US Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih.html?_r=0

by fern12 • 9 years ago

394 107 9 years ago

nytimes.com

roryisok• 9 years ago

Just when I think we can't possibly make any more amazingly stupid decisions on this planet, there we go again

strictnein• 9 years ago

A smart decision would have been to read the article.

sllabres• 9 years ago

I have read the article -- don't you think that there is the possibility for a catastrophic error with this kind of research?

yegle• 9 years ago

The intention seems legit, despite the concern. Quote from the article:

The pathogen to be modified must pose a serious health threat, and the work must produce knowledge — such as a vaccine — that would benefit humans. Finally, there must be no safer way to do the research.

grzm3• 9 years ago

Also, it's regulated and overseen by a review board:

"Now, a government panel will require that researchers show that their studies in this area are scientifically sound and that they will be done in a high-security lab."

It does sound like there are concerns. I'm glad that people are keeping their eyes on it. I found this quote interesting as well, regarding publishing the results of such research:

“Physicists long ago learned to distinguish between what can be publicly available and what’s classified,” he added, referring to nuclear weapons research. “We want to keep some of this stuff on a need-to-know basis.”

pluc• 9 years ago

The problem with the US keeping their eyes on it is that you can't trust them. All you need is a few lobbyists and rules and regulations seem to be just words. Hell, Net Neutrality had plenty of people "keeping their eyes on it" too.

saosebastiao• 9 years ago

Those seem reasonable. It's too bad the DEA can't be bothered to apply similar sound judgment to their drug classification schedules.

TheSithMaster• 9 years ago

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

toomanybeersies• 9 years ago

Getting a bit off topic here, but I've always interpreted that aphorism differently, and apparently the history of the saying agrees with me.

I've always interpreted it as being a corollary to "actions speak louder than words". Simply saying something, or having the intention to do something does not mean it will actually get done.

baddox• 9 years ago

Seems to me like that applies just as well to the prior ban.

JustAnotherPat• 9 years ago

I mean, even if the intention was to create a bioweapon to use in war, you would think the work would still fit those two parameters.

And how do you know the work will 'produce knowledge?'

A vaccine is impossible to guarantee.

devcpp• 9 years ago

A negative result is also considered knowledge: rejecting or disproving the null hypothesis is usually valuable. Tom Scott just did a video on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOJnOCdBr4s

So a bioweapon might not satisfy this criteria. Besides it probably violates other laws, and is thus still illegal.

matt40772• 9 years ago

I have no serious concerns with the US' good intentions, nor their ability to properly manage such a program.

What I fear, however, is that this action undermines the Biological Weapons Convention[0].

The convention explicitly allows for research such as this, yes. Nonetheless, it effectively worked as a moratorium on such research, with the US leading by example.

This program creates a situation much like nuclear research, where civil and military use cases exist on a continuum, with the first often being used to cover the second. Note how biological agents, where the US had the moral high ground, have entirely disappeared. Meanwhile, nuclear and chemical agents, which can be produced under the cover of closely related civil industries, are still very much threatening (and killing) people today.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_Weapons_Convention

jdironman• 9 years ago

Opensource Virus Warfare

smitherfield• 9 years ago

Now, I don't want to seem anti-science or anything, but this seems like a massive disaster just waiting to happen, in light of the incidents that led to this ban and also, even more to the point, the 2001 anthrax attacks.[1] Couldn't they at least restrict this research to labs far away from major population centers?

The analogue with software development, I'd say, is when people periodically point out that nuclear power plant or ICBM control systems still run on 8-inch floppy disks!!1! and therefore allegedly need to be completely rewritten. That rationale likewise fails to meet my tempting fate threshold.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks

sillysaurus3• 9 years ago

It's possible that it's very difficult to engineer a virus that can do better than anything nature has come up with. Evolution has had billions of years to try all the attack vectors. A worst case 12 Monkeys-style disaster seems unlikely.

