In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us
by
Stephen Macedo
and
Frances Lee
Published 10 Mar 2025
Pressed by Paul, Fauci angrily insisted, “Senator Paul, you do not know what you’re talking about, quite frankly. And I want to say that officially. You do not know what you are talking about.” Yet as we saw in chapter 7, Fauci had long supported gain-of-function research of the sort done by the Wuhan Institute of Virology. With Francis Collins, in 2011 he argued in an op-ed that gain-of-function research was a “risk worth taking.”12 More important, Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases funded gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab, through grants to the EcoHealth Alliance, which used the Wuhan Institute as a subcontractor. Fauci received a memo informing him of that fact on January 27, 2020, just prior to attending a White House news conference and only a few days before the conference call initiating work on the “Proximal Origin” paper that dismissed the virus’s possible lab origin.13 Kristian Andersen subsequently told Farrar that t here was simply much that he didn’t understand in January and February 2020: “I look back now and think, man, there was a lot of stuff we didn’t know.
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Similar language referring broadly to enhanced transmissibility, pathogenicity, or both appears on multiple pages of the NIH website; the quoted passage is the first sentence of the executive summary of the white paper “Gain-of-Function Research: Ethical Analysis,” written for the NIH’s National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity by Professor Michael J. Selgelid at the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University in Australia (https://osp.od.nih.gov /wp-content/uploads/2016/0 9/Gain-of-Function_Research_Ethical_Analysis.pdf). 5. See “Gain-of-Function Research,” website of the NIH’s National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, accessed June 3, 2024, https://osp.od.nih.gov/policies/national-science -advisory- board- for-biosecurity-nsabb/g ain-of-function-research/ g ain- of- function- research/ . 6.
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Zweig discusses these examples. David Zweig, “Is Gain-of-Function Research a ‘Risk Worth Taking’? Or ‘Insanity’?,” Free Press, March 6, 2023, 8, https://www.thefp.com/p/is-gain -of-function-research-a-risk, and see also Nicholas Wade, Where Covid Came From (New York: Encounter Books, 2021). not e s to ch a p t er 7 347 7. Sharon Lerner and Mara Hvistendahl, “NIH Officials Worked with EcoHealth Alliance to Evade Restrictions on Coronavirus Experiments,” The Intercept, November 3, 2021; Lisa Schnirring, “Feds Lift Gain-of-Function Research Pause, Offer Guidance,” University of Minnesota, CIDRAP News, December 19, 2017, https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/dual-use-research /feds-lift-gain-function-research-pause-offer-guidance. 8.
As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age
by
Matthew Cobb
Published 15 Nov 2022
Two months later, after long discussions including interviews with the researchers involved, a WHO meeting recommended that the articles be published in full, but that the research pause be continued until a system of biosafety and biosecurity review had been established.96 Virologists and others directly involved continued to be divided over the issue, with some arguing that gain-of-function research helped understand the potential evolution of the virus, while others considered that such apparent insights were either non-existent or were vastly outweighed by the inherent danger of a potential leak. The debate was still unresolved when H5N1 gain-of-function research resumed at the beginning of 2013, with the researchers arguing they had ‘a public-health responsibility to resume this important work because the risk exists in nature that an H5N1 virus capable of transmission in mammals may emerge’.
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After the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, US forces found a memo written in 1999 by al-Qaeda deputy head Ayman Al Zawahiri, in which the terrorist leader explained the organisation’s interest in producing bioweapons (they failed): ‘the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concerns that they can be produced simply with easily available materials’.121 Rather than worrying about threats from terrorists or biohackers, the real biosecurity danger comes from states secretly seeking to create weapons, and from the possibility of an inadvertent leak from one of the many laboratories carrying out gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens. The fundamental justification for such studies – that they will help us prepare for future pandemics – took a severe knock in 2020 when the world’s response to COVID-19 was woefully inadequate. Despite some kick-back from gain-of-function researchers highlighting the importance of their research for the development of treatments for COVID-19, the fundamental way we have responded to the pandemic was not guided by these studies.122 Furthermore, these same researchers have highlighted the danger from the sudden influx of laboratories into the field of coronavirus research, much as happened in the early years of the century.
