was happening in Wuhan and in Northern Italy. Yet, we didn’t close borders, set up testing quickly enough nor arrange tracing and isolation and there was a focus on clean surfaces and not masks. Covid-19 is a coronavirus. It is transmitted like any other coronavirus. The talk of herd immunity was clearly outrageous.

      Trump’s instinct was that the Chinese were to blame. Unfortunately for the US, he didn’t know what else to do after closing the border to China, allowing the virus in from Europe. (The vast majority of infections came to the UK from Italy, Spain and France.)

      We are where we are. There are two theories of origin: a species leap in a wet market or a leak from a laboratory carrying out risky experiments. The ramifications of the latter are far worse. Just imagine the political explosion across the world. There are enough problems with conspiracy theories as it is. What if one of them is true and their ringmaster general Trump is proved right? No-one will listen to a scientist again. We may as well give up on any hope of tackling climate change.

      Those warheads are a waste of money because we are never going to use them, right?

      • I think the fact that we’re discussing whether the integrity of ‘science’ is under threat because of one questionable and isolated incident reflects the hysterical times we’re living in. Levels of tolerance and understanding seem to be at an all time low and anti-intellectualism is rampant in the West right now. Science – in the abstract, monolithic sense – is portrayed as just another shady elite on the make.

        Media expectations seem extreme and unrealistic. Scientific ideals are good ones, and most scientists I have known respect those ideals and try to live up to them. Scientific communities tend to be robust and self-regulating. But scientists are humans, individuals working within organisations and institutions that are often subject to the same political and financial pressures as other professions. This shouldn’t be news, or lead to some grand conspiratorial reasoning, because what else would a scientific community of human beings look like?

        • Yes. We do live in hysterical times. Unfortunately, scientists are human and a small percentage of them lie and cheat and cover up. I’m afraid that scientists being responsible for developing a new virus via GoF that escapes the lab, kills millions of people, destroys economies and turns the world upside down, would be very big news indeed.

    • There never was any evidence to support a lab leak, and nothing new has emerged in recent times to change that. It is highly likely to be an animal spillover as per all other recent emergent infections such as Ebola. The ‘lab leak’ theory is a political tactic started by Trump and continued by Biden.

  4. Either way one of these things will come along one day that really do some damage. My middle of the night thoughts ate around what if there were no vaccine? It hurts my head just thinking about the decisions that would have to have been made by now. It’s frightening and would probably have been. We have to open up, keep everyone over 60 at home, good luck and pray hard…

  5. I’m an engineer, a pragmatist, a problem solver. And very dull (but you already knew that).

    Root cause analysis is supposed to be a tool to prevent a repeat problem, but is more often than not used as a witch hunt.

    We are where we are. Does it really matter how we got here? It could be a lab leak, species transfer or alien invasion, but the solution is the same.

  6. One of the members on a site I visit is (or claims to be) a scientist involved in new drug research and testing.

    They posted this link https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/

    They go on to mention technical things like and I am paraphrasing here 🙂 :
    the lack of a furin cleavage site in other natural coronaviruses, the codon optimisation for humans in COVID (which is quite unlikely and takes much time to create) and the lack of a genetic drift before it jumped across species (unlike other similar naturally occuring viruses )

    which lead him/her to question their previously-held beilief that a lab leak was QAnon-style conspiracy theory.

      • If all this was a TV series we’d all be shouting at the screen. “A pandemic breaks out in the city in one of the world’s most secretive and repressed countries which houses one of the world’s most eminent virus research centres. Unless those bats in those caves bought a one-way ticket on the Wuhan Express, how else did Covid-19 get going?”
        Mind you, I have been known to be Wrong before….

    • This is a very thorough description of the case for and against a lab leak.

      For me, one of the most disturbing aspects is the Virologist Omerta. Critics are too afraid to speak out because their future grants and research are dependent on panels of other virologists willing to support them.

      Didier Raoult is suing Elisabeth Bilk for having the temerity to criticise his blatantly flawed research into the use of Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid 19. For good measure, he has reported her for professional misconduct.

      Science v Truth?

      • @Tiggerlion if the conspiracy theorists knew of the extent to which China has benefitted economically their argument that it was a lab leak would become even more shrill. Cargo vessels out of China are full and rates have jumped by about 500 percent since last June. China’s biggest economic competitor India has been suffocated by a lockdown and a massive and rising number of infections/deaths.
        I think the links to a lab leak are not tenuous – there is a genuine possibility that it came from a lab leak and the chances are not any less than a species transfer. Given that the species have been around for thousands of years I assume the infection could have transferred at any time whereas lab research is current.

