Gene Engineers Keep Up Their Risky Tinkering, Unfazed by Pandemic Suspicions

The COVID-19 virus has created horrendous worldwide damage, which comes in many forms: long term injuries, deaths, and enormous economic damage. An important question to one day answer is: exactly how did the virus originate? No one in the West currently knows the answer to this question. The main relevant facts are these:

• COVID-19 is caused by a virus called SARS-CoV-2. 
• The first known cases of the virus were reported in December, 2019, in the city of Wuhan, China.
• In this city there are two large virus research labs, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The first of these is one of only two BSL-4 labs in China (a lab certified to do the most risky type of work on viruses).
• An outgoing US secretary of state declared in January, 2021 that the US had intelligence that  lab workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were infected with symptoms like that of COVID-19 or common seasonal illnesses as early as the fall of 2019, but no specific evidence was released to support these claims. 
• The genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is about 95% similar to a Bat CoV RaTG13 virus found in bats. There is a difference of more than 1000 nucleotides between the two viruses (three thousand according to a source cited below). 
• This  Bat CoV RaTG13 virus was known to have previously existed in the Tongguan Mine Shaft in Mojiang, China,  940 miles from Wuhan.
• Researchers transported such a virus (or fragments of it)  from Mojiang to the Wuhan Institute of Virology around 2013.
• In Wuhan not far from the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention there was a Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, a "wet market" that some suspected of involvement in the virus origin, although no bats were sold there. Many of the earliest people infected with COVID-19 had some contact with this market, although many other of the earliest people infected with COVID-19 had no contact with the market.  An article says, "Scientists also said the virus was unusually 'pre-adapted' for rapid human transmission, making it unlikely that the first human contact was made at the seafood market." 

Many say that the SARS-CoV-2 had a purely natural origin. They hypothesize that maybe it arose from the Bat CoV RaTG13 virus, through some kind of unlikely event in which the virus combined with some other virus. 

Others suggest that such an origin would have been too unlikely, and argue that it was probably not just a coincidence that the virus was first reported in a city with two large virus labs.  Some suggest the virus may have arisen from an accidental lab leak. It is known that scientists have sometimes done "gain-of-function" experiments, in which a microbe was genetically altered to make it more infectious.  Some speculate that perhaps well-intentioned scientists may have altered the genome of the Bat CoV RaTG13 virus, to make it more transmissable.  The goal may not have been to create some killer germ, but to learn more about bat viruses or how to make vaccines for them.  A recent article on the US News and World Report site says, "Some researchers still do not rule out the possibility that the virus was released accidentally by a specialist lab." One paper stated that in addition to natural origins the virus "probably originated in a laboratory," and some writers agree; but many experts disagree. 

Plausibly accounting for how a SARS-CoV-2 could have naturally arisen from a Bat CoV RaTG13 with only about 95% similarity is very difficult, and perhaps impossible. There is a difference of more than a thousand nucleotides between the two,  with this being "just right" biological information that makes COVID-19 so transmissible.  Referring to nucleotide base pairs, a scientist claims, "The difference between Chinese bat coronaviruses and SARS-CoV-2 is more than 3,000 base pairs." Such a substantial difference would have been very unlikely to have arisen through any random mutations occurring in a few years before humans started getting COVID-19. 

Right now we are seeing some random mutations that may increase the transmission rate of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus causing COVID-19). Such mutations (which involve variations in only a few nucleotides) are what we might expect, given the virus being present in many millions of people (there are currently 95 million with COVID-19). But before the appearance of SARS-CoV-2, it seems only a  small number of bats had the Bat CoV RaTG13 virus, making it very unlikely that such a virus would have naturally made some sudden leap in lethality because of random mutations, a leap seemingly requiring at least 1000 or more lucky nucleotide changes.  Similarly, a small number of typing monkeys will be very unlikely to produce any meaningful content, but with 100 million typing monkeys, one might occasionally produce by chance a little bit of meaningful content. 

So proponents of a purely natural origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are forced to appeal to speculative and rather hard-to-believe theories of some kind of blending or "recombination" between two different viruses.  Skeptics think this is rather like thinking that a mouse mated with a rat to make a mouse-rat.  In order to substantiate this  idea of a long-shot natural chance blending of two viruses, you would presumably need to find some other virus that is not the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and that has most of the 1000+ nucleotides that are in the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but not in the Bat CoV RaTG13 virus. Such a set of nucleotides has not been found in any other virus. You would also need to have some plausible account of how so much genetic material could have moved from one virus to another, which is another big explanatory difficulty. 

