In my opinion, gain of function is too dangerous with current security measures, and we should consider a moratorium. Lab biocontainment is exceptionally hard.
More specifically there were a few lab escapes of coronaviruses (SARS) in China that Beijing copped to in the early 2000s [1]. It happens to everyone, way more than it should. Yes, including America. [2]
[edit] To be clear, I'm not saying this definitely did or did not happen, I don't know. I'm saying if it came out later that it did, I wouldn't be surprised.
In the mid 1960s, my mom worked in an infectious disease lab. One day, her and her colleagues were tasked with cleaning out a freezer full of samples. Shortly thereafter her and everyone else in the lab got a flu-like illness that did not clear up for many days.
It really makes me wonder how many lab leaks may have happened during this time period when we started collecting and storing samples but we didn't yet have the ability to track diseases like we do today.
Back in 2009 I used to date a girl in Connecticut. She was attending Yale. She was a very nice person but very sloppy. She would always break something or spill something, it was her nature. One day she told me she's running late with school stuff so "meet me at the lab". I came in, got thru security and went to her lab. There she was feeding some 200 mosquitoes sick with malaria, buzzing in a rather small jar, all packed there nicely. This was her assignment for 3 weeks that she had to do twice a day. I could never get over the fact how little security was in place and how, if jar would break, there was absolutely no way to catch them all, in the middle of summer, with all windows wide open. I will never forget this story...
I saw an interview with a virologist, but I don't remember where (somewhere on YouTube). He said that there _is_ a moratorium on gain of function research, but that it's a joke because virology is pretty much about studying gain of function.
Even better: modern gene therapy is done with lentiviruses which were derived from HIV. This is commonly done; thousands of research labs around the world do this as a regular practice. We typically call them lentiviruses, rather than HIV-derived, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lentiviral_vector_in_gene_ther...
Lentiviral vectors are engineered to make them less harmful (and hopefully beneficial) to humans. They're also tested to ensure they're replication-incompetent, so that even if they did turn out to be harmful they couldn't spread from patient to patient.
The gain of function research of concern takes viruses already capable of sickening and killing humans (or their close relatives), and deliberately makes them deadlier and easier to spread among humans. This is a tiny fraction of virology, and has yet to deliver any practical benefit.
There's a legitimate concern that an overbroad ban on gain-of-function research could restrict safe and beneficial activities. The WIV's work was pretty far at the dangerous extreme, though--Ralph Baric's work was already controversial, and the WIV was working with a greater diversity of viruses, at lower BSL.
While many people define gain-of-function in virology as "enhancing existing attributes which would promote virulence", molecular biologists in general are more open to the idea that other functions, such as gene therapy, would also qualify as gain-of-function.
Either way my point was that we actively use a known highly transmissible virus, with some parts removed, under the general assumption that it's safe, and it's been demonstrated to not cause large issues (compared to other problems in gene therapy). I think people should be aware of that and in some sense I am surprised there isn't more attention placed on this practice.
I said "gain of function research of concern", which is vague but seems to have become the standard phrase to convey that narrower sense. There's definitely some grey, but the WIV's work was pretty deep in the black.
I'm reading more about lentiviral vectors now, and not totally comforted to see all the ways the earlier generations could regain replication competence. That still seems much less frightening to me than GOFROC, which is deliberately just one containment failure away from a novel pandemic.
There was a NIH moratorium, but it was lifted in 2017.
I don't agree about the point of virology being just about studying gain of function. There are tons of things you can study in virology without needing to create novel viruses.
See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
In my opinion, gain of function is too dangerous with current security measures, and we should consider a moratorium. Lab biocontainment is exceptionally hard.