Here's the Cliff Notes version of the argument in this paper:
1. SARS-CoV-2 has a number of unique and unusual genetic features, when compared to close relatives, many of which explain its high virulence and infectivity among humans.
2. A series of research papers published by a group of virologists, dating back a little over a decade, demonstrate (1) a progressively increasing understanding of viral features which make coronaviruses more infectious and virulent in humans, and (2) laboratory capabilities for successfully creating chimeric viruses (e.g. moving one specific protein sequence from a bat SARS-like virus to human SARS virus) to test their hypotheses.
3. Each of the unique and unusual features of SARS-CoV-2 appears somewhere in this line of research.
4. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where the outbreak began, were intimately involved this line of research.
Taken together, the publicly-available evidence indicates that a select group of virologists had the domain knowledge and laboratory capabilities to create chimeric viruses which possess each of the unusual features of SARS-CoV-2, and that select group of virologists was concentrated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology located at ground zero for the pandemic.
The authors feel that, in light of this preponderance of circumstantial evidence, the hypothesis that the biogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 involved human intervention should be seen as the leading (i.e. most likely) explanation.
They do not make any statement about how the virus first infected a live human and spread into a pandemic, but conditioned on their biogenesis hypothesis being true, one would then assume an accidental lab release from WIV as the most likely explanation.
This isn't entirely true, though. SARS-CoV-2 is much less virulent than SARS or MERS.
For a virus that recently crossed the zoonotic barrier, and even moreso for one crossing from bats, it's virulence is actually astonishingly low.
Therefore, the hypothesis of a two-stage crossing to humans, from bats to a larger land based mammal and then to humans is much much more likely, because this would explain high transmissibility due to the necessity to infect despite small lung volumes, as well as much lower virulence.
Therefore, the pre-existing hypothesis seems to match reality more closely than an accidental release. A virus being engineered to be an order of magnitude less virulent seems unlikely to say the least.
Related to the origin hypotheses, the hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec no longer seems as relevant. It was first laid out in a widely disseminated paper in The Lancet [1, see Figure 1B], but since then retrospective wastewater analyses from Italy[2], Spain[3], Brazil and others[4] have found it was circulating much earlier.
"The Italian National Institute of Health looked at 40 sewage samples collected from wastewater treatment plants in northern Italy between October 2019 and February 2020. An analysis released on Thursday said samples taken in Milan and Turin on Dec. 18 showed the presence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus." [2]
and
"Most COVID-19 cases show mild influenza-like symptoms (14) and it has been suggested that some uncharacterized influenza cases may have masked COVID-19 cases in the 2019-2020 season (11). This possibility prompted us to analyze some archival WWTP samples from January 2018 to December 2019 (Figure 2). All samples came out to be negative for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genomes with the exception of March 12, 2019, in which both IP2 and IP4 target assays were positive. This striking finding indicates circulation of the virus in Barcelona long before the report of any COVID-19 case worldwide." [3]
As noted downthread, these points don't particularly point to it being engineered (point 1 applies in spades to SARS and MERS, for example). Most scientists believe the evidence [0] indicates it's of natural origin.
Thanks for the summary. It feels a bit like the intelligent design argument for God. It has these features, we can’t imagine them randomly coming together, so it must have been designed. Add that humans really want to ascribe motive and reason to events, when sometimes it really is jus chance.
I feel step 4. is just a more specific detail of step 2, and the critical tricky piece of their argument is step 3 because that's the step that synthesizes steps 1 and 2. I imagine that the rebuttals would try to show that step 1 or 3 do not hold.
The summary is very much faithful, unfortunately followed by comments from commenters who obviously did not read the paper. I would just add this item, paraphrasing the paper:
In 2015 the Wuhan team of virologists working with researchers from Chapel Hill, NC obtained a chimeric virus able to infect the human respiratory tract, while unexpectedly featuring an increased pathogenesis in the mouse. The dangerous outcome was briefly discussed in the original paper, and further experiments seemed to have been carried out only at the Wuhan lab, possibly because of a US gov ban on such experiments that existed at that time.
A slightly tangential question I'd love to get more perspective on is the impact of the virus being "man made" on our current predicament. Even assuming that the virus was not naturally evolved, and its characteristics are partly caused due to human interventions we're still stuck finding a vaccine, medication and ways of reducing transmission.
Is there still a thread here that this virus is evidence that humans can possibly create chimeric viruses? In my limited understanding, using protein sequences to modify viruses is generally believed to be possible.
