I did not appreciate this distinction. Until I saw Bari Weiss’ interview of Jay Bhattacharya, I assumed that all gain of function research was dangerous.

I created this transcript of the above interview:

Bari Weiss:
Should gain a function research be banned, okay?

Jay Bhattacharya:
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 would advance a use that is vital tool for advancing human health, right? So, for instance you have some protein you want expressed so that you can use it as a treatment, like insulin, is a good example of this. You change the DNA of a of an E coli, use the E coli bacteria to produce the insulin cheaply. That’s gain of function work. 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 to it that makes it more transmissible among human cells and then you do that in a setting where it might infect the lab technician who takes it home without knowing it infects their family and causes a pandemic that causes so much damage.

That kind of research, or any 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. You have a few scientists taking risks on behalf of the entire human population, and they do it in an unregulated way that 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 the lockdown harms and caused trillions of dollars of damage and set society back for so long. What knowledge gain would be worth that?