The NIH ordered me to stop my 'dangerous' gain-of-function research

https://www.statnews.com/2025/10/06/gain-of-function-research-tuberculosis-expert-nih/

by maxall4 • 10 months ago

75 92 10 months ago

CalChris• 10 months ago

pazimzadeh2• 10 months ago

If what they are describing (marking strains using kanamycin) and creating deletion mutants really is what the NIH now considers gain-of-function research (nevermind dangerous) then all microbiology research has to stop immediately.

pazimzadeh2• 10 months ago

*kanamycin resistance cassette

kedihacker• 10 months ago

Well letting tb evolve over time and infect everyone is a lot more dangerous

chaostheory• 10 months ago

Because gain of function research is dangerous. It’s also what likely turned Covid into a pandemic.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07554...

https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments...

https://www.newsweek.com/covid-lab-leak-china-virus-nuclear-...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/10/covid-origins-invest...

https://www.propublica.org/article/senate-report-covid-19-or...

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/bies.202000...

fabian2k3• 10 months ago

The article explains pretty well why this particular research isn't dangerous. It's technically gain of function, but if you prohibit any research that adds antibiotic resistance to bacteria you eliminated essentially all of microbiology research.

polotics• 10 months ago

Both of the article's technique can much better be described as "removal-of-function" research IMHO.

JV002• 10 months ago

Perhaps it would be better to address the issues that can lead to an incident rather than stopping all research. Even counting the COVID-19 pandemic, the overall impact of gain-of-function research on health is still positive.

jbstack• 10 months ago

Knives are dangerous if used dangerously. Let's ban knives.

jjgreen• 10 months ago

Welcome to the UK.

solid_fuel3• 10 months ago

Someone compiled a virus, compilation is dangerous, let's ban compilers.

JV002• 10 months ago

Sad to see a new era of obscurantism, after studying it as a thing of the past, sure it was never to return.

hackingonempty4• 10 months ago

It is scary to see the President and Health Secretary and their appointees acting on conspiracy theories.

The evidence for zoonotic origin of SARS-COV2 is very strong[0] and the conspiracy theorists as usual have little more than speculation.

[0] https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annur...

BryantD2• 10 months ago

Quite strong:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...

elcritch• 10 months ago

Great links and even briefly skimming them makes me lean more towards zoonosis myself.

However, @hackingonempty's comment shows how dangerous over politicising these topics can be. Claiming lab-accident origin as a conspiracy theory stifles debates like the one linked.

Take a report from the first link where experts in the field still give a 21% chance to lab leak definitely takes it out of the range of conspiracy theories.

The only reason it was "removed" as a plausible origin was politics.

asked how likely it is that COVID-19 originated from natural zoonosis, experts gave an average likelihood of 77% (median=90%). In fact, four out of five experts stated that a natural zoonotic origin was more than 50% likely. However, consensus was not complete. Across all experts, the average likelihood they gave for a research-related accident origin was 21%. Overall, one out of five experts reported a 50% or greater chance for an origin other than natural zoonosis.

tim3337• 10 months ago

I think it's unfair to call the theory that a coronavirus popping up next to the world's most active lab experimenting them may have come from the lab a conspiracy theory. I mean did we call people saying radiation from the Chernobyl reactor might have come from an accident conspiracy theorists?

The "conspiracy theorists" include the director of the CDC at the time who was actually in contact with the Chinese CDC and also a virologist, and also the chair of the one official investigation which visited Wuhan in the early days.

hackingonempty4• 10 months ago

The WIV is more than 30km away. The quote below is from the above link, which is a relatively recent review of the "scientific evidence" from a virologist who (from the disclosure statement) "between 2019 and 2021, he was an unpaid Honorary Visiting Professor at Fudan University, Shanghai, China, and between 2014 and 2020, he was an unpaid Guest Professor at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Beijing, China." You should read the link I sent, at least

Obvious evidence against the laboratory leak allegation is that the first documented cases of COVID-19 were not linked to the WIV nor in the same geographical region of Wuhan (44). The WIV laboratory of Prof. Zhengli Shi, who has been the subject of abundant accusations because of her work on bat coronaviruses (10, 11, 13), is located more than 30 km from the Huanan market epicenter. Clearly, if the virus first emerged at the WIV, then that location should be the site of at least some of the earliest cases or linked to those cases. It is not.

ggm• 10 months ago

It's passing the task to others. Work will continue in other economies.