Or, and this is a really crazy theory, they were studying it in China because it was a local virus that they were worried might one day infect humans. Maybe they were studying which changes would make it most dangerous because they wanted to be ready if those changes happened naturally. Honest hard work can sometimes look like evil plans, and not every coincidence is the result of conspiracy.
All the things that the article posits have been looked into and the conclusion from most of the scientific community is that it is extraordinarily unlikely that this came from a lab in Wuhan.
It is a false claim that the Covid-19 outbreak started from Wuhan. Scientists from Spain, Italy and Brazil have independently reported the detection of the coronavirus in their city waste water samples dating back to early 2019.
China was the first country to detect the existence of the coronavirus, but it does not mean the virus started in China. If a country announces the finding of a new virus, it makes that country a whistle-blower for the mankind, not the scapegoat.
Epidemiologist Ellie Murray said it better than I could, so I’ll just quote her: “Yes, the chance of a virus like SARS-CoV-2 suddenly arising is fairly low. That’s why we have so few pandemics!!
But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!!
There’s no conspiracy, just statistics”[0]
That said, the fact that the outbreak started so close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology is certainly suggestive that it escaped from the lab, though that doesn’t mean it was necessarily “man made.”
Of the five salient points they make here, I would argue that they are a lot less strong than the authors believe them to be.
Point 1 can also likely be made for the original Sars-CoV, and probably is irrelevant. If they show CoV-2 is more human like than the earlier, then they can begin to make the point.
Point 2 is a gigantic leap of faith - I don’t understand how they connect amino acid inserts into the sequence to gain of function experiments. It makes no sense!
Points 3 & 4 are related: The extra charge on the RBD. If you look at the previous virus, it has a much smaller positively charged patch, and this expands in CoV-2, which makes an evolutionary drift in this direction entirely reasonable. It’s not a wholesale integration of a brand new feature. This charged patch is actually important for binding to heparan sulfate, which gets involved with a bunch of viral entry events (eg AAV, Chinkunguya virus, some other coronaviruses I think). There’s a few recent preprints that discuss the HS relationship with Cov-2, and can go a long way to explain the tropism of the virus. The HS can overcome lower expression of ACE2, by possibly supporting the attachment.
Finally, point 5 is where they throw out DC-SIGN as a receptor. While there are high mannose glycans on the virus particle, I don’t know of anyone proposing this as a receptor for the virus. There is no biochemical/experimental evidence that they show to support this idea.
I will add a few points which I read on a github page and I am unable to verify, so I would be keen to have others review and sanity check:
1) The likely genetic source of SARS cov1 and cov2 is a species of bat in Yunnan province, thousands of miles away, two provinces away from Hubei (Wuhan).
2) The outbreak allegedly started in December in Hubei province when the local bat population (which does not carry this SARS virus?) would be hibernating (?)
3) Only 66% of the initial 41 COVID patients had exposure to Huanan _seafood_ market.
4) A seafood market where you would have to have non-hibernating bats from Yunnan thousands of miles away from Wuhan(?)
5) The seafood market is 13Km away from Wuhan Institute of Virology where Yunnan bats were studied. And 1.4km away from Wuhan's Centre for Disease Prevention & Control (?)
Are these points real or misinformation? If real, why is there no pressure for an independent investigation?
> A Norwegian virologist has made claims about the non-natural origins of the new coronavirus. These claims were, reportedly, in an earlier draft of the paper, and Dr Sørensen has since repeated them to Norwegian press.
> The final version of the research paper, which has undergone peer review and been accepted for publication in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, doesn’t actually make any claims about whether the virus was natural or man-made in its current form.
> The scientific community widely agrees that the virus was not artificially engineered.
This is the immunology equivalent of "jet fuel can't melt steel beams". It's embarrassing to see it here, especially in a community with pretensions of bringing "disruption" to biotech. It would take a long time to catalog all the nonsense here but I'll just say that short subsequence (6aa) BLAST is meaningless and this subsequent claim is just word salad: "Such high human similarity also implies a high risk for the development of severe adverse events/toxicity and even Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE)"
(there's no relationship between the capacity for ADE and self-similarity of amino acid content)
This paper is not evidence, it is speculation based on an inability to see a path other than gain-of-function lab work. These coronaviruses are slow to evolve due to their proofreading capabilities but they recombine readily. The natural path, therefore, is a wild animal (likely pangolin, civet, raccoon dog, or even human) that is simultaneously co-infected by two viruses that recombine.
