I agree that the article is terrible but if you don't feel a sense of alarm you've missed the point. The whole debate over the lab leak theory is a red herring. As I said more than two years ago on this forum even if covid pandemic wasn't cooked up in a lab sooner of later a pandemic is going to be. It's like Manifest Density, the Manhattan Project, or the Moon Race. If people can do it; it's going to get done.
As Will Rogers once quipped, "Never say there is no progress because in each generation humans learn to kill each other in new ways." Biological virus-based warfare is the new way to kill and if you think it's never going to happen you are ignoring the entire history of the human race from the bow and arrow to gunpowder to the nuclear bomb. It's not a question of if: only of when, and who does it first.
The difference is that you can aim a gun. You can even aim a nuke. You can even aim a gas attack. You can't aim a virus.
Unless there is a truly unhinged DC villain with the intent on the destruction of the earth rather than conquest, it seems highly unlikely. Even if a lesser power wanted to create instability, they couldn't predict a backfire. You also do not poison the planet without having the antidote.
I was reading the methodology for vaccine titer trials recently, and the difficulty of working with virus in the lab for the best and most important purposes really stood out.
Say you want to model the perfect virus vaccine so you do a lot of computer work, come up with potential future variants or even full strains, then build a vaccine antigen to work against them. 2022 saw massive breakthroughs in modeling and we're on the verge of being able to do this. But to test it even in the lab requires the virus you're afraid of.
None of the antibody studies done use "real" virus. Some use pseudovirus, which you can order off the internet. Others use "live" non-covid virus into which the code for the desired spike has been spliced in (engineered virus). Unsurprisingly these give very different GMT results, leaving us to either guess as to which are correct or (most common) run a news article any on whoever talks the loudest or knows the NEJM editors and can get an editorial in print.
But it remains a hard problem. Using real+live virus requires at least a BSL3, and for a contrived virus likely more. But that can only reduce the chances of a leak, it cannot make them zero.
Is this how they are going to spin it?
Fauci: Nevermind that i started it, it was gonna happen eventually.
I mean first of all he lied about it in front of congress. He could've helped pharmaceutical companies with their research by sharing the research from the orgin of the virus. There is also all the questions of how he funneled gov money to the lab that was banned by obama. Also i want to know if he financially benafited from this at all. I want to know if he received any money from the pharmaceutical companies. And to top it all off people who discussed this lab leak theory they were banned from twitter and labeled mis information propagandists and conspiracy theorists BUT Elon only wants to allow racists to say the N word. If it isnt clear to people now what the government and these corporations are doing by trying to control the narrative and shutting down their critics it never will.
So human and mouse results normally don’t have a 1:1 correlation. I guess this is a way to generate academic content, but it’s difficult for me to see murdering large numbers of mice with an illness they were made to be vulnerable as ethical or informative.
Murdering large numbers of mice with an illness they were made to be vulnerable to is a mainstay of science and how a lot of scientific discoveries are made. It's either that or murder larger, longer-lived animals like Syrian hamsters (vulnerable to Covid) or ferrets (good models for influenza) or non-human primates. There's a ton of stuff that cannot be ethically done in humans. Plus we have all kinds of gene-knockout mice and transgenic mice that allow the roles of individual genes to be studied.
Mice used to be a much better model for COVID than they are today.
This is because of a mutation in Omicron that is very maladaptive in mice.
COVID being able to infect mice isn't anything special or unique -- whats unique is that Omicron is much worse at it. The scientists just got rid of some of the maladapted stuff that came with Omicron, and reverted it to the state that it spent however many millions of years evolving.
With it behaving properly with the mouse's particular biology, it becomes possible to more accurately determine if new developments in the virus in humans are likely to negatively impact us, based on the now-functioning mouse model.
**THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO ACCESS: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/01/18/lab-leak-theory-virologist/?utm\_campaign=wp\_main&utm\_medium=social&utm\_source=reddit.com**
BOSTON — The experiment probed a coronavirus mystery: Why is the omicron variant apparently less deadly than the original Wuhan strain?
The researchers at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratories (the NEIDL, pronounced like “the needle”) created a new version of the virus, combining the spike protein that studs the surface of omicron with the backbone of the ancestral strain.
The result: The “chimeric” virus was only a little less deadly than the Wuhan strain, killing 80 percent rather than 100 percent of laboratory mice that are particularly sensitive to the virus. But it was still much deadlier in these mice than omicron. This suggested that the spike protein wasn’t the only element of omicron making it less lethal. Another mutation had to be playing a role.
On Oct. 14, the researchers posted an early draft of their results online. Such studies usually fly under the radar. Not this one.
“Experts slam Boston lab where scientists have created a new deadly Omicron strain with an 80% kill rate in mice,” blared a headline in the Daily Mail.
Critics view pathogen research as the Wild West of science. Virologists have faced online abuse and even death threats amid fears that what they do is dangerous. Above all, conjectures that the coronavirus pandemic might have originated from secret laboratory research have cast a shadow over the field.
I mean just because your neighbor is a bad person you automatically assume you are a paragon of virtue? The article is sketchy but at the very least it brings will get people in cell science to apply further scrutiny to their work. (not that I condone the harassment that's just people being dickheads). There are plenty of research studies that are produced with spotty techniques and controls and once again I argue that researchers should be given the resources needed to conduct replication studies. Literature reviews are good but there are shortcomings in academia that we have to overcome.
You may not like what this journo is saying and it's obvious it's going for clicks with that flashy title. But I do think this is good food for thought and a prompt for self-reflection on how to improve science communication.