SilverElfin• 10 months ago

Reminder that the Obama administration banned gain of function research due to its dangers. Only for Fauci to perform it through EcoHealth and WIV while claiming he’s not funding it.

Quarrel• 10 months ago

They paused funding actual dangerous gain-of-function (as the article makes the distinction), while developing new guidelines for how it should be managed.

They then released the new framework of multi-layered review to clearly define the tradeoffs and how they were managed, and resumed funding for those that could meet the improved criteria.

ie it was standard research advancing regulatory risk management.

fergie2• 10 months ago

To me, a total outsider, developing antibiotic resistant strains of TB sounds at least "gain of function"-adjacent. Are there any experts here who would like to hazard a judgement?

ulrikrasmussen• 10 months ago

I thought the point of the article was that it was indeed adjacent, but that in their particular case there was no risk because (1) the mutated bacteria are actually less virulent, and (2) the mutated bacteria are resistant to one particular type of antibiotic which is not in use due to safety issues, but they are not resistant to any of the drugs that are actually used in humans to treat TB.

fabian2k3• 10 months ago

As the article states, it is technically a gain of function experiment. But what is actually prohibited are dangerous gain of function experiments.

This specific use of antibiotics resistance is also extremely common. Pretty much every single microbiology experiment starts this way, and every time you want to genetically modify bacteria you do this. This includes every time you want to produce any protein, because you need genetically modified bacteria for that. This is a large part of all labwork in this field.

As the article notes, the antiobiotic used is one that isn't used for humans. So there is not significant additional danger due to that modification. The bacterium itself is much more dangerous than most that are handled in the lab, but that's why they're in a BSL-3 lab.

solid_fuel3• 10 months ago

I did this kind of work in a community college biotech program (literally biotech 102, we used E. Coli just to learn the technique). They are not engineering a new, deadlier strain of bacteria, they are using antibiotic resistance to solve a very simple problem: genetic modification is a probabilistic process, you have Gene A and need to get it into bacteria, but Gene A doesn't make the bacteria different externally in any easily detectable way.

So, after the process of inserting Gene A into a batch of bacteria you need to figure out which of the bacteria actually picked up Gene A so you can proceed to the next step of your experiment. So, what you do is you pair Gene A with Gene B, which is a very light resistance to a very specific antibiotic. Now, after you perform the electroporation, you plate the bacteria on agarose gel, let colonies start to develop, and then lightly dose the gel with the antibiotic.

The surviving bacterial colonies are those which have incorporated both Gene A and Gene B (because they are paired). It's just a way of filtering bacteria after electroporation so you can do further work. It's not dangerous to people because A) this antibiotic resistance was already found in nature, B) it's a resistance to a very specific antibiotic, not all antibiotics, and C) you're doing this in a protected lab.

This is an incredibly standard process, to the point where - again - I did this in a Biotech 102 program at community college. You could sign up for a classes where you learn to do this, right now.

duskwuff• 10 months ago

Seconding this. I think my high school AP Biology class did a similar exercise in the early 2000s.

mrheosuper• 10 months ago

Interesting.

I have a question, why not pair Gene A with something still detectable but less "dangerous", like a gene that change body color, or emit different color under UV light.

Sorry i am totally noob here

gwd3• 10 months ago

A) this antibiotic resistance was already found in nature, B) it's a resistance to a very specific antibiotic, not all antibiotics

These are reasonable, but...

C) you're doing this in a protected lab.

...this one is problematic. It's not taking the concerns of the people you're talking to seriously; namely, that no lab can be protected enough, that there's always a chance of leaking, and that the more GoF research is done the higher chance something is going to leak.

If nothing else, not registering that you even understand someone's concern is a sure-fire way to get them to ignore everything else you say.

And, I'm not sure exactly what your attitude is, but at least the way you put it here does sound overconfident. Sure, protocols should be safe if they're all followed; but the protocols are followed by people, and people make mistakes. Just take a look at all the nuclear accidents that have happened in spite of protocols.

