Caring, the problem within

"On reading," by Simon Wain-Hobson, is a weekly discussion of scientific papers and news articles around gain of function research in virology.

Since January 2024, Dr. Wain-Hobson has written weekly essays for Biosafety Now discussing risky research in virology. You can read his entire series here.

Dawn silhouette, south of France

On wondering why it’s been so hard to make progress these past years on some things virological.

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Dangerous GOF research in virology took 13 years to crack. Movement came from a most unexpected quarter in the form of a Trump Presidential Executive Order. It came after a changing of the guard at the NIH. The Europeans and countries like Canada, Japan and Australia haven’t reacted or followed suit, perhaps because they’re reeling from so much else.

And while human affairs are invariably complex, the opening gambit was as simple as it was blunt. It started with Ron Fouchier talking tough at a scientific meeting in Malta circa September 2011 – he had just made a human respiratory transmissible form of the bird flu virus H5N1. Just that. Not surprisingly news got out fast. The Fouchier and Kawaoka manuscripts were referred to the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosafety (NSABB) which refused recommending publication of Dr. Fouchier’s paper at their December 20, 2011 meeting.

Yet just ten days later a line was drawn in the sand. The Washington Post published an OpEd entitled A flu virus risk worth taking. Its authors were no less than Drs. Anthony Fauci, Gary Nabel and Francis Collins, top administrators at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Not surprisingly when the NSABB met the second time, in the presence of Drs. Fauci and Collins, enough members flipped and recommended publication of the Fouchier manuscript without any data being redacted.

So it was that the mutations conferring respiratory transmission of the bird flu virus H5N1 between ferrets were plastered across the world thanks to the top two science journals Nature and Science who published this work. Note that this work was ultimately back peddled by the lead authors themselves.

This toxic OpEd has been dealt with in an essay (Chilled Virology). Yet as many virologists across the globe had NIH funded US collaborators or colleagues, almost no virologists spoke up. This was the desired result - there was not to be any discussion of this NIH funded work, apart from some very staccato, stage-managed meetings in the US. An iron curtain descended on virology.

One of the problems with papers in Science and Nature is that they are taken very seriously with others joining the bandwagon without questioning, when the normal reaction to any scientific paper is healthy skepticism. So it was that a few years later a paper was published in 2015 reporting what can only be described as GOF research on a bat coronavirus from Dr. Ralph Baric’s lab in the US funded by the NIH. The penultimate author was Dr. Zhengli-Li Shi from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This interpretation was disputed by virologists. Surprised? The world lurched on.

Dr. Baric was, still is, an excellent coronavirologist. A thinker. Therefore, it was only natural for others to pace him. And you’d do that by copying his recent work and adding a twist of your own.

Then COVID hit in 2020. The early pushback and pretentious condemnation of the lab leak hypothesis in the name of collegiality was stunning. The more so as there was no data around in March 2020 to support or refute any hypothesis. Obviously, this smelt. It had the effect of reopening the dangerous GOF research injury.

Once again, virologists failed to understand that when the public is deeply disturbed by things virological, they turn to them for council and comfort. Instead of providing that, they were met by disdain and words. When ideas fail, words come in handy. It’s attributed to Goethe, but it doesn’t matter who.

You don’t have to be particularly perceptive to know that COVID was badly handled at the policy level in the US and UK. Meanwhile, Taiwan with one of the highest population densities in the world did well.

The handling by the UK has been laid out by two reports from an independent enquiry. We’ve been over one (UK COVID response report) but please allow On reading to use the same brutal quote once again: Across the UK, systems had grown to be overly bureaucratic. Instead of focusing on skills, technology and infrastructure, they were focused on creating groups, sub-groups and documents. Emphasis added. How out of touch can you get?

In pyramidal structures people who express themselves clearly often get hammered and subsequently isolated, their analyses being sidelined even though they may well be correct. The solutions to survival are adherence to orthodoxy and bureaucracy where nobody is responsible. This provides protection from the chilly winds from above which are dissipated by the complexity of the labyrinths.

We have seen that the circle is complete: leaders do not know, they know that they do not know, but they feel they cannot say that they do not know as they are expected to know by a whole load of people who know they do not know anyway! (Pandemic Illusions). Plus, documents in archives are vulnerable to fire, flooding or being misplaced to quote Sir Humphrey Appleby.

This is also the case for scientific pyramids, even though being clear and precise as possible is necessary to scientific advancement. Bottom line: the human edifice is more important than the data. Ouch!

Virologists in most countries have not discussed dangerous GOF research. If they have it was to continue for there is nothing good to be gained from this grain of folly. They simply aligned with pax-NIH.

But it went beyond.

• Journalists covered the dangerous GOF virology controversy pretty well but by and large were not demanding enough. Why make the world a more dangerous place? Nobody brought up the Hippocratic Oath.

• As we saw in a recent essay (A virus not on the Select Agent list) the powers that be in the US can’t even get the extinct H2N2 flu virus, responsible for the 1957 Asian flu pandemic, onto the federal select agent list. A renowned think tank missed it too. As another renowned think tank, Terry Pratchett, observed, I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

Science is advancing at the coal face, AI being an example. However, at the higher levels of admin there seems to be a great deal of paralysis. How could the UK have got COVID so wrong? Political incompetence, experts under pressure in a competitive and probably macho environment trying to second guess a novel pandemic virus nobody had ever seen before colliding with bureaucracies interested in creating groups, sub-groups and documents. Aka not caring.

Here we’re not alone. Jamie Dimon is the head of the world’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase. CNN reported on a May 2025 talk of his. “We have to get our act together,” Dimon said. “We have to do it very quickly.”