But I'm ignorant of this topic. Without handwaving or pointing at the worst case, how much should we worry? Is there any evidence that a genetically enhanced virus can be devastating? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_virus doesn't have much.

tstrimple• 9 years ago

Your first sentence is true, but ignores the fact that scientists aren't creating viruses from scratch. They are using what nature made and modifying it. Many treatments rely on a viruses ability penetrate cells. Why recreate what already works so well?

ngvrnd• 9 years ago

I believe there is reason for concern w.r.t. modifications of flu viruses, for one thing. That is, they know what makes flu easily transmissible among humans, and they know a bit about how to alter nontransmissible viruses to be more so. Given the belief that things like the 1918 flu are believed to be viruses that made this jump on their own, it's quite reasonable to worry that we could do it in a lab.

dragonwriter• 9 years ago

It's possible that it's very difficult to engineer a virus that can do better than anything nature has come up with. Evolution has had billions of years to try all the attack vectors.

The traits desired in a bioweapon aren't particularly beneficial to the long-term propagation of a viral strain and thus would be selected against, or at least not selected for, by natural processes.

Simon_says2• 9 years ago

Maybe.

Evolution selects for virulence, not death toll. After all, your hosts can't spread you if they're dead.

phkahler• 9 years ago

If I recall correctly, there is one gene from a particularly lethal virus can be transferred to the flu to make an incredibly deadly nightmare. I don't know why anyone would do that, but it's possible. IIRC this has already been done in a lab. Trying to do the same but targeted seems like something certain types of people would try to do and could easily go awry.

drug_design_PhC• 9 years ago

It's possible that it's very difficult to engineer a virus that can do better than anything nature has come up with

As someone finishing a PhD in computer-aided drug discovery, this seems to be the situation in a lot of cases. Nature often finds it trivial to get around drugs and back to the viral behavior it wants. For example, a lab might make an allosteric drug that reduces the activity of a viral enzyme. In response to treatment with the drug, a few copies of the virus emerge with point mutation that makes them more active. Now a patient has two populations of viruses, and the disease no longer cares about the treatment. The surprising thing isn't just that this happens, but that it happens so rapidly, often requiring just a few days or a single mutation.

A quick example of the above is the I585T substitution in [1]

One big-picture concept is that genes and proteins are more than their immediate sequences/transcripts. On top of their current identity, they all exist on an mutational "landscape". Remember that some codons are redundant, while some amino acid changes would require two or three base mutations. Therefore, the sequence of a virus encodes both its current identity, as well as nearby evolutionary "alternatives". When a recurring threat comes by, the virus might have encoded in its genes a common defense, maybe through a particularly mutagen-exposed gene location or something like that. In the above case, the virus may have had millenia of exposure to weird dietary natural products and whatnot, and encoded easy rate up/down mutations for its essential enzymes, or orthosteric disruptor mutations for its promiscuous binding sites.

This sort of fuckery will have to become a consideration in designing the antivirals of the future.

And, to toot my own horn: In an evolutionary sense, our fight against viruses is particularly interesting. Now that computers are helping us accelerate drug development, our brains and computers could be considered as part of our immune systems. In the same way that metal weapons made us safe against macroscopic threats (lions etc), computers and public health infrastructure will become our arsenal against microscopic threats. If computer-aided drug design can lead to faster approval of cheap drugs, we can design hundreds of antiviral molecules and chase a virus all over its evolutionary landscape, until it has nowhere left to run.

For out-of-field readers -- An anecdote of cancer cells (not viruses) becoming reliant on a drug in [2]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC296079/ [2] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2017/10/04/cancer-...

emodendroket6• 9 years ago

"It's possible that it's very difficult to engineer corn that can resist pests better than anything nature has come up with. Evolution has had billions of years to try all the attack vectors. Widespread commercial use of genetically modified corn seems unlikely."

mistercow• 9 years ago

Evolution has had billions of years

As a general rule, if your argument starts with this premise, you're probably heading down the wrong path. Natural evolution is an extremely limited optimization process with a dramatically different loss function than the ones used by humans.

cowsandmilk• 9 years ago

It's possible that it's very difficult to engineer a virus that can do better than anything nature has come up with

A lot of the debate was started because 2 groups did so in 2011, independently of each other finding mutations that allow the deadly H5N1 virus to transmit via air[1][2]. One group also did work to model the chance of these mutations showing up in nature[3]. The techniques by which to do this are fairly well established. Knowledge of how to do it safely is fairly limited, as is access to animals in which to test these modifications.

* [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10831 * [2] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6088/1534.long * [3] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6088/1541.full

scentoni• 9 years ago

About a hundred years ago, evolution came up with something that killed 50-100 million people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic Smallpox and plague did far worse.

jerf• 9 years ago

It is a massive disaster waiting to happen.