      • Many years ago, as a freshly-minted Philosophy and English graduate, I found myself attending a job interview which degenerated (through no fault of my own, naturally) into a heated debate as to whether the humanities were entirely without merit and only science really mattered.

        I argued then, and still believe now (perhaps demonstrating quite how little personal growth I’ve achieved in the intervening decades) that the two have to be considered in tandem: science is the pursuit of knowledge in respect of the physical and natural world, but to make sense of the impact/implications of scientific discovery we are often required to ask broader questions about the human condition.

        To use the same example I rolled out way back when; science can tell you the chemical composition of Zyklon B, but you need the humanities to even attempt to understand how that pesticide was ultimately used (and even then it’s hard to wrap your head around). Science highlights the truth, but how that truth is subsequently wielded is often down to human beings, with all the fallibility that entails.

        A lot of the failures being discussed on this thread are less failures of science, in my view, more of human beings. Specifically; it seems quite possible to me that we’ll never know exactly where the virus originated from, but the truth will remain that the Chinese government were not overly active in ringing the alarm bells, and have been extremely evasive regarding helping the international community understand how all this got started.

        It’s apropos of absolutely nothing I’ve written above, and the West Wing has come to seem horrifyingly naive on recent viewing, but here’s an absolutely beautifully written scene that was called to mind by this discussion.

        • I’ve interviewed a lot of people in my time. I wish I’d interviewed you.

          Anyway, I agree with you 100%. Human beings often fail to live up to the high principles, the discipline and the integrity of science. Hence, the troubles we are in.

          • To be honest, tigs, it was a proper car crash.

            The guy in question was, at the time, a bit of a name in my industry, and it was probably ill-advised to get on the wrong side of him.

            But he was also so aggressive, so closed-minded and so rude that I pretty much concluded halfway through that I wasn’t getting the job, I wouldn’t have wanted it anyway and that he was a massive bully who wasn’t used to being disagreed with.

            So, after about 15 minutes on the same tiresome subject, I stopped trying to gently flat-bat his questions (I initially assumed he was testing whether I could politely stand up for myself) and we had an extremely gratifying argument instead. Sometimes in your career you have to just read the room and really commit to the creation of a great war story.

        • I watched that episode of The West Wing a few months ago and it stopped me in my tracks. And you’re right, it’s not just the prescience of it, it’s the beautiful writing, and acting. CJ’s ‘You really are very sweet sometimes’ sounds and looks like it could be a scene with Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

          Oh and by the way, this is a great thread dealing informatively, sensibly and rationally with a sensitive, polarised debate, interspersed with the occasional laugh out loud bon mot from Moose, our very own (if considerably filthier) PG Wodehouse. Thanks to all concerned. If only the real world were like Afterword land (at least most of the time).

  7. Most conspiracy theorists I’ve come into contact with aren’t bothered about
    where or how COVID might have originated, they simply refuse to accept its existence

  8. I’ve said from the off (but not in a conspiracy theory kind of way, although I generally get shouted down for it by my mates) that it’s too much of a coincidence that it emerged so close to a place where the bats were used for testing and that the bats were from so far away from the area. It just seems too obvious, but I can’t see us ever knowing for definite now, as if it was a lab accident there is no way such a secretive country would leave any evidence to be found. I think the effort would be better devoted to minimising the risk of it ever happening again.

    Then again, I also thought you could shrink the Oscar Pistorius murder trial down to one piece of evidence – she locked the bathroom door. We never even closed the bathroom door, and that includes the en suite. But she closed it in the middle of the night, when the only other person in the place was her boyfriend. And even if they hadn’t yet reached that stage of their relationship he a) was asleep and b) has no legs. I couldn’t see why they felt the need to discuss that one any further!

    • How can you put in place measures to prevent it if you don’t know if arose from a lab or in nature? To mitigate the risk from nature, virologists might argue for more lab work.

      • That is a very tricky question isn’t it, because it’s unlikely that we’ll ever know. Or at least we can all but guarantee that we’ll never have the proof that it started in a lab, as the Chinese government would have made sure about that. Man has spent an awful lot of time and money developing things with the power to kill us all. We’re bloody idiots.

    • Interesting article, written by a breast surgeon, a specialty about as far removed from virology as it is possible. He focusses his attention critiquing the genetic engineering theory of GoF, particularly one unpublished paper, summarised in The Daily Mail, that is easy to ridicule. He doesn’t say anything about Serial Passage.

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