Your best bet, I think, would be to lean on A and B: "There are strict protocols in place around labs to keep things from leaking; but even in the very unlikely event that something like this does leak, it won't really have any impact: as I said, the antibiotic resistance is a mutation that evolved by itself in the wild already; it won't make things worse than they already are."

EDIT: Or, at least, to say: "Look, I know it sounds really scary, but if you'd seen the protocols, you see how basically impossible they are to screw up. <brief descripiton of why it's unlikely to leak even if implemented by lazy or incompetent people.>"

The point is to let people know that you hear and understand their concern, and then to educate them about why their concern is unfounded.

EDIT2: This comment seems to be controversial; it's had at least 3 upvotes and 2 downvotes, which surprises me. Any downvoters care to explain?

sjducb2• 10 months ago

Biologists modify cells so that we can study them. The modifications are about 0.00001% effective. If you attempt to modify 10^6 cells then maybe 20 cells will be modified. Most cells do not take the modification. So you need to select out the individual cells that have been modified.

You do this by including antibiotic resistance genes alongside your modification. Now all modified cells are resistant to the antibiotic. Then you apply a small amount antibiotic to kill the unmodified cells. Now you only have the cells with your interesting modification.

This is the mainstay of molecular biology. Every lab biologist has done it. We even do it as college students in lab practicals.

Banning the use of antibiotic resistance genes in biological research is effectively banning all wet lab medical research.

api• 10 months ago

The entire biology field is filled with terrorists! We had no idea! I bet they also use 5G radiation to make the chemtrails! Ban dihydrogen monoxide!

grumpy-de-sre• 10 months ago

I always thought it was only a matter of time before the general public heard the term "antibiotic resistance" and had a freak out.

Conveniently ignoring the fact that they're literally feeding the stuff to livestock to improve growth rates / feed efficiency [1]. Talk about dangerous gain-of-function "research". Industrial vat grown protein cannot come soon enough [2].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eaTIe_TBZA

timschmidt15• 10 months ago

There's some debate in these comments about the origins of Covid, so I figured it'd be worth dropping the following testimony on the topic which I found eye opening:

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Qu...

It references a great deal of information from https://project-evidence.github.io/

And I've found Jamie Metzl's collection of resources interesting as well: https://jamiemetzl.com/origins-of-sars-cov-2/

rhubarbtree2• 10 months ago

That’s a very interesting read. What were the arguments against? Was this dismissed?

tim3337• 10 months ago

The debate goes on and both sides are fairly fixed in their views. I think the evidence is strong in favour of a lab origin but wikipedia still is against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_SARS-CoV-2

estearum18• 10 months ago

IMO while the debate around COVID's origin is interesting, it's pretty much definitionally a waste of time.

1) We'll never actually know the answer

2) Even if we did, it wouldn't change anything about what we ought to do

There's no way China would be "punished" for something if it was a lab leak, and there's no way that [the actually dangerous end of] GoF research is a good risk-reward tradeoff anymore in light of instant mRNA vaccines.

Every breath spent pointing fingers on origin is another breath not spent on the remediations we have to do no matter who's responsible.

timschmidt15• 10 months ago

We'll never actually know the answer

We feel differently about this. Personally, I find all the evidence collected so far quite compelling. And I believe humanity has a responsibility to our children to investigate all worldwide pandemics to the fullest extent possible.

Even if we did, it wouldn't change anything about what we ought to do

Whether or not it would change what we ought to do, it would absolutely change what we actually do. I think there would be broad public support for increased safety procedures at a minimum. The testimony I linked offers additional suggestions.

Your scenario of ending all GoF research might be on the table, or might not, but there is a broad range of less dramatic options available. Among them, locating GoF research labs away from densely populated metropolitan areas and international airports.

tim3337• 10 months ago

I disagree. It can be a waste but there are basic issues that if the origins are natural it makes sense to crank up lab research to counter such things and if the origin was a lab screw up it makes sense to restrict what the labs do.

And more subtle issues along those lines.

It's a bit like an air crash investigation. You have several million killed and want to understand what happened so as to try to prevent the next one.

bad_username• 10 months ago

It will not be a waste of time if the government and corporate actors are held accountable for the suppression of any discourse around what later turned to be factually true.

The NIH ordered me to stop my 'dangerous' gain-of-function research

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