The problem with genome data centric analysis is that no distinction is made between RNA samples and virus isolates. Key evidence for the gain-of-function hypothesis, is one or more lab isolates that match long segments of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, including non-coding segments.
When Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier suggested that COVID-19 could be man-made, I started taking this view more seriously. Now seeing additional papers coming out supporting this, the case is getting stronger.
I'm not a biologist but I do find it strange that COVID-19 is so infectious in humans. How can a virus which supposedly 'naturally evolved' in a totally unrelated animal species (bats) be so well adapted to spreading between humans? Intuitively, that doesn't make sense.
Also the fact that the WHO has kept changing its story about this virus from the beginning is not reassuring at all. At this stage, as crazy as it is, I'm inclined to believe the conspiracy theorists because the official version comes across as even crazier.
Has this paper either been peer-reviewed or submitted for peer-review as a preprint?
I have a PhD in chemistry and I certainly don’t feel like I’m qualified to judge the quality of the work or the track record of the authors, scientifically.
I think this paper’s deserves a thorough airing and evaluation, but I don’t think Hacker news is a forum well equipped to produce a high signal to noise evaluation on such a highly charged claim, to say the least.
Most of HN is not qualified either to judge the quality of AI, ML, opsec, renewables or any of a whole host of topics that are actually deeply complex.
But that does not mean it does not classify as potentially substantial news, that at least should be visible.
Nobody is arguing that it shouldn’t be more properly vetted when published via normal scientific channels, as these things usually are.
So what would evidence, rather than speculation, look like in this case? A SARS-CoV 2 genome sequence dated before December 2019? Somehow identifying patient zero and corresponding records of their exposure at the lab? I’m skeptical that any hard evidence will be found. It seems to me the origin is likely to remain speculative indefinitely.
If it was the lab someone involved in the research may talk. If it's natural we may find the animal source. The Chinese have not been terribly cooperative with investigating things though so it may remain speculative.
NSA/CIA intelligence catching them red handed discussing how it happened. Of course, with the Iraq fiasco still in our collective memory, who knows if the public would believe it.
For example, in their point 1 they feel that since an aspect of the virus is well-adapted for humans it was not the result of evolution. However, viruses jumping between species happens naturally... because an aspect of the virus happens to be well-adapted for the new host species.
In fact, in this argument they seem to misunderstand the fundamental mechanism of evolution: a random aspect of a replicating organism provides an advantage in an environment, allowing the organism to thrive. For any random aspect that provides an advantage there might be thousands, millions, or more that do not. The existence of a particular unlikely successful aspect is not an argument against natural evolution. We expect many successful aspects to be highly unlikely.
Another example is in the conclusion:
> Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong
I think they rather significantly overstate how “parsimonious” their explanation is, but setting that aside, they scarcely address the alternative. In this article they address ways in which the virus might have been created by scientists, but do not address the ways in which the virus could have evolved naturally. You can’t conclude X is more likely than Y if you only consider the likelihood of X but not Y. So, e.g., they would need to survey the science around how viruses evolve and jump species naturally and show how it does not explain this virus.
There are plenty of more flaws in this article. But I’ll stop here. It’s probably pointless to argue with reason anyway, since the people putting forward this kind of nonsense already don’t care about reason.
Anyway, if this is the best case that the virus was artificially created, we can probably all rest assured it was not.
Just look at the prior chinese coronavirus-related studies, they did antibody tests in villages near bat caves for SARS-like coronaviruses, some of villagers had antibodies in 2015 despite no reported SARS infections ever near the area.
Simplest conclusion:
Zoonotic diseases sometimes jump from bats to humans in Chinese rural areas. The case clusters stay inside the isolated communities and stop naturally due to low population and lack of super-spreader events that can kickstart an epidemic.
In 2019 it happened again, but this time a villager who was infected visited Wuhan => pandemic
It is interesting to think about the origins of Covid-19 with Bayesian statistics in mind. We believe that the virus originated in Wuhan, and the two competing "mainstream" theories are whether the virus came from a wet market or a bio lab.
I don't know exactly how many wet markets exist in China, but I would guess that there are thousands spread across China. A wet market is simply a place where fresh produce/meat is sold (think farmer's market). "In Hong Kong, for example, there is a widespread network of wet markets where thousands of locals shop everyday for their meat and vegetables. There is one in almost every district and none of them trade in exotic or wild animals." [1] Of these $\Theta(1000)$ wet markets, probably a few are located in Wuhan.