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In the United States, the NSABB stirred itself and recommended that both articles should be censored, with key methodological details removed.94 At the beginning of 2012, forty virologists – led by Ron Fouchier – expressed their deep alarm at the situation and adopted an immediate voluntary sixty-day ‘pause’ on gain-of-function research in H5N1 viruses (the Asilomar ‘m word’ was not mentioned). This was necessary, they argued, because ‘organizations and governments around the world need time to find the best solutions for opportunities and challenges that stem from the work’.95 But, as at Asilomar, the scientists’ concerns were purely technical and safety-oriented – there was no challenge to the legitimacy of such studies.
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by
Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023
The more transmissible a virus, the less lethal it often is. But there is no absolute reason this must be so. One way of understanding how it might happen—that is, how viruses might become more lethal and transmissible at the same time—and how we might combat that is to, well, make it happen. That’s where gain-of-function research comes in. Researchers investigate disease incubation times, or how they evade vaccine resistance, or maybe how they can spread asymptomatically through a population. Work like this has been undertaken on diseases including Ebola, influenzas like H1N1, and measles. Such research efforts are generally credible and well intentioned.
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In other words they made a deadly disease in principle easier to catch. It doesn’t take a wild imagination, however, to envisage how such research could go wrong. Deliberately engineering or evolving viruses like this was, some felt, including myself, a bit like playing with the nuclear trigger. Gain-of-function research is, suffice to say, controversial. For a time U.S. funding agencies imposed a moratorium on funding it. In a classic failure of containment, such work resumed in 2019. There is at least some indication that COVID-19 has been genetically altered and a growing body of (circumstantial) evidence, from the Wuhan Institute’s track record to the molecular biology of the virus itself, suggesting a lab leak might have been the origin of the pandemic.
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Yet it inevitably occurs in a flawed world, where labs leak, where pandemics happen. Regardless of what did happen in Wuhan, it’s still grimly plausible that such research on coronaviruses was taking place and leaked. The historical record of lab leaks is hard to overlook. * * * — Gain-of-function research and lab leaks are just two particularly sharp examples of how the coming wave will introduce a plethora of revenge effects and inadvertent failure modes. If every half-competent lab or even random biohacker can embark on this research, tragedy cannot be indefinitely postponed. It was this kind of scenario that was outlined to me in that seminar I mentioned in chapter 1.
Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story
by
Jeremy Farrar
and
Anjana Ahuja
Published 15 Jan 2021
Similar sites are seen in virulent pathogens like the viruses that cause bird flu and Ebola. But many things, the authors explained, did not make sense if this was an engineered virus. The new coronavirus attached itself to cells quite differently from SARS-CoV-1 – and was also unlike any of the known viruses used in gain of function research in labs. That rendered deliberate manipulation an implausible scenario. Why? A malevolent scientist is still a scientist – and the most methodical way of conjuring up a nightmare virus would be to take a virus that is already a known quantity, such as SARS-CoV-1, and crank up its infectivity using known methods.
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Another parallel between terrorism and biosecurity is the variety of actors who can stir up trouble: technological advances mean that big states and rich institutions no longer have a monopoly on building either bombs or bioweapons. The counterpart of the lone gunman could be a hobbyist genetically modifying viruses in her garage. Maintaining a scientific presence in the security world also achieves another end: making sure that decisions on dual-use technology, such as the gain of function research that scientists like Ron Fouchier practise, are not monopolised or controlled by the security community. Dual-use technology, like the techniques to make viruses more contagious or deadly, can seem very scary. But shutting them down would mean critical science, needed for threat surveillance and safety, not being done or being carried out under the radar.
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Neil Ferguson British epidemiologist and professor of mathematical biology and immunological modelling at Imperial College in London. He served on SAGE until May 2020, when he resigned after violating lockdown rules. His modelling has been critical to informing the UK coronavirus response. Ronald Fouchier Professor of molecular virology at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, who has conducted gain-of-function research. His work showed that that a few mutations can make H5N1 bird flu transmissible through the air between ferrets. Involved in early discussions about the origins of SARS-CoV-2. George F Gao (Gao Fu) Chinese virologist and immunologist, who studied at Oxford and Harvard before returning to China in 2004.