There is also the difficulty of explaining how a bat with the virus could ever naturally have got to Wuhan, so far from any place where bats existed.  Because of such explanatory difficulties, there does not currently exist any plausible detailed theory of a purely natural origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.

When trying to explain the origin of the AIDS virus, scientists were able to come up with a natural origins theory that did not sound too far-fetched. The theory was that the AIDS virus (or a predecessor) had arisen in chimpanzees, and had spread to humans.  That doesn't sound very unbelievable, for we know that chimpanzees are genetically very similar to humans. But it's an entirely different affair if you try to suggest some virus spread naturally from bats to humans. It's rather hard to imagine organisms more dissimilar than a bat and a human. A science news story entitled "Bats cannot directly infect humans with Covid-19" says this: "Sixty-four scientists have said bats do not spread Covid-19."

A team of experts has recently arrived in China to investigate the origin of the virus that causes COVID-19.  Two committees have been organized to investigate the origin of COVID-19, one formed by the WHO and another by the journal The Lancet. If they ever issue a report, we should ask a question before having any trust in their conclusions. That question is: to what extent are such experts vested interests that are stakeholders having a lot to lose if they don't conclude COVID-19 had a purely natural origin? Referring to these two investigations, a story in Wired says, "It’s already clear, however, that both are compromised by a lack of clear procedures to manage conflicts of interest and questionable independence."

Let us consider the very strong self-interest that certain scientists have in COVID-19 being declared to be of purely natural origin. If it were to be discovered that the virus causing COVID-19 arose from a lab leak, that would be a very bad day for any scientist connected with genetic engineering. The consequences might be like this:

• People would become much more distrustful of all gene-splicing research.
• There would probably be all kinds of new restrictions of all types of gene-splicing research, lots of new red tape that scientists would have to wade through.
• There might well be reduced funding of any project involving gene splicing or gene manipulation, and some types of gene-splicing activity that are now allowed might be banned. 
• The credibility of all those who have been cautioning about genetically modified food (GMOs) would probably be increased (fairly or unfairly), and the credibility of all those who have dismissed such people as misguided alarmists would be decreased (fairly or unfairly). 

This would all be very bad for quite a few scientists. So unless they present some compelling proof for purely natural origins, we should tend to distrust the conclusions of any such scientists involved in an investigation into the origins of COVID-19. Putting some scientist involved in gene-splicing on a committee investigating the origin of a virus that may have come from a lab leak is rather like putting the brother of a person being tried for a crime on the jury judging his innocence or guilt. 

Another type of person we should distrust on such a committee is anyone who is a evolutionary biologist. Evolutionary biologists have a long history of telling very far-fetched "just so" stories to avoid having to conclude that some biological innovation involved design. We may assume that in any "chance or design" origins question involving COVID-19, an evolutionary biologist will always come down on the side of chance.  

Preliminary signs offer very little hope that a proper investigation will be done. The China-approved WHO agenda for the investigation of the origin of COVID-19 makes no mention of the major biological research centers in Wuhan, China, just as if no consideration will be given to the hypothesis of a lab leak.  So it will be kind of like an investigation of the mysterious death of a wife in which the husband is ignored as a suspect. 

It is astonishing how oblivious the scientific community seems to be to the not-extremely-unlikely possibility that genetic engineering or reckless viral fiddling might be to blame for a devastating global pandemic.  A prudent precautionary measure would have been for every genetic engineering lab in the world to double their security measures and safety measures as soon as we knew what we knew by March, 2020.  But nothing of the sort seems to have happened.  Astonishingly, a Nobel prize in Chemistry was given in December 2020 to someone chiefly for her work in developing the CRISPR tool that makes gene splicing much easier. Would it not have been a good idea to have figured out the origin of COVID-19 before giving an award that would inevitably be interpreted as an encouragement for gene splicing?

In the New Yorker magazine  in January 2021 there is a long article enthusing about CRISPR and its ability to enable easy gene splicing.  In the frightening words below, the author gets real pleased about her ability to easily create some dangerous novel microbial life form in her kitchen using some gene-editing tool similar to CRISPR, stating the following:

"I have almost no experience in genetics and have not done hands-on lab work since high school. Still, by following the instructions that came in the box from the Odin, in the course of a weekend I was able to create a novel organism. First I grew a colony of E. coli in one of the petri dishes. Then I doused it with the various proteins and bits of designer DNA I’d stored in the freezer. The process swapped out one 'letter' of the bacteria’s genome, replacing an 'A' (adenine) with a 'C' (cytosine). Thanks to this emendation, my new and improved E. coli could, in effect, thumb its nose at streptomycin, a powerful antibiotic. Although it felt a little creepy engineering a drug-resistant strain of E. coli in my kitchen, there was also a definite sense of achievement, so much so that I decided to move on to the second project in the kit: inserting a jellyfish gene into yeast in order to make it glow."