Notably, there is only one level 4 bio lab in China, and it happens to be located in Wuhan. [2]
You can't conclude anything with absolute certainty doing this kind of probabilistic analysis, but this line of argument swayed me to seriously consider the possibility that the virus originated in the lab.
And, of course, note that we do not have to assume any malicious intentions. It's easy to imagine a virus accidentally escaping the lab, regardless of whether it evolved naturally or with some human intervention to facilitate research. A State Department cable from 2018 wrote that the lab "has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” [3]
Footnote: Yes, I know that $\Theta(1000)$ just means "some constant" from a mathematical perspective. But I think the idea is clear, even if the mathematical statement taken at face value conveys no information.
Has it been peer reviewed? Otherwise not being an epidemiologist it is hard for me to judge weather the scientific argument presented by this paper is sound.
Impossible for non experts to interpret, but deserving of an equally careful and thorough response in any rebuttal claims.
> Conclusion
> We have deduced the internal logic of published research which resulted in the exact functionalities of SARS-CoV-2,
> including the convergence of agreement from difference classes of source,
> the timings of the stages of the research,
> and
the development of documented capabilities by named institutions and individuals.
> These meet the criteria of means,
timing, agent and place in this reconstructed historical aetiology to produce sufficient confidence in the account to reverse
the burden of proof.
> Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need
to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong before asserting that their evidence is persuasive, most
especially when, as we have indicated, we note puzzling errors in their use of evidence.
> In our companion article, in a
similar forensic manner we will explore the primary evidence used to sustain the hypothesis of zoonotic transfer.
> In neither
this article nor the next do we speculate about motive.
That evidence looks weak IMO, but it's frustrating that the current culture in science isn't "present the best argument for your position no matter how crazy it is" but rather "your arguments better agree with the established consensus unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right."
It's because normal people are not equipped to deal with the cherrypicking and manipulative narrative that these kinds of "evidence" papers show. Take the 5G conspiracy for example, 100+ cell phone towers attacked, and workers setting up attacked as well. Lots of testable assertions made, none backed up with any kind of evidence.
That's because it's exhausting to debunk idiots & those operating in bad faith (often both); it takes several orders of magnitude more work to respond and debunk that unicorns don't exist than it does to post that they do.
> it's frustrating that the current culture in science isn't "present the best argument for your position no matter how crazy it is" but rather "your arguments better agree with the established consensus unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right."
That current culture of science has gradually driven me toward skepticism. Unless I see converging evidence from various independent sources, a claim is just a big "maybe". How many of the claims have been peer reviewed, or replicated (when everyone is busy publishing their own papers, or competing to make the news, or signing book deals)? How much of what is repeated by those with a platform just a gambit, riding on the reputation of those claiming it first? How much is just unchecked assumptions (e.g. that others will have certainly verified the claims)? As you start looking closer, the level of imposture and bullshit is just too high. Scientists are as human as anyone, with everything it implies.
"You better agree with consensus" has always been the current culture in science. It's nothing to do with science itself -- just human emotionality. We don't change unless we have to, unless there's overwhelming evidence that we need to.
If you make a claim that's wildly diverging from established consensus, yes, you're required to bring overwhelming evidence. Because the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the claim being wrong.
There's no point in relitigating everything from first principles unless you can make it extremely clear it's worth the effort.
> "your arguments better agree with the established consensus unless you have overwhelming evidence that you are right."
Isn't that the whole point of science? Big claims require big proof. What standard are you proposing be used instead?
Or are you leaning on the "better" in that sentence in the sense of coercion? As in, you're saying that arguments without overwhelming evidence that contradict established consensus are being suppressed?
If so, how? This garbage is being circulated endlessly. There's not a virologist in the world who isn't aware of it. It's not suppressed. It's just wrong.
I think there's a two way problem. The current state of public discourse on science in the U.S. is very skewed from scientific consensus. For example a YouGov poll found that 49% of Americans think that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab.
This kind of skew between public perception and scientific consensus can create a siege mentality, because it's easy to find someone who has been convinced by some media subculture that something is self-evidently true in spite of reams of evidence to the contrary. As in the vaccination-autism connection situation, all it can take is one scientific study, subsequently debunked, to give an entire movement the validation they need to completely ignore an enormous consensus with plenty of data to back it up.
