As someone who had the 2009 H1N1 strain I wish the authors would have spoken more about whether that strain as well could have come from a lab accident or was just natural.<p>Has anyone heard anything to that end or was it just random probability that caused it?
This is a spectacularly misleading paper in a non-biological journal that assumes, without any explanation, that somehow scientists thawed out a 1950 H1N1 strain and somehow, through some gain of function process, made the 1977 version.<p>The obvious question is, How?<p>In 1977 (or 1976, to produce something that would have infected people in 1977), recombinant DNA technology was new; cloning had just begun. There were very few restriction enzymes, oligonucleotide synthesis was done by hand (literally) and PCR had not been invented yet. Today, GOF studies are easy because we can synthesize virtually any piece of DNA. But in 1977, graduate students got rich because they could synthesize a dozen-ish residues of DNA and sell them (for stock) to Genentech.<p>What people were not doing was engineering new forms of flu virus.
An interesting relevant precedent for this argument: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23875758" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23875758</a>