Dr. Jay Bhatthacharya: Research That Has Any Capacity of Causing a Pandemic Through Gain-of-Function Work Should Be Banned’

Weiss: “Should gain a function research be banned.”
BHATTACHARYA: “Okay, so you have to be careful here. There’s some gain-of-function research which is entirely benign, has no chance of causing a pandemic, and might advance — is vital tool for advancing human health, right? So, for instance, you know, you have some protein you want expressed so that you can use it as a treatment. Insulin is a good example of this. You change the DNA of a E. coli, use the E. coli bacteria to produce the insulin cheaply. That’s gain-of-function, there’s nothing wrong with that. But there is gain-of-function work that has the potential to cause a pandemic. You take a virus you find in a bat cave in China, Coronavirus, you add a biochemical element — this is not theoretical — you add an element that makes it more transmissible among human cells, and then you do that in a setting where it it might infect the lab technician who takes it home, without knowing it affects their family, and causes a pandemic that causes so much damage. That kind of research, or research that has any capacity of causing a pandemic through gain-of-function work should be banned. I think it has no place among the toolkit of scientists. It’s — essentially what you have is you have a few scientists taking risks on behalf of the entire human population, and to do it in an unregulated way makes absolutely no sense to me. Even if you don’t agree that, that is what led to this past pandemic — I happen to think it does, but even if you don’t agree, going forward, why would you say, yes, you should take that risk? There aren’t enough benefits to that kind of research to warrant causing a pandemic that can kill 10 million, 20 million people if you include, like, the lockdown harms, and cause trillions of dollars of damage and set society back for so long. What knowledge gain would be worth that?”