But the massiveness of that disaster, or its impendingness, has very little to do with some people in Washington DC mouthing words about how you shouldn't do that.

This is definitely one of those cases where I feel like a lot of people are demonstrating some very magical thinking about the effectiveness of regulations, with all due respect to those involved. Does Kim Jong Un care that some people in Washington DC say that it's illegal to make lethal viruses? Does China? Russia? Iran? Europe? Anyone else in the world, really? Or a small criminal lab located in the United States? Or a criminal with access to a lab in the United States? It's not like there's literally people standing on top of every single gene sequencer in the world, or the US, stopping people from doing things.

The regulations were not all that was standing between us and some deadly virus, because anyone who would make a deadly virus and release it, accidentally or otherwise, still has a very simple path to that goal: "Ignore the regulations the US has." This just gives the good guys a chance to possibly learn some things about that before someone else releases it.

emodendroket6• 9 years ago

That's not the point of restricting research, though; the point of it is restricting research done by labs which are not bent on using biological weapons on human victims but allow them to fall into the wrong hands, or carelessly cause an incident with improper handling of the materials.

ogdoad• 9 years ago

Setting the stage for every biohazard movie ever made.

Isamu• 9 years ago

That's ok, Project Wildfire will be automatically activated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain

lurr2• 9 years ago

Wouldn't activating wildfire have been a complete disaster in the book?

It's been a long time since I read that. The part about the guy's seizures freaked me out for a while.

LandR• 9 years ago

That was a great book right up until the last few pages. It just ended so abruptly!

ct0• 9 years ago

I hope this is only approved in places where the average temperature is below zero and most common form of transportation as snowmobile.

24gttghh• 9 years ago

Even those places aren't a guarantee with global warming happening.

exelius• 9 years ago

Do you want the zombie apocalypse? Because this is how you get the zombie apocalypse.

nutbutter• 9 years ago

This also how you get ants.

staunch• 9 years ago

Trial and error isn't great for this kind of stuff but it works great for AI research. Let's create software that can do genetic engineering of viruses right the first time.

DigitalJack2• 9 years ago

An informative series from pbs narrated by Jeff goldblum on YouTube: search for "dna episode 1 of 5 the secret of life"

It's a great high level overview of dna sequencing from the discovery of its shape through the completion of the human genome project in 2000.

I'm having trouble pasting a link, maybe someone could help me out.

DigitalJack2• 9 years ago

The downvotes seem weird to me. Maybe it felt off topic?

Dr. Francis S. Collins is in several of the videos, and the third video is all about this particular controversy of dangerous experiments at the dawn of genetic engineering(for example one guy wanted to splice a cancer causing gene in e. coli bacterium).

It seemed relevant to me. It is what the article is talking about afterall.

grzm3• 9 years ago

Hard to say. Maybe the lack of a link? I agree it otherwise looks it would be relevant.

c3534l• 9 years ago

I don't trust people's due dilligence enough to be okay with this.

Edit: remember when Ebola was never supposed to leave the CDC fascility and a nurse was exposed to it and left the hospital? That's what happens when there's the highest level of scrutinity and security.

chewbacha• 9 years ago

Sounds like we are multiplying the ways to cause species level extinction rather than reducing them.

Kewl.

TeMPOraL3• 9 years ago

As long as we progress, it will always be like that.

Technology is, in a fundamental way, a force multiplicator. It gives you power to do more things that you could do with only your biological body and mind. That power can be used for destructive means too, so it follows that as we get more power, we open new, exciting ways to destroy ourselves.

convery• 9 years ago

Well, shit. That law was the only thing keeping the super-villains from going through with their plans..

Houshalter• 9 years ago

This was posted a few days ago. It's a talk about the dangers of man made viruses by Intel's chief medical officer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY

2 minutes in he talks about how a strain of flu escaped from a lab in 1977 and killed (and is still killing) millions of people.

swframe2• 9 years ago

My only concern is North Korea.

They have a strong desire to match american machismo. They probably lack the funds to build novel biological weapons their own. They are extremely good at break into computer systems. Companies excel at ignoring their vulnerabilities until it is too late.

always_good• 9 years ago

Pretty weak concern considering Americans will sell it to you.

