Attention to the Unseen

Bloomberg reports: From her first visit before it formally opened in 2018, Anderson was impressed with the institute’s maximum biocontainment lab. The concrete, bunker-style building has the highest biosafety designation, and requires air, water and waste to be filtered and sterilized before it leaves the facility. There were strict protocols and requirements aimed at containing the pathogens being studied, Anderson said, and researchers underwent 45 hours of training to be certified to work independently in the lab. The induction process…

Read More Read More

Zeynep Tufekci writes: There were curious characteristics about the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 1977-78, which emerged from northeastern Asia and killed an estimated 700,000 people around the world. For one, it almost exclusively affected people in their mid-20s or younger. Scientists discovered another oddity that could explain the first: It was virtually identical to a strain that circulated in the 1950s. People born before that had immunity that protected them, and younger people didn’t. But how on earth had it…

Read More Read More

David A. Relman writes: If we scientists are not forced to confront the issues of laboratory safety and risky research in a serious and sustained manner, history suggests that we will not do so. In 2012, controversy erupted when it transpired that two sets of researchers — at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands — were altering highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses to enhance their transmissibility among mammals (to understand their potential…

Read More Read More

The Wall Street Journal reports: Chinese researchers directed the U.S. National Institutes of Health to delete gene sequences of early Covid-19 cases from a key scientific database, raising concerns that scientists studying the origin of the pandemic may lack access to key pieces of information. The NIH confirmed that it deleted the sequences after receiving a request from a Chinese researcher who had submitted them three months earlier. “Submitting investigators hold the rights to their data and can request withdrawal…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: The U.S. government spent more than $18 billion last year funding drugmakers to make a Covid vaccine, an effort that led to at least five highly effective shots in record time. Now it’s pouring more than $3 billion on a neglected area of research: developing pills to fight the virus early in the course of infection, potentially saving many lives in the years to come. The new program, announced on Thursday by the Department of…

Read More Read More

Natalie Shure writes: Last week the Food and Drug Administration approved Aduhelm—the first new Alzheimer’s drug in 18 years—an event that, at first blush, heralds the amazing news of a medical advance. Perhaps it might have been, had the whole process leading up to the agency giving its nod to the medication played out in a functional health care system. But that’s not what happened. Far from hailing the advent of a transformative breakthrough for the six million Americans suffering…

Read More Read More

David Wallace-Wells writes: Nothing has changed but the narrative. A majority of Americans now believe that the coronavirus emerged from a lab, not nature, and in recent weeks a new openness to the lab-leak theory has taken over “nearly all mainstream media,” as my colleague Jonathan Chait put it. But the material case for the hypothesis remains essentially unchanged from the version advanced by Nicholson Baker, in this magazine, in January — indeed more or less unchanged from the version…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: To a growing chorus of American politicians and scientists, she is the key to whether the world will ever learn if the virus behind the devastating Covid-19 pandemic escaped from a Chinese lab. To the Chinese government and public, she is a hero of the country’s success in curbing the epidemic and a victim of malicious conspiracy theories. Shi Zhengli, a top Chinese virologist, is once again at the center of clashing narratives about her…

Read More Read More