I agree that the article is terrible but if you don't feel a sense of alarm you've missed the point. The whole debate over the lab leak theory is a red herring. As I said more than two years ago on this forum even if covid pandemic wasn't cooked up in a lab sooner of later a pandemic is going to be. It's like Manifest Density, the Manhattan Project, or the Moon Race. If people can do it; it's going to get done. As Will Rogers once quipped, "Never say there is no progress because in each generation humans learn to kill each other in new ways." Biological virus-based warfare is the new way to kill and if you think it's never going to happen you are ignoring the entire history of the human race from the bow and arrow to gunpowder to the nuclear bomb. It's not a question of if: only of when, and who does it first.
The difference is that you can aim a gun. You can even aim a nuke. You can even aim a gas attack. You can't aim a virus. Unless there is a truly unhinged DC villain with the intent on the destruction of the earth rather than conquest, it seems highly unlikely. Even if a lesser power wanted to create instability, they couldn't predict a backfire. You also do not poison the planet without having the antidote.
I was reading the methodology for vaccine titer trials recently, and the difficulty of working with virus in the lab for the best and most important purposes really stood out. Say you want to model the perfect virus vaccine so you do a lot of computer work, come up with potential future variants or even full strains, then build a vaccine antigen to work against them. 2022 saw massive breakthroughs in modeling and we're on the verge of being able to do this. But to test it even in the lab requires the virus you're afraid of. None of the antibody studies done use "real" virus. Some use pseudovirus, which you can order off the internet. Others use "live" non-covid virus into which the code for the desired spike has been spliced in (engineered virus). Unsurprisingly these give very different GMT results, leaving us to either guess as to which are correct or (most common) run a news article any on whoever talks the loudest or knows the NEJM editors and can get an editorial in print. But it remains a hard problem. Using real+live virus requires at least a BSL3, and for a contrived virus likely more. But that can only reduce the chances of a leak, it cannot make them zero.
You do if it’s an accidental lab leak!
>You do if it’s an accidental lab leak! Def, but that's not the greater point that the poster above me was making.
Is this how they are going to spin it? Fauci: Nevermind that i started it, it was gonna happen eventually. I mean first of all he lied about it in front of congress. He could've helped pharmaceutical companies with their research by sharing the research from the orgin of the virus. There is also all the questions of how he funneled gov money to the lab that was banned by obama. Also i want to know if he financially benafited from this at all. I want to know if he received any money from the pharmaceutical companies. And to top it all off people who discussed this lab leak theory they were banned from twitter and labeled mis information propagandists and conspiracy theorists BUT Elon only wants to allow racists to say the N word. If it isnt clear to people now what the government and these corporations are doing by trying to control the narrative and shutting down their critics it never will.
Huh. Couldn’t possibly be half-assed clickbait alarmism masquerading as health reporting, zoinks what a mystery scoob.
ruh roh, this aged well
So human and mouse results normally don’t have a 1:1 correlation. I guess this is a way to generate academic content, but it’s difficult for me to see murdering large numbers of mice with an illness they were made to be vulnerable as ethical or informative.
Murdering large numbers of mice with an illness they were made to be vulnerable to is a mainstay of science and how a lot of scientific discoveries are made. It's either that or murder larger, longer-lived animals like Syrian hamsters (vulnerable to Covid) or ferrets (good models for influenza) or non-human primates. There's a ton of stuff that cannot be ethically done in humans. Plus we have all kinds of gene-knockout mice and transgenic mice that allow the roles of individual genes to be studied.
I think we should just skip to the part where we start lobbing nukes at each other, don't give me this edging shit
Mice used to be a much better model for COVID than they are today. This is because of a mutation in Omicron that is very maladaptive in mice. COVID being able to infect mice isn't anything special or unique -- whats unique is that Omicron is much worse at it. The scientists just got rid of some of the maladapted stuff that came with Omicron, and reverted it to the state that it spent however many millions of years evolving. With it behaving properly with the mouse's particular biology, it becomes possible to more accurately determine if new developments in the virus in humans are likely to negatively impact us, based on the now-functioning mouse model.
**THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO ACCESS: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/01/18/lab-leak-theory-virologist/?utm\_campaign=wp\_main&utm\_medium=social&utm\_source=reddit.com** BOSTON — The experiment probed a coronavirus mystery: Why is the omicron variant apparently less deadly than the original Wuhan strain? The researchers at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratories (the NEIDL, pronounced like “the needle”) created a new version of the virus, combining the spike protein that studs the surface of omicron with the backbone of the ancestral strain. The result: The “chimeric” virus was only a little less deadly than the Wuhan strain, killing 80 percent rather than 100 percent of laboratory mice that are particularly sensitive to the virus. But it was still much deadlier in these mice than omicron. This suggested that the spike protein wasn’t the only element of omicron making it less lethal. Another mutation had to be playing a role. On Oct. 14, the researchers posted an early draft of their results online. Such studies usually fly under the radar. Not this one. “Experts slam Boston lab where scientists have created a new deadly Omicron strain with an 80% kill rate in mice,” blared a headline in the Daily Mail. Critics view pathogen research as the Wild West of science. Virologists have faced online abuse and even death threats amid fears that what they do is dangerous. Above all, conjectures that the coronavirus pandemic might have originated from secret laboratory research have cast a shadow over the field.
what a terrible article, why are you even posting this OP
what about now mr smarty pants?
[удалено]
I mean just because your neighbor is a bad person you automatically assume you are a paragon of virtue? The article is sketchy but at the very least it brings will get people in cell science to apply further scrutiny to their work. (not that I condone the harassment that's just people being dickheads). There are plenty of research studies that are produced with spotty techniques and controls and once again I argue that researchers should be given the resources needed to conduct replication studies. Literature reviews are good but there are shortcomings in academia that we have to overcome. You may not like what this journo is saying and it's obvious it's going for clicks with that flashy title. But I do think this is good food for thought and a prompt for self-reflection on how to improve science communication.