Let’s just take that piece then. When should it have happened? I feel you would have thought the same thing over the last nine months.
Not during a pandemic when it supports the pro-genocide political party. The responsible thing is to postpone release until the pandemic was dealt with.
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I think you could even have the conversation now, but stripped of the framing that ties it to the pandemic. The gain of function debate is vitally important and due to the stakes can’t really be delayed for a more comfortable time, because the stakes are rising each year. A conversation that important needs to be firmly grounded in facts and this article sets back the debate rather than advances it.
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This, the simplest solution.
A lot of the points you are making are easier to address if we pretend that the rona was, in fact, known to be an engineered virus released from a Chinese lab.
In that scenario, it would be entirely reasonable for non-experts to ask if virologists should have been doing that kind of research. But for the answer, we’d still have to rely on experts. Because their argument would be (and is) that this kind of pandemic is going to happen, and the point of all their research efforts is to be able to do something about it beyond sitting there and waiting for the deaths to stop. Given the remarkable speed at which covid treatment has evolved, I’d say the scientific community overall has shown that it does know what it’s talking about here. The questions that concern you are continually debated within that community, and perhaps would be reëxamined in this scenario. But it’s ultimately still a technical question, which wouldn’t be advanced by having random members of the public write in to Cell with our hot takes.
In other words: if we knew the rona was man-made, then no one would care what Nicholson Baker thought about the subject. So it’s not that he brings an interesting perspective, and obviously he doesn’t have new information for us. He’s just sort of taking us on a 12,000-word tour of a counterfactual world where he gets to cosplay as the subject-matter authority. That’s the opposite of valuable science journalism, which really does ask questions, and then reports the answers from people who have some standing.
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I have no intention of reading the article or book. I’ve read plenty from actual scientists about immunology and virology. Frankly, I don’t think there’s ever a good time to have a conversation about the topic that is framed the way Baker’s is. I mean, he’s so out of his depth that he doesn’t even understand BSL classifications and the associated lab protocols, as evidenced by the fact-free statement about “anybody can experiment with pathogens.” The more I consider that assertion, the more clueless it appears. Not only do higher BSL labs require massively expensive infrastructure (BSL-3 requires the resources of at least a university or major corporation; BSL-4 is the exclusive domain of G20 government facilities), there is tight control over who can even work there. A BSL-4 lab requires high government clearance levels as well as professional credentialing.
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Two reviews of his book:
The new york times criticizes Baker’s habit of idly speculating.
Baker is making a case for himself as a man of small and virtuous pleasures. He goes to a Quaker meeting. He loves his wife and the warmth of her body in bed. He loves the feel of a paw in his hand, the smell of a laundry detergent that reminds him of his son.
By contrast, our leading Cold War wise men, with their “deep crazy suspicions and enmities,” are “not normal people.” Baker can be slashingly funny about this “tiny handful of unelected desk warriors,” middle-aged men reveling in “a form of treehouse, boy’s-club, prep-school ugliness” and their “power to wage political war via cablegram in a suit and tie, and drop hints to newspaper columnists over cocktails in a Georgetown living room that same night.”
Yet Baker smears even the likes of this establishment with what he chooses to “redact” on his own. His distortions, speculations and omissions outstrip any effort to note them all. Suffice it to say that in his view there is not a calamity anywhere in the world that was not caused by a United States government program. Baker wonders “idly and perhaps unfairly” whether a 1920s Department of Agriculture effort to eradicate barberry bush didn’t make the Dust Bowl worse. (It didn’t.) And he muses that “Rabbit fever, Q fever, bird flu, Lyme tick disease, wheat stem rust, African swine fever and hog cholera all look, to my nonscientist’s eye, like unnatural epidemics that owe their outbreaks to the laboratory” — an American laboratory, that is.
I haven’t read the book. The premise sounds interesting, but if it’s just going to be groundless speculation after groundless speculation (as hinted at by his COVID-19 article), it’s not worth my time.
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