gain-of-function research Concepts

Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History

by Ben Mezrich · 6 Nov 2023 · 279pp · 85,453 words

’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

Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One

by Debora MacKenzie · 13 Jul 2020 · 266pp · 80,273 words

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

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), 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

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today

by Jane McGonigal · 22 Mar 2022 · 420pp · 135,569 words

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

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, 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

A Shot to Save the World: The Inside Story of the Life-Or-Death Race for a COVID-19 Vaccine

by Gregory Zuckerman · 25 Oct 2021 · 368pp · 106,185 words

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

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story

by Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja · 15 Jan 2021 · 245pp · 71,886 words

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

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All

by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares · 15 Sep 2025 · 215pp · 64,699 words

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

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, 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

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, “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

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time

by Yascha Mounk · 26 Sep 2023

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

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

by Toby Ord · 24 Mar 2020 · 513pp · 152,381 words

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

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma

by Mustafa Suleyman · 4 Sep 2023 · 444pp · 117,770 words

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

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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

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, 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

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the best of intentions. However, not everyone shares those intentions. CULTS, LUNATICS, AND SUICIDAL STATES Most of the time the risks arising from things like gain-of-function research are a result of sanctioned and benign efforts. They are, in other words, supersized revenge effects, unintended consequences of a desire to do good. Unfortunately

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that alongside trying to build positive tools and forestall bad outcomes, we may inadvertently accelerate the very things we’re trying to avoid, just like gain-of-function researchers with their viral experiments. Technologies I develop may well cause some harm. I will personally continue to make mistakes, despite my best efforts to learn

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treaty,” an international agreement to stop experimentation on the most pathogenic materials. Any experiments that would seriously raise the risk of a pandemic event, including gain-of-function research, would be banned. He also advocates an entirely new regime of insurance and liability for anyone working with viruses or other potentially harmful biomaterials. It

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-hotly-debated-h5n1-papers-finally-published. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT For a time U.S. funding agencies Amber Dance, “The Shifting Sands of ‘Gain-of-Function’ Research,” Nature, Oct. 27, 2021, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02903-x. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT There is at least some indication Chan

Uncontrolled Spread: Why COVID-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic

by Scott Gottlieb · 20 Sep 2021

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

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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

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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

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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

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, 214, 375 Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, 60–61 Freedom of Information Act, 236 Frost, Wilfred, 85–86 Furin cleavage site, 356–57, 361–62 Gain-of-function research, 358–59 Gao Fu (George F. Gao), 48–49, 50, 70, 406n GAO (Government Accountability Office), 105, 244 Gates, Bill and Melinda French, 62, 283

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age

by Matthew Cobb · 15 Nov 2022 · 772pp · 150,109 words

In Covid's Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us

by Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee · 10 Mar 2025 · 393pp · 146,371 words