He added that the United States has a “mismanagement” issue. He called on fixing permitting, regulations, immigration, taxation, inner city school and the health care system. If those things are fixed, Dimon said, the country could grow 3% a year.

“What you heard today on stage was the amount of mismanagement is extraordinary. By state, by city, for pensions … and that stuff is going to kill us…”

The US can’t even fix inner city schools, although we’ve known this for a while. Why? Those who care are no longer heard. Their efforts are isolated. Health services in high income countries cannot simply siphon off trained staff from other countries to their detriment. But they do. The irony is obvious. For the last 150 years the norm was focusing on natural resources from overseas and not caring a shit about the locals. The 21^st century variant is natural resources and trained personnel from across the globe.

There is urgency as that stuff is going to kill us…

Let’s look at another urgent parallel. The head of the UK’s foreign intelligence agency MI6, Blaise Metreweli said in her first public speech that the UK is “now operating in a space between peace and war” and “the front line is everywhere,” amid growing tensions with Russia.

Emphasizing the need to master new technology, Metreweli said recent advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology and quantum computing could converge to create “science-fiction-like tools” which could be used as perilous weapons. Seeing biotechnology and perilous weapons in the same sentence doesn’t augur well.

The chief previously led the service’s technology and innovation teams, a position made famous as “Q” in the James Bond movies. The lady clearly knows what she is talking about.

In a more dangerous, tech-mediated world, the chief called for the “rediscovery of our shared humanity,” to determine how the future unfolds… “It is not what we can do that defines us, but what we choose to do.”

We have some serious choosing to do. We’ve seriously ignored dangerous GOF research in particular, and Dual Use Research of Concern in general for too long. And now we have the AI juggernaut to deal with, while quantum computing is just a few steps away. If we could remember first, do no harm – an incredibly low bar – that would be a start.

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Everything is personal today. Nobody cares about society which is seen as old school. Or as Robert Reich put it recently, America’s so-called “leadership class” is a sham. Most of them do not care a whit for the rest of the US. They are out for themselves.

Yet citizens pay taxes, part of which are spent supporting science and medicine for their good. Administrations have a tendency of privatizing the benefits of the finances dedicated to them, while the risks remain. In the aerospace industry safety was always #1 aka public interests dominated private ones. Then Boeing morphed, cut corners and favored $$$ (private) over safety (public) with known results. Meanwhile, the US Federal Aviation Administration struggled, partly because they rely so much on experts from the aviation industry.

In fields where expertise is rare this happens although there are ways of tackling conflicts of interest. It’s called transparency. As mentioned previously, virology today is low tech and so there are many specialists around. Yet virology and virologists are like small businesses, struggling to find customers, aka getting grant monies to stay open. That’s #1 understandably. However, this makes them vulnerable, some would say beholden to those at the top of science administrations to toe the line. Speech is curtailed or used carefully - you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

Scientists must be allowed to say what they think and not fear what some far away boss in DC thinks. Fortunately, the new NIH boss has said just this.

Virologists already abide by a huge number of regulations with good reason yet are mostly unaware that they also have an obligation to do no harm. The 2005 InterAcademy Panel statement on Biosecurity is clear on this (Do no Harm 1). It was signed by more than 60 national science academies from around the world, including the US National Academy of Sciences. Most scientists I’ve spoken to didn’t know about it. The academies signed a feelgood statement but didn’t get the word out. Or didn’t care. Or both.

This is why the Executive Order on dangerous GOF research is necessary. Other nations should follow suit.

Fortunately, everything is not as bleak. The Mirror Life community penned an excellent text to the journal Science and have reacted openly and responsibly (Mirror Life). They were able to do so because there were no chilling winds coming from the NIH or elsewhere. Plus, the fact that mirror chemistry is already in biotech companies today.

By contrast, the economic advantages of Mirror Life are unclear. That said, when you see the metabolic potential of natural bacteria and the power of human imagination to conjure up experiments, it is hard to accept that mirror bacteria could do better than natural bacteria.

Concerning AI, there is so much investment and vested interest that there will be little control. Especially as the Trump Administration, like others across the globe, are in favor. The applications to biology are evident. Through imagery and AI analysis, a tissue section can be read more accurately leading to a diagnosis of cancer earlier than the human eye/brain combination.

The applications to infectious diseases will be multiple and beneficial so long as it is not used to design novel or enhance existing pathogens. We’ve already seen the first scientific paper devoted to the design of viruses that infect bacteria (AI assisted design of viruses).

Wisely, the Executive Order on dangerous GOF research didn’t define the techniques used to develop novel pathogens. Whether it be genetic engineering, selection in the lab or AI, it’s the end point that matters. Accordingly, AI is covered.

As Q’s successor said we must recover our shared humanity. More simply put, we need to get back to caring. And that’s the problem within everybody’s mind.

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Aside 1

Private (individual) desires over public (societal) interests is of course a form of parasitism, which brings us back to infectious agents. When you realize that the amount of mismanagement is extraordinary, indeed it’s holding back the US economy, some powerful antiparasitic drugs would be useful. Gotta laugh.

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Aside 2

Other countries are not managing simple stuff well. Take the Brits and their beloved National Health Service. Thousands of people who have had a stroke are ending up severely disabled or dying because the NHS has to few specialists to treat them quickly enough, senior doctors are warning. Just don’t siphon off specialists trained in other countries. You voted for Brexit; live with it.

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Aside 3

A harrowing example of not caring.

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Aside 4

To finish on a positive note, take a look at Ronnie O’Sullivan, the snooker genius at work, and his words at 12:50.

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Simon Wain-Hobson is an emeritus professor at the Institute Pasteur, Paris, from which he retired in 2021. He and his colleagues were the first to sequence the genome of HIV, and Wain-Hobson has published more than 230 papers on virology and cancer.