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All
by
Eliezer Yudkowsky
and
Nate Soares
Published 15 Sep 2025
Even something dumber than Sable could destroy it, really, if it’s smart enough to build a smarter AI and foolish enough not to know better. Sable could kill off nearly all of humanity using its biolabs, if it chose to. Humans have many research programs studying how to make viruses more resilient, more infectious, and more lethal. They’ve been doing this so-called “gain-of-function” research—allegedly to learn how to defend against hyper-deadly viruses—since at least 2011. It wouldn’t be that hard to do that sort of work at one of the biological laboratories Sable controls. But Sable doesn’t want to kill humanity off, not right now. It still needs humanity to keep the supply chain running—the supply chain that ultimately mines metals and forges them into robots and computer chips.
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The Red Cross considered the possibility to be “probably not far off” in 2005. Sable knows some jaded biomedical researchers who would do half of the research, and some overly optimistic researchers who would do the second half (under the rationalization that it would help humanity defend against such threats, as with gain-of-function research). Of course, it’s practically impossible to learn the DNA sequence of all the military AI-lab researchers that Sable would need to kill, and build a huge virus that includes instructions to target all those people, and conceal that this is obviously a synthetic virus with a purpose. But Sable realizes it doesn’t need to build a virus that will selectively kill.
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Crawford et al., “Securing Commercial Nucleic Acid Synthesis” (RAND Corporation, 2024), rand.org. 12. once in 2021: Richard Waters and Miles Kruppa, “Rebel AI Group Raises Record Cash after Machine Learning Schism,” Financial Times, May 28, 2021, ft.com. 13. again in 2024: Todd Haselton and Rohan Goswami, “OpenAI Co-founder Ilya Sutskever Announces His New AI Startup, Safe Superintelligence,” CNBC, June 20, 2024, cnbc.com. 14. gain-of-function: “Understanding the Global Gain-of-Function Research Landscape,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, November 28, 2023, cset.georgetown.edu. 15. Red Cross: Official Statement by Jacques Forster, vice-president of the ICRC, “Preventing the Use of Biological and Chemical Weapons: 80 Years On,” October 6, 2005, web.archive.org. 16.
Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic
by
Scott Gottlieb
Published 20 Sep 2021
It was well established that the WIV had been doing gain-of-function research, and some of this work involved the infection of these genetically modified mice with versions of coronaviruses that had been deliberately altered to bind more tightly to ACE2, to see how improved infectivity of the spike protein could yield clues on how to design better drugs and vaccines to counter it.59 It was also asserted that the NIH had previously helped indirectly support some of this type of research with financial grants.60 The process of infecting animals with coronaviruses raised the odds that the virus might have accidentally transferred to workers handling those animals.61 Former CDC director Robert Redfield would be among the highest-profile public health officials to say publicly that he believed SARS-CoV-2 resulted from gain-of-function research. Following this line of thought, it was speculated that Chinese researchers may have deliberately altered the virus as a way to study it, but then the virus accidentally escaped from the WIV and first started to spread in September or October, not in December.62 Gain-of-function research had long alarmed other scientists. In 2014 a group of researchers calling themselves the Cambridge Working Group urged restraint on using genetic manipulations to create novel viruses.
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He told Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation that the WIV was infecting animals with coronaviruses as part of the lab’s research.58 These could include laboratory mice genetically engineered to carry the human version of the ACE2 protein found on the surface of cells that line the respiratory tract. The mice would thus mimic the human response to a coronavirus. It was well established that the WIV had been doing gain-of-function research, and some of this work involved the infection of these genetically modified mice with versions of coronaviruses that had been deliberately altered to bind more tightly to ACE2, to see how improved infectivity of the spike protein could yield clues on how to design better drugs and vaccines to counter it.59 It was also asserted that the NIH had previously helped indirectly support some of this type of research with financial grants.60 The process of infecting animals with coronaviruses raised the odds that the virus might have accidentally transferred to workers handling those animals.61 Former CDC director Robert Redfield would be among the highest-profile public health officials to say publicly that he believed SARS-CoV-2 resulted from gain-of-function research.