We seem to see in this article a blindness to the dangers of genetic engineering that is truly staggering. We are in the deepest of deep trouble if professional gene splicers have so lax and reckless an attitude. 

No one should be surprised if it turns out that biology research has put mankind at great risk. The chemists gave us such horrors as the  gas weapons used to kill 90,000 in World War I, the Zyklon B gas that killed so many in the Holocaust, the napalm used to kill or disfigure hundreds of  thousands during the Vietnam War, and the addictive synthetic opioids that led to more than a million global deaths by drug overdose. The physicists gave us the nuclear bombs that killed hundreds of thousands either at the end of World War II or through atomic testing that gave countless people cancer. Ever since the invention of the hydrogen bomb, a loaded gun has been held to mankind's head, thanks to the research of the nuclear physicists. So why should we be surprised if we learn that biologists may have created a great risk through unwise research? 

In a USA Today article a professor makes some comments suggesting an indifferent attitude about the origin of COVID-19:

"In some ways, it doesn't matter where the virus came from, said Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. What matters is how to deal with the crisis in the USA. 'When the house is burning down is not the time to start looking for where the matches were,' he said."

I have a much better analogy. If your child's school is on fire, and you think the fire may have started because a certain child was playing with matches, and you know that the child has ten friends that also like to play with matches, then after you see that the fire department has arrived to put out the fire, you should phone the parents of those ten children, and tell them you think the fire may have been started by a child playing with matches, and suggest that they have a long talk with their children about the danger of playing with matches. Nowadays there are many scientists doing work that is like playing with matches. 

We do not yet know exactly how COVID-19 originated, and we do not know whether its origin was purely natural. But it will be  unsurprising if some devastating global pandemic arises one day from some virus accidentally escaping from a laboratory of gene splicers. Here is a relevant song you can sing to yourself, using the catchy melody from the classic rock song "Secret Agent Man."

There's a man whose work creates real danger

He's a splicing "play God" gene arranger

With every splice he makes

Another risk he takes

You might get real sick because of his work

Secret gene lab man

Secret gene lab man

They set him up to play God

And to mess with viral genes

Next time you lunch at a cafeteria

You may catch his gene-spliced bacteria

The gene-spliced germs he gave

May send you to your grave

Tons of us may die because of his work

Secret gene lab man

Secret gene lab man

They set him up to play God

And to mess with viral genes

Postscript: I have noticed a trend in the mainstream media that the the lab leak hypothesis of COVID-19 origin is recently being discussed more and more as a not-extremely-unlikely possibility.  An example is the recent long CNET article here, which states that the lab leak hypothesis "has become increasingly difficult to ignore."  The article quotes an evolutionary biologist as saying, "I think it is plausible that either SARS-CoV-2 emerged 'naturally' from some sort of interaction between humans and animals, or that it was an accidental release from a lab."  The Washington Post recently published an editorial calling the lab leak hypothesis "plausible," but I prefer the more cautious term "not extremely unlikely" to describe such a hypothesis. 

A recent sign of the reckless enthusiasm of gene engineers is the publication of a publicly accessible Nature Protocols paper devoted to telling us in great detail exactly how to genetically engineer variations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, which is rather like publishing a publicly accessible paper on exactly how to manufacture different types of nuclear bombs.  

In February 2021 we saw headlines saying the WHO had said that a lab leak was "extremely unlikely." That statement came not as some official WHO proclamation, but was merely made by Peter Embarek, the head of a WHO team investigating COVID-19 origins. A biosecurity expert says the following about the WHO team (voicing concerns shared by several other experts in the same article):

"'The mission's messaging was clearly political – not scientific – and aligned very closely with Beijing's narrative of a possible origin source outside China's borders. They provided no credible evidence for why they do not feel the lab-leak hypothesis should remain on the table or why other explanations were seen as more likely."

Later the director-general of the WHO Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated this:

"Some questions have been raised as to whether some hypotheses have been discarded. 'Having spoken with some members of the team, I wish to confirm that all hypotheses remain open and require further analysis and studies."

Former CDC director Robert Redfield (a virologist) stated in late March 2021 that he suspected that COVID-19 came from a lab leak.  He cited no proof for such a claim, which many scientists dispute. But I think everyone should be concerned about his description of how most lab virologists behave. He stated this: "Most of us in a lab, when trying to grow a virus, we try to help make it grow better, and better, and better, and better, and better, and better so we can do experiments and figure out about it."