BTW (need to add this disclaimer on the internets, I often forget) I'm not disagreeing with you, just riffing off your comment with some more thoughts.
It's not just weak, it's incoherent and seemingly written by someone who misunderstood some wikipedia articles on virology.
There's a difference between someone trying to seriously assess the possibility of lab origins for SARS-CoV-2 and whatever GPT-3 generated nonsense this post is.
How many times has a single scientist been chastised by the broader scientific community at first and then their original idea finally accepted as the truth?
Sometimes ideas initially can seem crazy because they're unfamiliar I guess.
I suppose in this case, I oppose this idea because it sounds kind of scary.
You're free to present crazy-sounding arguments in day-to-day conversation, but a journal isn't the place to present crazy arguments. Journals are where you present overwhelming evidence or replicate/falsify existing results.
[+] [-] jkhdigital|5 years ago|reply
1. SARS-CoV-2 has a number of unique and unusual genetic features, when compared to close relatives, many of which explain its high virulence and infectivity among humans.
2. A series of research papers published by a group of virologists, dating back a little over a decade, demonstrate (1) a progressively increasing understanding of viral features which make coronaviruses more infectious and virulent in humans, and (2) laboratory capabilities for successfully creating chimeric viruses (e.g. moving one specific protein sequence from a bat SARS-like virus to human SARS virus) to test their hypotheses.
3. Each of the unique and unusual features of SARS-CoV-2 appears somewhere in this line of research.
4. Researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, located in the city where the outbreak began, were intimately involved this line of research.
Taken together, the publicly-available evidence indicates that a select group of virologists had the domain knowledge and laboratory capabilities to create chimeric viruses which possess each of the unusual features of SARS-CoV-2, and that select group of virologists was concentrated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology located at ground zero for the pandemic.
The authors feel that, in light of this preponderance of circumstantial evidence, the hypothesis that the biogenesis of SARS-CoV-2 involved human intervention should be seen as the leading (i.e. most likely) explanation.
They do not make any statement about how the virus first infected a live human and spread into a pandemic, but conditioned on their biogenesis hypothesis being true, one would then assume an accidental lab release from WIV as the most likely explanation.
[+] [-] sudosysgen|5 years ago|reply
For a virus that recently crossed the zoonotic barrier, and even moreso for one crossing from bats, it's virulence is actually astonishingly low.
Therefore, the hypothesis of a two-stage crossing to humans, from bats to a larger land based mammal and then to humans is much much more likely, because this would explain high transmissibility due to the necessity to infect despite small lung volumes, as well as much lower virulence.
Therefore, the pre-existing hypothesis seems to match reality more closely than an accidental release. A virus being engineered to be an order of magnitude less virulent seems unlikely to say the least.
[+] [-] pmayrgundter|5 years ago|reply
Related to the origin hypotheses, the hypothesis of zoonotic outbreak from a wet market in mid-Dec no longer seems as relevant. It was first laid out in a widely disseminated paper in The Lancet [1, see Figure 1B], but since then retrospective wastewater analyses from Italy[2], Spain[3], Brazil and others[4] have found it was circulating much earlier.
"The Italian National Institute of Health looked at 40 sewage samples collected from wastewater treatment plants in northern Italy between October 2019 and February 2020. An analysis released on Thursday said samples taken in Milan and Turin on Dec. 18 showed the presence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus." [2]
and
"Most COVID-19 cases show mild influenza-like symptoms (14) and it has been suggested that some uncharacterized influenza cases may have masked COVID-19 cases in the 2019-2020 season (11). This possibility prompted us to analyze some archival WWTP samples from January 2018 to December 2019 (Figure 2). All samples came out to be negative for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 genomes with the exception of March 12, 2019, in which both IP2 and IP4 target assays were positive. This striking finding indicates circulation of the virus in Barcelona long before the report of any COVID-19 case worldwide." [3]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7159299/ [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-... [3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.13.20129627v... [4] https://twitter.com/LMeigre/status/1282819131390210050
[+] [-] hazeii|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/the-new-coronavirus-could-have-...
[+] [-] matwood|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerome-jh|5 years ago|reply
In 2015 the Wuhan team of virologists working with researchers from Chapel Hill, NC obtained a chimeric virus able to infect the human respiratory tract, while unexpectedly featuring an increased pathogenesis in the mouse. The dangerous outcome was briefly discussed in the original paper, and further experiments seemed to have been carried out only at the Wuhan lab, possibly because of a US gov ban on such experiments that existed at that time.