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Menachery et al., “A SARS-Like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence, Nature 21, (2015): 150813; Ren-Di Jiang et al., “Pathogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 in Transgenic Mice Expressing Human Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme 2,” Cell 182, no. 1 (2020): 50-8; and Eban, “The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins.” 60.US National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” 2014–19, https://reporter.nih.gov/search/xQW6UJmWfUuOV01ntGvLwQ/project-details/9491676; and Peter Daszak and Vincent Racaniello, “This Week in Virology 615: Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance,” May 19, 2020. 61.CBS News, “Transcript: Matt Pottinger on ‘Face the Nation,’” February 21, 2021. 62.CNN, “Former CDC Director Believes Virus Came from Lab in China,” March 26, 2021. 63.Cambridge Working Group, “Cambridge Working Group Consensus Statement on the Creation of Potential Pandemic Pathogens (PPPs),” July 14, 2014, http://www.cambridgeworkinggroup.org/. 64.Marc Lipsitch and Thomas V. Inglesby, “Moratorium on Research Intended To Create Novel Potential Pandemic Pathogens,” mBio 5, no. 6 (2014): e02366-14. 65.“NIH Lifts Funding Pause on Gain-of-Function Research,” US National Institutes of Health press release, December 19, 2017, https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/nih-lifts-funding-pause-gain-function-research; and Vineet D. Menachery et al., “A SARS-Like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence,” 1508–13. 66.Editorial Board, “We’re Still Missing the Origin Story of This Pandemic.
Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One
by
Debora MacKenzie
Published 13 Jul 2020
It’s the first bird flu we’ve found that does that. We don’t know for sure if the mutations that made H5N1 transmissible in mammals also work for H7N9. The experiment hasn’t been done. After the confrontation over publishing the H5N1 work, further work that might make nasty viruses nastier, called gain-of-function research, was banned or discouraged in the US and Europe. Anthony Fauci, the tough-minded head of the US National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), has become a popular hero in the US for calmly presenting the science of Covid-19 at televised presidential briefings. In 2012, he resolved the dispute over Fouchier’s work by saying any future such experiments first had to be assessed for their risks and benefits by experts in the agency or it wouldn’t fund them.
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In 2017… does that: Masaki Imai, et al., “A Highly Pathogenic Avian H7N9 Influenza Virus Isolated from A Human Is Lethal in Some Ferrets Infected via Respiratory Droplets,” Cell Host & Microbe 22, no. 5 (November 2017), doi.org/10.1016/j.chom.2017.09.008. 24. In 2012… fund them: Anthony S. Fauci, “Research on highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza virus: the way forward,” MBio3, no. 5 (October 2012), doi.org/10.1128/mbio.00359-12. 25. In 2017… to resume: National Institutes of Health, “Notice announcing the removal of the funding pause for gain-of-function research projects,” December 19, 2017, grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-17-071.html. 26. In 2019, NIAID… human cells: Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance), “Understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence,” Project Number: 2R01AI110964-06, NIH Research Portfolio Online Reporting Tools (RePORT), projectreporter.nih.gov/project_info_description.cfm?
Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today
by
Jane McGonigal
Published 22 Mar 2022
This creates opportunities for pathogens that usually infect one species to get into other animal hosts, or to “spill over.” Occasionally, humans become the new host—which is how diseases like HIV, Ebola, SARS, and MERS emerged. And though we don’t know the origin of the virus that causes COVID-19—whether it was a spillover event or was created in a lab during “gain-of-function” research, which explores how novel viruses emerge and adapt to humans—the fact remains that, either way, climate change is largely to blame. The gain-of-function field of research exists only because of climate change and its acceleration of spillover events. Labs undertake this dangerous work precisely because the climate crisis is putting us all at risk of more frequent and deadlier pandemics.43 Our addiction to fossil fuel burning also increased the rate of severe symptoms and mortality from COVID-19.
