No. I can hypothesize that 2 + 2 = 5 but that doesn’t mean it is possible. People don’t usually hypothesize impossible things but some of us are very dumb.
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Great, then let’s stop right there.
This is bullshit nonsense and it’s shameful of BB to be amplifying this racist and xenophobic garbage.
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I think we’re better off doing a 5000-word piece about the existence of Helen Keller being a fraud. Because that’s the kind of world that Baker is sending his piece into.
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Essentially, your analogy means that no one can trust anything anyone writes as their profession, because they inherently have the self-interest of wanting people to be interested in their writing, and so to continue to be paid for it.
I’m cool with disagreement on the article, and have myself changed my mind to an extent about its effectiveness because of its focusing too much on the covid-19 lab side, but I just really dislike “attack on author’s motives” as a primary line of response. It’s so reductive and a low-level of argument. Baker is a good writer, a valuable writer, a thoughtful writer, and it’s dispiriting to see BoingBoing as a place where disagreement means nefariousness or cluelessness. We have so much of that in our discourse today.
I guess that I choose to believe that those idiots never existed.
Just to piss them off.
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And yet that is his motive for writing this piece. He wrote a book on the general history of lab accidents and then tried to sell it by glomming onto COVID with a totally unsupported theory that he got a friendly magazine to publish.
All true. But if we’re going to discuss the author himself, Baker is also an attention-seeking wannabe gadfly. His highbrow and provocative fiction (e.g. Vox and The Fermata) never got him much public notice outside the insular world of publishing’s and academia’s bien pensants, so he started writing provocative and contrarian non-fiction (Double Fold and Human Smoke come to mind) in an attempt to widen his appeal. Unfortunately for him, his complex writing style is such that it’s not going to get him the general public attention he craves, even when New York magazine tries to provide him with a popular platform to sell his work.
If you want to be a Hitchens- or Amis-style literary “bad boy” in the U.S. you have to take your Flesch-Kincaid level down at least a couple of notches, something Baker is unwilling or unable to do.
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A virus escaping from a research lab is a slim possibility.
Nowhere near as possible as it jumping ship from animal to human - see Ebola, Mad Cow, etc.
Manufacturing a virus to intentionally cause harm? I call conspiracy.
The best way, I think, to shoot down a conspiracy, is simply to ask “why?”
Why manufacture something so ineffectual (cold hearted percentages)?
Why not stick to something effective (novichok)?
My tuppence worth.
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Your arms must be tired from carrying all this water.
In your race to win at white knight commenter you failed to miss the point. Baker’s desire to create a conversation about lab security and what research should be done is ill-timed and the spitballing of what ifs surrounding our current situation is irresponsible.
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Equally- they can not prove that Nicholson Baker didn’t purposely cause the release.
And wasn’t responsible for the recent “mutations”; if mutations they were.
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If we as a society cannot question what different scientific groups are doing with technology that can legitimately have world-spanning effects, where does that lead us?
We can do that without resorting to innuendo and just-so suggestions. Baker’s piece is full of salacious half-baked bullshit teasing up to the line of irresponsible conspiracism. If he’s such a talented writer, he could have found many other ways to make the same points without the slimy bullshit.
Any scientists can work on anything they want without oversight or visibility?
No one said that or suggested it should be the case. Take your strawman back behind the shed where it belongs.
If we’re not going to develop reasoned, healthy conversations about our values on where science can go, we are abdicating our responsibility to have a democratic society.
This piece isn’t a reasoned conversation. It’s a tabloid story dressed up for petit bourgeousie pretenders.
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Noted, and it makes sense.
But I refer you to a book called ‘The Hot Zone.’
I read it years ago for research. These people are working with Ebola, Marburg, etc. All the really nasty shit. Level Four viruses, which basically means going through four different protection levels before reaching the outside world.
So something that does as little “comparative” harm as corona and is as easy to kill, should hardly be difficult to contain from one of these professional places.
Which is why I consider the escape theory improbable.
And now having said that, if these viruses are only treated as Level 1, I can see a hole in my argument.
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Proving a negative is virtually impossible. And there is absolutely no evidence for artificial origin, while there have been closely related coronaviridae identified in bats, so the most straightforward answer is most likely. As I have previously stated, if you want to overturn accepted scientific consensus, have at it, that is how breakthroughs happen. But you better bring evidence, and lots of it, or you will get laughed out of the arena.
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They aren’t, but when their musings conflict with the science, their lack of knowledge becomes noteworthy in assessing their recommendations. Some of the best reporting on this pandemic has come from sources who aren’t scientists, but if you are going to buck the best scientific evidence, in a way that just happens to line up with racist conspiracy theories you need actual evidence, not just a general hand waving over the existence of risks.
Admitting you may be wrong and are just asking questions is such a common tactic that there are common misdirection tactic that it has humorous names.