[+] [-] m0hit|5 years ago|reply
A slightly tangential question I'd love to get more perspective on is the impact of the virus being "man made" on our current predicament. Even assuming that the virus was not naturally evolved, and its characteristics are partly caused due to human interventions we're still stuck finding a vaccine, medication and ways of reducing transmission.
Is there still a thread here that this virus is evidence that humans can possibly create chimeric viruses? In my limited understanding, using protein sequences to modify viruses is generally believed to be possible.
[+] [-] sandworm101|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Cantbekhan|5 years ago|reply
5. Cui Bono?
[+] [-] chris_wot|5 years ago|reply
There is a massive amount of misinformation around COVID-19. Check out this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation_related_to_the_...
All the things that the article posits have been looked into and the conclusion from most of the scientific community is that it is extraordinarily unlikely that this came from a lab in Wuhan.
[+] [-] ezVoodoo|5 years ago|reply
China was the first country to detect the existence of the coronavirus, but it does not mean the virus started in China. If a country announces the finding of a new virus, it makes that country a whistle-blower for the mankind, not the scapegoat.
[+] [-] mjirv|5 years ago|reply
But conditional on being in a pandemic the chance that the virus that arises to cause it is like SARS-CoV-2 is super high!!
There’s no conspiracy, just statistics”[0]
That said, the fact that the outbreak started so close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology is certainly suggestive that it escaped from the lab, though that doesn’t mean it was necessarily “man made.”
[0]https://twitter.com/epiellie/status/1281960135796101120?s=21
[+] [-] maest|5 years ago|reply
The paper was published in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics[0] (this accepted version is materially different from the original link posted here).
Only thing I could find about Birger Sorensen's was his Linkedin page [1a] and the Immunor page where he's listed as the Chairman [1b].
Angus Dagleish looks legit, although it's notable that he did stand for Parliament in 2016 as a UKIP candidate, according to Wikipedia[2].
Can't find any primary sources for Andreas Susrud.
[0]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
[1a]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/birger-sorensen-174a20b/?origina... btw, if this is considered doxxing, let me know and I can remove the link.
[1b]: https://immunor.com/about-immunor/board-of-directors/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Dalgleish
[+] [-] hirenj|5 years ago|reply
Point 1 can also likely be made for the original Sars-CoV, and probably is irrelevant. If they show CoV-2 is more human like than the earlier, then they can begin to make the point.
Point 2 is a gigantic leap of faith - I don’t understand how they connect amino acid inserts into the sequence to gain of function experiments. It makes no sense!
Points 3 & 4 are related: The extra charge on the RBD. If you look at the previous virus, it has a much smaller positively charged patch, and this expands in CoV-2, which makes an evolutionary drift in this direction entirely reasonable. It’s not a wholesale integration of a brand new feature. This charged patch is actually important for binding to heparan sulfate, which gets involved with a bunch of viral entry events (eg AAV, Chinkunguya virus, some other coronaviruses I think). There’s a few recent preprints that discuss the HS relationship with Cov-2, and can go a long way to explain the tropism of the virus. The HS can overcome lower expression of ACE2, by possibly supporting the attachment.
Finally, point 5 is where they throw out DC-SIGN as a receptor. While there are high mannose glycans on the virus particle, I don’t know of anyone proposing this as a receptor for the virus. There is no biochemical/experimental evidence that they show to support this idea.
[+] [-] DoingIsLearning|5 years ago|reply
1) The likely genetic source of SARS cov1 and cov2 is a species of bat in Yunnan province, thousands of miles away, two provinces away from Hubei (Wuhan).
Ref: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708621/
2) The outbreak allegedly started in December in Hubei province when the local bat population (which does not carry this SARS virus?) would be hibernating (?)
3) Only 66% of the initial 41 COVID patients had exposure to Huanan _seafood_ market.
Ref: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
4) A seafood market where you would have to have non-hibernating bats from Yunnan thousands of miles away from Wuhan(?)
5) The seafood market is 13Km away from Wuhan Institute of Virology where Yunnan bats were studied. And 1.4km away from Wuhan's Centre for Disease Prevention & Control (?)
Are these points real or misinformation? If real, why is there no pressure for an independent investigation?