I'd be more worried about the lack of scruples among people. Unfortunately that doesn't create as much of a boogeyman.

chrisper• 9 years ago

You know how when you watch movies and because you know so much about tech you can tell that most of the stuff done in movies regarding hacking etc is bullshit and not real.

Now I have a lack in knowledge of biology at this level, but can someone maybe explain to me how all those disease mass extinction movies cannot be real? I feel like my lack of knowledge here causes my concerns when reading stuff like this article.

crimsonalucard2• 9 years ago

Ebola is one such virus. In terms of evolution these viruses tend to burn out by killing the host. Evolutionary pressures push viruses towards symbiotic equilibrium. Thus in the worst case scenario there will be survivors who are immune or the virus or the virus will burn out until the only strain left does not harm humans. The later was the case with ebola.

makmanalp2• 9 years ago

It sure killed a LOT of people in the process though, so I wouldn't say that that's quite so reassuring.

jacquesm3• 9 years ago

If anything Ebola is too lethal. It tends to burn out locally before it can spread far from its originating point though if someone should immediately travel after becoming infected it could spread to a new location. But in the majority of the cases so far it has burned out before it could spread to a new village, though the largest outbreak to date claimed in excess of 10,000 lives and spread quite far.

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-31982078

All it will take for Ebola to be a truly massive killer is a small mutation that would reduce immediate mortality or that would increase the incubation time. Either one of those would greatly increase the number of people that a single outbreak would affect. I'd rather not have to live through that.

craftyguy• 9 years ago

In terms of evolution these viruses tend to burn out by killing the host.

I learned two things playing that 'Pandemic' flash game a few years back:

1) don't evolve deadly characteristics until you've infected as many people as possible (to get around ebola's issue you pointed out)

2) Madagascar is the place to be in the event of a global epidemic

s0l1dsnak3123• 9 years ago

Glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. I'm also glad that I'm aware to some extent of how what I don't know might obscure my judgement - I think a lot of people don't get exposed to the amount of cross-discipline junctures in knowledge that people in tech do.

matt40772• 9 years ago

One aspect such movies almost always get wrong is ease of protection: With only modest countermeasures (face coverings, washing hands, ventilating rooms etc), you can drastically cut down the rate of transmission. A scientist with advanced equipment and knowledge getting infected is extremely unlikely. In the real world it happens, but only to 0.x%, and only to hospital staff spending weeks with thousands of infected people, under often sub-optimal conditions.

It's completely possible to go years without catching a cold if you're willing to devote maybe 10% of your time and a little money to it, and avoid certain situation. We just don't bother because getting a cold isn't (usually) that terrible.

lambdadmitry• 9 years ago

It's completely possible to go years without catching a cold if you're willing to devote maybe 10% of your time and a little money to it, and avoid certain situation

You picked my curiousity! What do you have in mind?

grouseway• 9 years ago

Thing is, some of the stuff I used to laugh at as bullshit can be done now.

Use the enhance feature to magically unblur images to clarity? I've seen ML demos of stuff like that.

Giant realtime database of all phone calls meta data and recordings? Realtime facial/license plate recognition search of millions of people/cars? Not so funny anymore.

Tracking peoples movements in realtime. Sure just cary this phone wherever you go.

Realtime overhead imagery of an entire city? There's a company that flies drones around that lets them rewind the movements of all cars in the city throughout the day...

Magic black box that can decrypt all encryption? Sure, funny only if you overlook underhanded C planted by the NSA.

Hacking into industrial machinery and power systems?

Having millions of computers all under your control to launch attacks?

This was all funny Hollywood BS and conspiracy theories two decades ago. Elaborate animated "hacking" scenes are still funny but what they accomplish is possible.

TeMPOraL3• 9 years ago

Yup. Watch_Dogs-style hacking of CCTV cameras? As the other story on HN's frontpage today will tell you (and so will any experience with Shodan), it's totally doable in theory - the only practical reason this doesn't happen is that every camera is broken in a different way, and as a protagonist, to hack them in a field-actionable way, you'd have to have a hundred people in your tech support staff, who manually engage appropriate exploits based on your requests.

top_post• 9 years ago

So to bring a technology angle to this, there isn't anything remotely equivalent around this for Cybersecurity where it has some parallels. Everyone understands how bad a pandemic is - the risk of lives is obviously more important than data - however with the reliance of technology lives can be indirectly affected, such as the case of WannaCry shutting down hospitals and associated healthcare technology.