Those concerns are real. His hypothesis isn’t. One of the reasons people take specialists in the field more seriously than a novelist JAQing off in the pages of New York magazine is that they are better able to parse the nuances of the risk. The speed with which we were able to get a vaccine was only possible because of advancements made studying SARS, MERS, and other coronaviruses in labs. Here’s some popular reporting on the other side of that coin. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/727/transcript This one is about how the specific skills studying other coronaviruses sped up the current studies. Same people slightly more technical in press release form COVID-19 Vaccines with UT Ties Arrived Quickly After Years in the Making | Department of Molecular Biosciences And a broader group of researchers using those skills https://cen.acs.org/analytical-chemistry/structural-biology/structural-biologists-revealed-new-coronaviruss/98/i17 How far back in time would our research be without the decade of experience those researchers had working on coronavirus structures? How far without the lab equipment funded and ready to go?
There are records of what type of studies are done in these labs, not just the official records and filings, but also the papers and registrations with the protein database and similar professional work products. Jumping to that assumption without actual evidence also requires assuming that the people in the labs were just not creating any work product that would inevitably point directly to them, like the protein database. When the pandemic started basically every skilled professional on the planet started digging through their rolodex and any relevant papers. Someone would have noticed that people were working with remarkably similar materials. A lab accident would also have likely shown up with the lab workers being among the first and hardest hit, something that is missing in the evidence.
No, but we can be thoughtful about passing on information that conflicts with the best available information during a life and death pandemic.
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Weaker. Feel free to prove it.
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Once again, if “author motives” were the only issue with this article, that’d be one thing. But it’s not. If Mary Roach wants to write an interesting article on dead bodies to tie into her book about dead bodies, more power to her. If she writes a dubiously researched and dangerously speculative overhyped article about exploding cadavers in advance of releasing a book about the dangers of your neighborhood morgue, that’s a different kettle of fish.
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Don’t you mean you’re?
FYI- personally attacking other members is against the terms of service here.
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Tabloid innuendo and purple prose. Irresponsible bullshit from a writer too in love with his own words. He can’t help but add suggestive little flourishes everywhere. It’s gross.
If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab.
We are? Have you ever worried about leaving the stove on or the front door unlocked? Implying prudence on the part of the director is a smoking gun for being obligated to entertain his unsupported lab hypothesis is complete whack bullshit.
What do you do if you run a well-funded laboratory, an NIH “center of excellence,” and your emergent virus is no longer actually making people sick? You start squeezing it and twisting it into different shapes. Making it stand on its hind legs and quack like a duck, or a bat. Or breathe like a person.
Bitch, you do those things while it is still making people sick to understand how it works. You don’t wait around and juice up your methods to keep being funded. Maybe Mr. Baker is telling on himself here: once his other prose wasn’t receiving an eager audience, he had to turn to this tortured hypothesis and start squeezing it and twisting it into different shapes. Execrable.
Perhaps viral nature hit a bull’s-eye of airborne infectivity, with almost no mutational drift, no period of accommodation and adjustment, or perhaps some lab worker somewhere, inspired by Baric’s work with human airway tissue, took a spike protein that was specially groomed to colonize and thrive deep in the ciliated, mucosal tunnels of our inner core and cloned it onto some existing viral bat backbone. It could have happened in Wuhan, but — because anyone can now “print out” a fully infectious clone of any sequenced disease — it could also have happened at Fort Detrick, or in Texas, or in Italy, or in Rotterdam, or in Wisconsin, or in some other citadel of coronaviral inquiry. No conspiracy — just scientific ambition, and the urge to take exciting risks and make new things, and the fear of terrorism, and the fear of getting sick. Plus a whole lot of government money.
A nod to nature (and a poor understanding of evolution and mutation) in the beginning, but it’s rapidly drowned in all the money money money innuendo that follows. Of course, Mr. Baker, let’s imply that everyone else is as cravenly motivated by lucre as you instead of making a substantial point of fact.
Baric, Jonna Mazet, and Peter Daszak of EcoHealth worked together for years — and Daszak also routed Predict money to Shi Zhengli’s bat-surveillance team in Wuhan through his nonprofit, mingling it with NIH money and money from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
The fuck. “Mingling it with NIH money”…no. That’s not how any federal contracting works. Despite Mr. Baker implying that Daszak just made a decision to do his friend Zhengli a favor, doing subcontracting for federal contracts requires first climbing a small mountain of paperwork and oversight before a single wet penny gets sent anywhere.
Daszak, for his part, seems to have viewed his bat quests as part of an epic, quasi-religious death match.
I think Mr. Baker is just jealous that Dr. Daszak is better at purple prose than he is: ““Will we succumb to the multitudinous horde? Are we to be cast downward into chthonic chaos represented here by the heaped up gibbering phantasmagory against which we rail and struggle?”” Nice setting for a DnD campaign.