[+] [-] i_cannot_hack|5 years ago|reply
> The final version of the research paper, which has undergone peer review and been accepted for publication in the Quarterly Review of Biophysics Discovery, doesn’t actually make any claims about whether the virus was natural or man-made in its current form.
> The scientific community widely agrees that the virus was not artificially engineered.
https://fullfact.org/health/richard-dearlove-coronavirus-cla...
[+] [-] iskander|5 years ago|reply
(there's no relationship between the capacity for ADE and self-similarity of amino acid content)
[+] [-] sradman|5 years ago|reply
The problem with genome data centric analysis is that no distinction is made between RNA samples and virus isolates. Key evidence for the gain-of-function hypothesis, is one or more lab isolates that match long segments of the SARS-CoV-2 genome, including non-coding segments.
[+] [-] jupenur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptica|5 years ago|reply
I'm not a biologist but I do find it strange that COVID-19 is so infectious in humans. How can a virus which supposedly 'naturally evolved' in a totally unrelated animal species (bats) be so well adapted to spreading between humans? Intuitively, that doesn't make sense.
Also the fact that the WHO has kept changing its story about this virus from the beginning is not reassuring at all. At this stage, as crazy as it is, I'm inclined to believe the conspiracy theorists because the official version comes across as even crazier.
[+] [-] chrisbrandow|5 years ago|reply
I have a PhD in chemistry and I certainly don’t feel like I’m qualified to judge the quality of the work or the track record of the authors, scientifically.
I think this paper’s deserves a thorough airing and evaluation, but I don’t think Hacker news is a forum well equipped to produce a high signal to noise evaluation on such a highly charged claim, to say the least.
[+] [-] pldr2244|5 years ago|reply
But that does not mean it does not classify as potentially substantial news, that at least should be visible.
Nobody is arguing that it shouldn’t be more properly vetted when published via normal scientific channels, as these things usually are.
[+] [-] bwi4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jupp0r|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] casefields|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmull|5 years ago|reply
For example, in their point 1 they feel that since an aspect of the virus is well-adapted for humans it was not the result of evolution. However, viruses jumping between species happens naturally... because an aspect of the virus happens to be well-adapted for the new host species.
In fact, in this argument they seem to misunderstand the fundamental mechanism of evolution: a random aspect of a replicating organism provides an advantage in an environment, allowing the organism to thrive. For any random aspect that provides an advantage there might be thousands, millions, or more that do not. The existence of a particular unlikely successful aspect is not an argument against natural evolution. We expect many successful aspects to be highly unlikely.
Another example is in the conclusion:
> Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong
I think they rather significantly overstate how “parsimonious” their explanation is, but setting that aside, they scarcely address the alternative. In this article they address ways in which the virus might have been created by scientists, but do not address the ways in which the virus could have evolved naturally. You can’t conclude X is more likely than Y if you only consider the likelihood of X but not Y. So, e.g., they would need to survey the science around how viruses evolve and jump species naturally and show how it does not explain this virus.
There are plenty of more flaws in this article. But I’ll stop here. It’s probably pointless to argue with reason anyway, since the people putting forward this kind of nonsense already don’t care about reason.
Anyway, if this is the best case that the virus was artificially created, we can probably all rest assured it was not.
[+] [-] belltaco|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user_50123890|5 years ago|reply
Just look at the prior chinese coronavirus-related studies, they did antibody tests in villages near bat caves for SARS-like coronaviruses, some of villagers had antibodies in 2015 despite no reported SARS infections ever near the area.
Simplest conclusion: Zoonotic diseases sometimes jump from bats to humans in Chinese rural areas. The case clusters stay inside the isolated communities and stop naturally due to low population and lack of super-spreader events that can kickstart an epidemic.
In 2019 it happened again, but this time a villager who was infected visited Wuhan => pandemic
[+] [-] anikan_vader|5 years ago|reply
I don't know exactly how many wet markets exist in China, but I would guess that there are thousands spread across China. A wet market is simply a place where fresh produce/meat is sold (think farmer's market). "In Hong Kong, for example, there is a widespread network of wet markets where thousands of locals shop everyday for their meat and vegetables. There is one in almost every district and none of them trade in exotic or wild animals." [1] Of these $\Theta(1000)$ wet markets, probably a few are located in Wuhan.
Notably, there is only one level 4 bio lab in China, and it happens to be located in Wuhan. [2]
You can't conclude anything with absolute certainty doing this kind of probabilistic analysis, but this line of argument swayed me to seriously consider the possibility that the virus originated in the lab.