Vulnerabilities researched and weaponized by the government, ended up in the public, and caused global damage. There is no oversight into how these are produced or their risks.

neves• 9 years ago

As a foreigner, for me it is not a good news from the only country that dropped nuclear bombs over innocent civilians.

neuro_imager• 9 years ago

I'm not entirely clear on the scenarios in which this type of research would be beneficial (I'm a physician):

- AFAIK research on vaccines does not require altering an organism to make it more lethal. You would want to cover as broad a spectrum of serotypes/serovars of the existing organism as possible. I can see how someone might argue that you could pre-empt a more malignant variant but surely this is outweighed by the likelihood of creating systemic risk.

- What exactly would we learn form creating new, highly virulent organisms that can't be learned using the same technology on non-virulent organisms?

- It bothers me that this is a push to create more biological weapons from the military complex (especially terrifying considering the infantile intellects we currently have in congress).

nerpderp83• 9 years ago

As much as I dislike the subject, providing a monitorable outlet is better than a full prohibition. Prohibition denies important signals to things that will occur anyway.

sndean• 9 years ago

For more background, and since this article is surprisingly short:

This is a better article: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/nih-lifts-3-year-ban...

This ban that's being lifted stems from a few incidents, but really the driving force was Ron Fouchier's [0] gain-of-function study where his lab made a few mutations that enabled transmission of the bird flu (H5N1) virus between ferrets. All they had to do was make five mutations and it was suddenly more dangerous (here's the paper [1]). Ferrets may sound random, but they can become infected with human flu virus and show similar pathology to humans - they're a model for humans.

I remember hearing Fouchier speak in Washington at a biodefense conference right after the study came out. He was (is?) pretty much a celebrity among scientists, but the policy folks had a different opinion...

Pretty sure these things will escape from the lab at some point. I've personally handled some B. anthracis (causes anthrax) that was supposedly non-viable only to find out later that it was almost certainly still alive. (Not this case, but here's an example [2] mentioned in the article.) There would (hopefully) be more regulations on BSL3+ organisms like the viruses being discussed, because anthrax is relatively friendly, but like any other field, all it takes is one incompetent person.

[0] https://www.erasmusmc.nl/MScMM/faculty/CVs/fouchier_cv?lang=...

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4810786/

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/anthrax/news-multimedia/lab-incident/ind...

Tharkun• 9 years ago

Lethal viruses? No problem. Drugs? Abortion? Never!

Weird how that works.

snowpanda• 9 years ago

Yes because black tar heroin produced in a basement comes with the following disclaimer: ".... and the work must produce knowledge — such as a vaccine — that would benefit humans".

Stop making everything political, if this was done under a different administration you would have applauded it because of it being a scientific effort. Chances are this was decided by a panel and not the person you despise.

Being a-political myself, it always amazes me how for BOTH parties, the political issues aren't even about the issue at hand anymore. It's about proving the other side wrong.

TeMPOraL3• 9 years ago

That's politics in a nutshell. It's never about the actual issue at hand, it's always about getting on top of the other side.

yakt2• 9 years ago

Great ! Now this is going to open new rooms for more mistakes and may lead to more deaths which can be blamed to some scientific failure.

We humans collectively as one entity clearly have no discipline.

The current set of laws are themselves in first place not providing any peace in the lives of most people. And we have no time to fix that issue and our impulsive anxiety issue is making some weak willed men to open up new roads to destruction. It may yield some benefit but it is not essential.

I have 0 confidence in today's governments that they are capable of containing any damage caused by this law.

If entire of humanity is going to become extinct then we can take a high risk effort. All the day every time we need not take life threatening risks.

Opening up of this law means any minute now in best case scenario there is a 1% chance that there may be a deadly virus in the air u just breathed in. And based on history we humans are capable of leading ourselves into worst case scenarios and that puts the percentage of risk anywhere between 1% to 99%.

Now even if something worst case happens i am sure the human species would not go extinct as the billionaires and few millionaires would have means to survive any death prone event only with nobody left to buy their products anymore.

Kudos!

US Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted

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