Despite this wide-ranging effort, there is at the moment no animal host that zoonoticists can point to as the missing link. There’s also no single, agreed-upon hypothesis to explain how the disease may have traveled from the bat reservoirs of Yunnan all the way to Wuhan, seven hours by train, without leaving any sick people behind and without infecting anyone along the way.
Despite all the documentation, we also can’t verify that the astronauts actually went to the moon and not Mars. Mr. Baker’s love of dangling implications is getting pretty gross at this point.
This patchwork pathogen, which allegedly has evolved without human meddling, first came to notice in the only city in the world with a laboratory that was paid for years by the U.S. government to perform experiments on certain obscure and heretofore unpublicized strains of bat viruses — which bat viruses then turned out to be, out of all the organisms on the planet, the ones that are most closely related to the disease. What are the odds?
Zero understanding of zoonotic reservoirs, unmapped viral diversity, or how science actually works. No words at all devoted to imagining how much worse off we’d be in this pandemic if the Wuhan laboratory had never done any work on coronaviruses.
In July, I discovered a number of volunteer analysts who were doing a new kind of forensic, samizdat science, hunched over the letter code of the SARS-2 genome like scholars deciphering the cuneiform impressions in Linear B tablets.
A whole paragraph of people who agree with him, but no words to spare for those who disagree with him.
Hoping to smooth over controversy by showing due diligence, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, founded in the BioShield era under President Bush, paid a consulting firm, Gryphon Scientific, to write a report on gain-of-function research, which by now was simply referred to as GoF. In chapter six of this thousand-page dissertation, published in April 2016, the consultants take up the question of coronaviruses. “Increasing the transmissibility of the coronaviruses could significantly increase the chance of a global pandemic due to a laboratory accident,” they wrote.
A thousand page report that clearly he didn’t fully read, but only combed for supporting quotes.
It was “an ongoing threat,” Baric wrote. But was it? Civets and camels that are exposed to a lot of bat-guano dust may be an ongoing threat and a manageable one. But the bats themselves just want to hang in their caves and not be bothered by frowning sightseers in spacesuits who want to poke Q-tips in their bottoms.
Does Mr. Baker not go outside? Bats move around, die, get eaten.
Daszak was outraged (“I am not trained as a private detective”), and again he fought back. He was reluctant to give up his own secrets, too. “Conspiracy-theory outlets and politically motivated organizations have made Freedom of Information Act requests on our grants and all of our letters and emails to the NIH,” he told Nature . “We don’t think it’s fair that we should have to reveal everything we do.”
This is a fair point to bring up, but it’s framed all wrong. Mr. Baker could have tied this back to Lipsitch & other’s concerns around GoF expts as a call for transparency, but instead went for the cheap tabloid trick of painting Daszak as a simple villain.
It was actually a case of industrial overexposure to an infectious substance — what we might call a massive OSHA violation. The bat disease that the men encountered wasn’t necessarily all that dangerous except in an environment of immunosuppressive overload.
“Immunosuppressive overload” is made-up bullshit, especially in the context of respiratory viruses marked by massive inflammation.
But in the climate of gonzo laboratory experimentation, at a time when all sorts of tweaked variants and amped-up substitutions were being tested on cell cultures and in the lungs of humanized mice and other experimental animals, isn’t it possible that somebody in Wuhan took the virus that had been isolated from human samples, or the RaTG13 bat virus sequence, or both (or other viruses from that same mine shaft that Shi Zhengli has recently mentioned in passing), and used them to create a challenge disease for vaccine research — a chopped-and-channeled version of RaTG13 or the miners’ virus that included elements that would make it thrive and even rampage in people?
Look at this bullshit. Just look at it. Isn’t it possible that Mr. Baker has done a shit job of evaluating the evidence objectively and has been on a biased witch hunt for factoids and insinuations to support his anchoring bias (which he helpfully included with his March journal entry)?
IN SUM:
UUGGGHHHHHHHHH
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“Loose Change” was about as credible as this litany of hogwash. “Isn’t it possible?” “What if?” “Mightn’t we conclude?” If you like reading stuff like this as fiction, more power to you. You want to argue that there is anything in it that’s useful or relevant to the real-world crisis we are living through? Yeah, no.
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Excellent point. It’s definitely not the case. Different pathogens are classified into categories based on the hazard they pose, and labs that handle them must meet rigid criteria in order to qualify to study them. For example, anybody can study a relatively harmless pathogen with a basic lab setup. But harmful pathogens require more stringent and expensive lab security and containment. There are only a few thousand Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) labs in the world that can handle dangerous pathogens, and only a handful globally that are allowed to handle the real monsters of the infectious disease world. You can count the number of BSL-4 labs in North America on one hand.
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