And, of course, note that we do not have to assume any malicious intentions. It's easy to imagine a virus accidentally escaping the lab, regardless of whether it evolved naturally or with some human intervention to facilitate research. A State Department cable from 2018 wrote that the lab "has a serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.” [3]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/14/asia/china-wet-market-coronav...
[2] https://www.livescience.com/china-lab-meets-biosafety-levels...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/state-depar...
Footnote: Yes, I know that $\Theta(1000)$ just means "some constant" from a mathematical perspective. But I think the idea is clear, even if the mathematical statement taken at face value conveys no information.
[+] [-] vzaliva|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gowld|5 years ago|reply
> Conclusion
> We have deduced the internal logic of published research which resulted in the exact functionalities of SARS-CoV-2,
> including the convergence of agreement from difference classes of source,
> the timings of the stages of the research,
> and the development of documented capabilities by named institutions and individuals.
> These meet the criteria of means, timing, agent and place in this reconstructed historical aetiology to produce sufficient confidence in the account to reverse the burden of proof.
> Henceforth, those who would maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic arose from zoonotic transfer need to explain precisely why this more parsimonious account is wrong before asserting that their evidence is persuasive, most especially when, as we have indicated, we note puzzling errors in their use of evidence.
> In our companion article, in a similar forensic manner we will explore the primary evidence used to sustain the hypothesis of zoonotic transfer.
> In neither this article nor the next do we speculate about motive.
[+] [-] Robotbeat|5 years ago|reply
EDIT: It sounds less like a scientific/academic argument and more like the caricature of a legal argument.
[+] [-] ggm|5 years ago|reply
https://virological.org/t/tackling-rumors-of-a-suspicious-or...
[+] [-] barbacoa|5 years ago|reply
Basically they were studying animal to human virus transmission by bio engineering bat viruses to infect human cells.
https://project-evidence.github.io/
[+] [-] etangent|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] belltaco|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bshoemaker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mekoka|5 years ago|reply
That current culture of science has gradually driven me toward skepticism. Unless I see converging evidence from various independent sources, a claim is just a big "maybe". How many of the claims have been peer reviewed, or replicated (when everyone is busy publishing their own papers, or competing to make the news, or signing book deals)? How much of what is repeated by those with a platform just a gambit, riding on the reputation of those claiming it first? How much is just unchecked assumptions (e.g. that others will have certainly verified the claims)? As you start looking closer, the level of imposture and bullshit is just too high. Scientists are as human as anyone, with everything it implies.
[+] [-] logjammin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] groby_b|5 years ago|reply
If you make a claim that's wildly diverging from established consensus, yes, you're required to bring overwhelming evidence. Because the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the claim being wrong.
There's no point in relitigating everything from first principles unless you can make it extremely clear it's worth the effort.
[+] [-] jonahbenton|5 years ago|reply
Always how it has been, since beginning of the thing we call "science."
[+] [-] newacct583|5 years ago|reply
Isn't that the whole point of science? Big claims require big proof. What standard are you proposing be used instead?
Or are you leaning on the "better" in that sentence in the sense of coercion? As in, you're saying that arguments without overwhelming evidence that contradict established consensus are being suppressed?
If so, how? This garbage is being circulated endlessly. There's not a virologist in the world who isn't aware of it. It's not suppressed. It's just wrong.
[+] [-] lemmsjid|5 years ago|reply
This kind of skew between public perception and scientific consensus can create a siege mentality, because it's easy to find someone who has been convinced by some media subculture that something is self-evidently true in spite of reams of evidence to the contrary. As in the vaccination-autism connection situation, all it can take is one scientific study, subsequently debunked, to give an entire movement the validation they need to completely ignore an enormous consensus with plenty of data to back it up.
BTW (need to add this disclaimer on the internets, I often forget) I'm not disagreeing with you, just riffing off your comment with some more thoughts.
[+] [-] iskander|5 years ago|reply
There's a difference between someone trying to seriously assess the possibility of lab origins for SARS-CoV-2 and whatever GPT-3 generated nonsense this post is.
[+] [-] bamboozled|5 years ago|reply
Sometimes ideas initially can seem crazy because they're unfamiliar I guess.
I suppose in this case, I oppose this idea because it sounds kind of scary.
[+] [-] lord_braleigh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] La1n|5 years ago|reply
It's been that way for a long time, with Kuhn writing a whole book on it
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_...