The intention seems legit, despite the concern. Quote from the article:<p><i>The pathogen to be modified must pose a serious health threat, and the work must produce knowledge — such as a vaccine — that would benefit humans. Finally, there must be no safer way to do the research.</i>
For more background, and since this article is surprisingly short:<p>This is a better article: <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/nih-lifts-3-year-ban-funding-risky-virus-studies" rel="nofollow">https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/nih-lifts-3-year-ban...</a><p>This ban that's being lifted stems from a few incidents, but really the driving force was Ron Fouchier's [0] gain-of-function study where his lab made a few mutations that enabled transmission of the bird flu (H5N1) virus between ferrets. All they had to do was make five mutations and it was suddenly more dangerous (here's the paper [1]). Ferrets may sound random, but they can become infected with human flu virus and show similar pathology to humans - they're a model for humans.<p>I remember hearing Fouchier speak in Washington at a biodefense conference right after the study came out. He was (is?) pretty much a celebrity among scientists, but the policy folks had a different opinion...<p>Pretty sure these things will escape from the lab at some point. I've personally handled some B. anthracis (causes anthrax) that was supposedly non-viable only to find out later that it was almost certainly still alive. (Not this case, but here's an example [2] mentioned in the article.) There would (hopefully) be more regulations on BSL3+ organisms like the viruses being discussed, because anthrax is relatively friendly, but like any other field, all it takes is one incompetent person.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.erasmusmc.nl/MScMM/faculty/CVs/fouchier_cv?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://www.erasmusmc.nl/MScMM/faculty/CVs/fouchier_cv?lang=...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4810786/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4810786/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/anthrax/news-multimedia/lab-incident/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cdc.gov/anthrax/news-multimedia/lab-incident/ind...</a>
You know how when you watch movies and because you know so much about tech you can tell that most of the stuff done in movies regarding hacking etc is bullshit and not real.<p>Now I have a lack in knowledge of biology at this level, but can someone maybe explain to me how all those disease mass extinction movies cannot be real? I feel like my lack of knowledge here causes my concerns when reading stuff like this article.
This was posted a few days ago. It's a talk about the dangers of man made viruses by Intel's chief medical officer: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY</a><p>2 minutes in he talks about how a strain of flu escaped from a lab in 1977 and killed (and is still killing) millions of people.
Now, I don't want to seem anti-science or anything, but this seems like a massive disaster just waiting to happen, in light of the incidents that led to this ban and also, even more to the point, the 2001 anthrax attacks.[1] Couldn't they at least restrict this research to labs far away from major population centers?<p>The analogue with software development, I'd say, is when people periodically point out that nuclear power plant or ICBM control systems <i>still run on 8-inch floppy disks!!1!</i> and therefore allegedly need to be completely rewritten. That rationale likewise fails to meet my tempting fate threshold.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks</a>
I don't trust people's due dilligence enough to be okay with this.<p>Edit: remember when Ebola was never supposed to leave the CDC fascility and a nurse was exposed to it and left the hospital? That's what happens when there's the highest level of scrutinity and security.
My only concern is North Korea.<p>They have a strong desire to match american machismo. They probably lack the funds to build novel biological weapons their own. They are extremely good at break into computer systems. Companies excel at ignoring their vulnerabilities until it is too late.
So to bring a technology angle to this, there isn't anything remotely equivalent around this for Cybersecurity where it has some parallels. Everyone understands how bad a pandemic is - the risk of lives is obviously more important than data - however with the reliance of technology lives can be indirectly affected, such as the case of WannaCry shutting down hospitals and associated healthcare technology.<p>Vulnerabilities researched and weaponized by the government, ended up in the public, and caused global damage. There is no oversight into how these are produced or their risks.
Great ! Now this is going to open new rooms for more mistakes and may lead to more deaths which can be blamed to some scientific failure.<p>We humans collectively as one entity clearly have no discipline.<p>The current set of laws are themselves in first place not providing any peace in the lives of most people. And we have no time to fix that issue and our impulsive anxiety issue is making some weak willed men to open up new roads to destruction. It may yield some benefit but it is not essential.<p>I have 0 confidence in today's governments that they are capable of containing any damage caused by this law.<p>If entire of humanity is going to become extinct then we can take a high risk effort. All the day every time we need not take life threatening risks.<p>Opening up of this law means any minute now in best case scenario there is a 1% chance that there may be a deadly virus in the air u just breathed in. And based on history we humans are capable of leading ourselves into worst case scenarios and that puts the percentage of risk anywhere between 1% to 99%.<p>Now even if something worst case happens i am sure the human species would not go extinct as the billionaires and few millionaires would have means to survive any death prone event only with nobody left to buy their products anymore.<p>Kudos!
I'm not entirely clear on the scenarios in which this type of research would be beneficial (I'm a physician):<p>- AFAIK research on vaccines does not require altering an organism to make it more lethal. You would want to cover as broad a spectrum of serotypes/serovars of the existing organism as possible. I can see how someone might argue that you could pre-empt a more malignant variant but surely this is outweighed by the likelihood of creating systemic risk.<p>- What exactly would we learn form creating new, highly virulent organisms that can't be learned using the same technology on non-virulent organisms?<p>- It bothers me that this is a push to create more biological weapons from the military complex (especially terrifying considering the infantile intellects we currently have in congress).
Trial and error isn't great for this kind of stuff but it works great for AI research. Let's create software that can do genetic engineering of viruses right the first time.
As much as I dislike the subject, providing a monitorable outlet is better than a full prohibition. Prohibition denies important signals to things that will occur anyway.
An informative series from pbs narrated by Jeff goldblum on YouTube: search for "dna episode 1 of 5 the secret of life"<p>It's a great high level overview of dna sequencing from the discovery of its shape through the completion of the human genome project in 2000.<p>I'm having trouble pasting a link, maybe someone could help me out.