Thread by @Ayjchan

I’m going to make a long thread later today going through natural origin arguments recently presented on TWiV and the Washington Post. But before that, I think the responsible thing to do is to explain what virology is.

What do virus researchers do? Why is this work important?

With the lab leak hypothesis #OriginsOfCovid now being considered seriously, there’s been some new concerns or fears about what virus researchers / virologists are doing in the lab and why they grow and study viruses in the first place.

I’d say that, in my experience, very few virologists are engaged in dual use research. Most of the virologists working on pathogens are sincerely just trying to understand the biology of the virus, build models of the infection, and find ways to treat patients.

Even this basic virus research requires collecting a natural virus, growing up virus particles, and manipulating the virus to test the function of each gene.

Yes, it sounds scary, but to find treatments, scientists must at some point grow up viruses & study infection mechanisms.

Scientists have not yet reached a state where you can accurately predict the biology of a pathogen just by looking at its sequence. If we ever get to that magical future, then we can stop having to grow viruses and develop infection models.

Most viruses are also not human pathogens. And even a great deal of viruses in our bodies do not cause disease and could actually be the source of medical discoveries.

Not all viruses are bad.

scientificamerican.com/article/viruse…

When I saw this research article yesterday cataloging all of the tens of thousands of viruses in our bodies, I was both happy and sad because I had pitched this idea several times over the years to collaborators but wasn’t able to do this analysis 🥲

pnas.org/content/118/23…

Viruses are also a cornerstone of gene therapy. These viruses infect human cells but don’t cause disease. They’ve been modified so they only deliver gene therapies and don’t make more copies of viruses.

Scientists who work on these don’t necessarily call themselves virologists.

I’ve been scared all this time of talking about my own research involving viruses (past & present) because I am worried extremists cannot differentiate between the different types of virus research or acknowledge that working with human pathogens is necessary to find treatments.

When people are calling for a ban on all virus research and not recognizing the necessity and the good of some virus research, it makes it extremely challenging for scientists to have a transparent discussion about the risks of different types of pathogen research.

This discussion is even more challenging now that the term “gain-of-function” has hit the mainstream.

Each scientist (and now non-scientist) has a slightly different perception of what is reasonably (or in their opinion, obviously) considered GOF.

I think that, for this discussion to progress, we have to be very clear about what exact experiments or projects are worth reviewing and regulating on an international level.

And these should be judged by risk of causing an outbreak, rather than GOF or genetic engineering.