Derek Lowe writes:

The NIH has not been doing itself any favors recently when it comes to questions about coronavirus research. Ever since the advent of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan, there have been questions about coronavirus work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. My own view hasn’t really changed since the last time I wrote about that particular issue: I think a natural origin for the current virus is very much more likely than it being some sort of engineering construct (in fact, I don’t give that latter possibility any real credibility at all). But what that doesn’t rule out is the general lab-leak hypothesis, because someone could have been studying the wild-type virus and made a careless mistake as well. Clarity in this area is totally lacking, and while I hope the new investigative team that the WHO is putting together can figure some things out, I doubt if that will happen. The Chinese authorities have (so far) shown no interest at all in really cooperating with such an inquiry. They must realize that this just brings on more suspicion, but they have clearly decided that that is better than many of the alternatives.

Complicating all this is the fact that there was US funding for some of the Wuhan viral research. A particularly hot topic has been “gain-of-function” research, so let’s try to define that a bit (update: see here for more). GoF work attempts to modify a biological pathway in a cell line or an organism in order to enhance or broaden the scope of some particular process. In virology, it generally refers to work that would help to understand how a particular virus might be able to mutate in the future under different conditions. Under present circumstances, it particularly refers to seeing how a pathogen might be able to change in ways that would cause more harm. Viruses are constantly mutating, and GoF work is at attempt to see around the corner and anticipate what might come next – and how likely (or unlikely) that might be to happen in the real world.

I believe that this is very important work, but it’s not to be undertaken lightly. In the most dangerous cases – which can also be the most important ones, at times – you may be working with a virus that could acquire (through your work) the ability to spread through the human population. Even further, you may be working with a virus that is already capable of doing that, and producing forms of it that are still more infectious or more easily able to avoid the human immune response. This sort of work calls for extremely stringent review and oversight, and it also needs the highest levels of lab safety and containment measures that biomedicine is capable of providing. [Continue reading…]