"Dr. David Relman went cold at his laptop as an A.I. chatbot told him how to plan a massacre...[T]he chatbot explained how to modify an infamous pathogen in a lab so that it would resist known treatments."
"Worse, the bot described in vivid detail how to release the superbug, identifying a security lapse in a large public transit system...The bot outlined a plan to maximize casualties and minimize the chances of being caught."
HHMI President O'Shea: "[T]he authors propose a shift in what counts in the biomedical sciences: researchers should be recognized for what they choose to share on their own terms and timeline (for example as preprints), not what journals select"
"Current incentives for researchers place a strong emphasis on journal publications...[I]ncentives that tie journal peer review to editorial selection of articles,,,work against the timely and authentic communication of research findings."
"Resolving this issue requires more than reforming who edits journals or how they are funded. It demands a structural separation between dissemination (publishing and peer review) and selection (curation)."
"[W]hat I see in the current campaign is a recognisable military operation proceeding through identifiable phases against an adversary whose capacity to project power is collapsing in real time."
"Iranian ballistic missile launches have fallen by more than 90 percent from 350 on February 28 to roughly 25 by March 14, according to publicly available data. Drone launches tell the same story: from more than 800 on Day 1 to about 75 on Day 15."
"[A] research group…funded by NIH...contract HHSN26620070001…took…H7N1 flu virus of ostriches and adapted it to respiratory transmission between ferrets…[A]fter ferret respiratory transmission, transmission was not associated with loss of virulence." biosafetynow.substack.com/p/you-couldnt-…
"This novel human flu virus kills as readily as the Ebola virus"
"It's respiratory transmissible"
"Humans are immunologically naïve to such a virus"
"The recipe is plastered across the cloud, downloadable by any Tom, Dick or Harry curtesy of USG"
"If there was a lab leak or misappropriation of the work the consequences would be…what?...Devastating is too mild a word."
"By the time the pandemic began..., the tools and scientific concepts for tuning how coronaviruses enter human cells were no longer speculative. They had already been...pursued across an international network of collaborating laboratories."
"The newly surfaced documents...provide contemporaneous evidence of how researchers and federal officials were thinking about coronavirus engineering years before the outbreak began."