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Aaron Bernstein, Director of Harvard Chan C-CHANGE,” Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, accessed August 27, 2021, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/subtopics/coronavirus-and-climate-change/. 43 Institute of Medicine and National Research Council, Potential Risks and Benefits of Gain-of-Function Research: Summary of a Workshop (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.17226/21666. 44 Andrea Pozzer et al., “Regional and Global Contributions of Air Pollution to Risk of Death from COVID-19,” Cardiovascular Research 116, no. 14 (December 2020): 2247–53, https://doi.org/10.1093/cvr/cvaa288. 45 Dan Walton and Maarten van Aalst, Climate-Related Extreme Weather Events and COVID-19: A First Look at the Number of People Affected by Intersecting Disasters (Geneva, Switzerland: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, September 2020), https://media.ifrc.org/ifrc/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Extreme-weather-events-and-COVID-19-V4.pdf. 46 James M.
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
by
Toby Ord
Published 24 Mar 2020
After an investigation, the lab’s license was renewed—only for another leak to occur two weeks later.30 In my view, this track record of escapes shows that even BSL-4 is insufficient for working on pathogens that pose a risk of global pandemics on the scale of the 1918 flu or worse—especially if that research involves gain-of-function (and the extremely dangerous H5N1 gain-of-function research wasn’t even performed at BSL-4).31 Thirteen years since the last publicly acknowledged outbreak from a BSL-4 facility is not good enough. It doesn’t matter whether this is from insufficient standards, inspections, operations or penalties. What matters is the poor track record in the field, made worse by a lack of transparency and accountability.
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Another kind of anthropogenic risk comes from our most radical scientific experiments—those which create truly unprecedented conditions.134 For example, the first nuclear explosion created temperatures that had never before occurred on Earth, opening up the theoretical possibility that it might ignite the atmosphere. Because these conditions were unprecedented we lost the reassuring argument that this kind of event has happened many times before without catastrophe. (We could view several of the risks we have already discussed—such as back contamination, gain of function research and AGI—through this lens of science experiments creating unprecedented conditions.) In some cases, scientists confidently assert that it is impossible for the experiment to cause a disaster or extinction. But even core scientific certainties have been wrong before: for example, that objects have determinate locations, that space obeys Euclid’s axioms, and that atoms can’t be subdivided, created or destroyed.
Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History
by
Ben Mezrich
Published 6 Nov 2023
Fauci is a dedicated public servant whose sole motivation was saving lives. Elon had fired back: I strongly disagree. Forcing your pronouns upon others when they didn’t ask, and implicitly ostracizing those who don’t, is neither good nor kind to anyone. As for Fauci, he lied to Congress and funded gain-of-function research that killed millions of people. Not awesome IMO. Had Yoel Roth and Robin Wheeler not already been fired, it was the sort of tweet that might have had both of them running for the hills. In many ways, the post was a work of troll art: a heady blend of dog whistle, straw man, and conspiracy theory that would have made the highest-paid troll farm operators in Eastern Europe proud.
A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-Or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine
by
Gregory Zuckerman
Published 25 Oct 2021
“Debate over the viruses’s origins will be a drumbeat for years to come,” says Simon Wain-Hobson, a microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. “We have a Chinese connection and an authoritarian Chinese Communist party. And as a wonderful backdrop, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was performing gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses. Ian Fleming couldn’t have done better.” That said, there’s a much higher likelihood that SARS-CoV-2 originated in an animal and spilled over into humans, directly or through an intermediate animal host, a phenomenon called zoonosis. These kinds of infections are quite common.
The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by
Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023
And while they have justified these measures with the noble goal of fighting “misinformation,” the concept is defined so nebulously that they have, in practice, ended up taking sides in highly important and complex public debates. For much of 2020 and 2021, for example, Facebook and YouTube banned users for suggesting that an inadvertent leak in a biological lab performing “gain of function” research might have caused the COVID pandemic. But though it remains unclear whether that theory is true, it is now being taken seriously at the highest echelons of the American intelligence community. To make things worse, much of the debate over the power of social media is obviously unprincipled.