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When I was in college, I had a friend who was doing microbiology. She switched majors a few times, and ultimately wound up doing counseling. She was very, very smart, and quite fastidious. Despite being very, very smart, and quite fastidious, she wound up bringing home at least one of the things she was working on in the lab. It was a pretty boring thing! Like, rhinovirus level of boring. But she commented on it, and I think it was a motivator to _not_ orient towards doing bench science for a living. On some level, when you are culturing stuff and looking at it, there are risks.
That was decades ago, sometime around 1991, give or take. We lived in a world that was soaked in fear of AIDS, and Laurie Garrett’s _The Coming Plague_ hit hard when it came out, as did Preston’s _The Hot Zone_. The first antivirals were available, but they had problems — they had bad side effects, they were crazy expensive and they were hard to access. It was also a world in which a lot of people were blaming the victim, and using moral frames for viral activity (yeah, because a virus is a capable moral agent, for sure!) and airbags in cars in the US were still a very new thing. The homicide rate was high. E Coli outbreaks were on the rise. Mad Cow and BSE were entering our vocabulary and a whole lot of us were learning a whole lot of things that were deeply terrifying, which sort of compensated for the reduction in terror of the end of the Cold War.
Also, in this rough time frame, Rand Paul’s father was running for office and running a creepy newsletter, and participating in a lot of nonsense about the possibility that AIDS was the result of US government researchers engaging in experimentation to create a deadly virus under the auspices of WHO.
This week, there was an entertainingly heated debate between Rand Paul and Dr. Fauci on the topic of whether the virus of our age might have been the result of gain-of-function experimentation. Fauci — correctly — wasn’t having any of that.
Gain of function is just a fancy term of art for the kind of thing that Rand Paul’s dad accused the US and WHO of doing to create AIDS — science taking some kind of material that is a problem on its own, and making it even worse, weaponizing it, whatever. Gain of function does _not_ include assessment of the existing capabilities of a virus. If you have something you isolated, and you infect a lab animal with it, to see what that does, that’s not gain of function. You have to tinker with it for it to qualify as gain of function. The research that Rand Paul is pointing to is _not_ gain of function research; it was about looking at viruses collected from bat guano and whatever in a cave, and assessing whether those viruses had the capacity, _in vitro_ of infecting human cells. They concluded that some of them could infect ACE2 cells. Which does, indeed, seem relevant. This was useful research. We needed to know this.
When Rand Paul and the other right wingers made their predictable accusations that It’s All Someone’s Fault and It Was On Purpose and It Was A UN / WHO / government Conspiracy, it was all about someone doing something on purpose to take a virus and make it worse. On purpose.
The research now being pointed to is research that basically found our problematic virus or its very close relative in the wild. I am prepared to believe that something along the lines of what happened to my college friend happened in conjunction with this or similar research. I am also prepared to believe that some animal in a live animal market caught that kind of virus from a bat, was then captured, brought to the market, exposed other animals and humans to the virus, and so forth. I am even prepared to believe that this has happened more than once in the past, and this is just the one where there was a lot of air travel and it got other places fast.
I do NOT want to see the kind of thing that happened to my friend in college with a rhinovirus-type-event turned into blame for the pandemic, because people LOOKED for guv-mint / UN conspiracy and couldn’t find it, so they downgraded it to “lab leak” and hoped everyone would notice that this isn’t actually gain of function, and it’s pretty boring, and it could just as easily happen with someone raising horses or whatever that happened to hang out under the wrong tree at the wrong time (Hendra). Ron Paul was wrong. Rand Paul is wrong.
That was decades ago, sometime around 1991, give or take. We lived in a world that was soaked in fear of AIDS, and Laurie Garrett’s _The Coming Plague_ hit hard when it came out, as did Preston’s _The Hot Zone_. The first antivirals were available, but they had problems — they had bad side effects, they were crazy expensive and they were hard to access. It was also a world in which a lot of people were blaming the victim, and using moral frames for viral activity (yeah, because a virus is a capable moral agent, for sure!) and airbags in cars in the US were still a very new thing. The homicide rate was high. E Coli outbreaks were on the rise. Mad Cow and BSE were entering our vocabulary and a whole lot of us were learning a whole lot of things that were deeply terrifying, which sort of compensated for the reduction in terror of the end of the Cold War.
Also, in this rough time frame, Rand Paul’s father was running for office and running a creepy newsletter, and participating in a lot of nonsense about the possibility that AIDS was the result of US government researchers engaging in experimentation to create a deadly virus under the auspices of WHO.
This week, there was an entertainingly heated debate between Rand Paul and Dr. Fauci on the topic of whether the virus of our age might have been the result of gain-of-function experimentation. Fauci — correctly — wasn’t having any of that.
Gain of function is just a fancy term of art for the kind of thing that Rand Paul’s dad accused the US and WHO of doing to create AIDS — science taking some kind of material that is a problem on its own, and making it even worse, weaponizing it, whatever. Gain of function does _not_ include assessment of the existing capabilities of a virus. If you have something you isolated, and you infect a lab animal with it, to see what that does, that’s not gain of function. You have to tinker with it for it to qualify as gain of function. The research that Rand Paul is pointing to is _not_ gain of function research; it was about looking at viruses collected from bat guano and whatever in a cave, and assessing whether those viruses had the capacity, _in vitro_ of infecting human cells. They concluded that some of them could infect ACE2 cells. Which does, indeed, seem relevant. This was useful research. We needed to know this.
When Rand Paul and the other right wingers made their predictable accusations that It’s All Someone’s Fault and It Was On Purpose and It Was A UN / WHO / government Conspiracy, it was all about someone doing something on purpose to take a virus and make it worse. On purpose.
The research now being pointed to is research that basically found our problematic virus or its very close relative in the wild. I am prepared to believe that something along the lines of what happened to my college friend happened in conjunction with this or similar research. I am also prepared to believe that some animal in a live animal market caught that kind of virus from a bat, was then captured, brought to the market, exposed other animals and humans to the virus, and so forth. I am even prepared to believe that this has happened more than once in the past, and this is just the one where there was a lot of air travel and it got other places fast.
I do NOT want to see the kind of thing that happened to my friend in college with a rhinovirus-type-event turned into blame for the pandemic, because people LOOKED for guv-mint / UN conspiracy and couldn’t find it, so they downgraded it to “lab leak” and hoped everyone would notice that this isn’t actually gain of function, and it’s pretty boring, and it could just as easily happen with someone raising horses or whatever that happened to hang out under the wrong tree at the wrong time (Hendra). Ron Paul was wrong. Rand Paul is wrong.