Scientists Revive Neanderthal Tooth Bacteria
When Gain of Knowledge is Not "Gain of Function"
Thanks to the Daily Sceptic for running this piece. This is first time a first run article of mine has run on the site, a site whose motto is: “Question Everything. Stay Sane. Live Free.” I hope it will be the first of many; you can visit the site at: https://dailysceptic.org/
Just because you can do something, should you?
This is not just a question people should ask themselves as they stare at the last piece of pizza but in many other circumstances as well.
And certain people need to ask it more often – scientists, for example, with the potential power over life or death, societal progression or regression, potential world-changing breakthroughs or world-devastating disasters.
Like Captain Ahab and his maniacal chase of the white whale Moby Dick, sometimes – quite often, actually – obsessively doing something just because you can, just because you need to fill a deep-seated personal need may not be in the best interest of everyone else involved…or anywhere, for that matter.
Gain of Function (GOF) research is a perfectly terrifying example of this problem.
The general definition offered to the public by officials during the pandemic was essentially this: GOF takes a virus and enhances its lethality to, or transmissibility amongst, humans in order to be able to study the resulting bug to speed the search for a potential treatment if and when the virus evolves in nature to the same danger point.
In other words, if scientists can work with the possible superbugs now they can get a “head start” and be better prepared to fight them in the future if they should appear naturally (zoonotically) and threaten humans.
By that definition – a common, descriptive, and precise definition - gain of function has never worked.
For a deeper dive into this specific topic, including detailed definitions and debate, see here: https://thomas699.substack.com/p/gain-of-function-has-never-worked
The risk/reward calculation under those circumstances is very clear – zero chance of reward for performing an infinitely risky act. Performing any activity – from crossing the street to breeding superbugs in a lab – with those odds is unconscionable.
Even possibly more importantly, it can never work as advertised, in part because natural evolution is literally impossible to predict in a lab. Of course if the actual goal is to create bioweapons or general health problems that can be “solved” by a drug you happen to somehow already know how to make, then it may very well have worked – quite spectacularly, in fact.
But what about scientific processes that seem a bit like GOF but are not? Is, for example, the fictional creation of dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park” similar? Can breeding dogs over generations to accentuate a trait be considered in the same family? How about cross-pollinating roses to get a new color?
Or, how about, as was announced this week, the ability to “revive” Neanderthal-era bacteria?
In (very) short, the team – original study here: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf5300 - was able to harvest ancient bacteria from a calcified Neanderthal tooth, tease out what remained of the genome, splice it together, and voila! a bacteria – a paleofuran - that had not seen the light of day in thousands of years.
The newborn bug – and the process behind it - could amongst other things, say researchers, hold potential for new drugs – like anti-biotics and such – that would be beneficial for us mostly non-Neanderthals today.
“This is the first step towards accessing the hidden chemical diversity of earth’s past microbes, and it adds an exciting new time dimension to natural product discovery,” Martin Klapper, PhD, postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz-HKI and co-lead author of the study, said.
So - does reviving ancient life fall under the GOF rubric?
No, it doesn’t, for a number of reasons.
First, the process does not even approximate that used in GOF.
Second, the scientists involved actually have a very good idea of what they could end up with in the end, while GOF is a serial amplification process to see how nasty it can make a bug to “see what will happen.” By the way, this was the exact same excuse used by the American CDC when it left hundreds of Black people with untreated syphilis even after the cure was found - https://thomas699.substack.com/p/doctors-without-ethical-borders .
Third, there is clearly no intention to purposefully make something that is specifically more lethal to and more transmissible amongst humans as GOF (in the current context) does.
“This would not qualify as GOF research or ePPP (enhanced potential pandemic pathogens) research under the US policies,” said Dr. Richard Ebright, a Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology. “And because it is not reasonably expected to generate a serious pathogen it probably would not count as GOFROC (gain of function research of concern.)”
Obviously, any new technological process can be warped by bad actors, but it seems clear that this achievement is just that – a real achievement.
Other biotech/genetic engineering to bring back former creatures could also fall under a similar rubric, though some aspects of the “de-extinction” effort do raise other certain concerns.
For example, most have heard about the effort to bring back the woolly mammoth. This effort is being championed by (amongst others) a company called Colossal - https://colossal.com/ and definitely has a literally warm and fuzzy feel about it.
But ethicists have warned – like with Ahab and his whale – that the such efforts may not be a good idea: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/14/1036884561/dna-resurrection-jurassic-park-woolly-mammoth .
It must be noted that these efforts do not occur in a vacuum and companies are for-profit ventures that have investors to satisfy, either financially or informationally - in Colossal’s case, one of those investors is In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA - https://www.iqt.org/ .
Yes the CIA really funds - to the tune of reportedly about $120 million a year – an “independent” venture capital fund that invests in tech startups. You can see the spy agency’s portfolio – which includes the notorious Palantir - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Controversies - here: https://www.iqt.org/portfolio/ .
While the Neanderthal bacteria is a neat piece of science and could have a real – and potentially very positive – benefit, the scientific process – the method, the ethics, the motivations, the desires – can in other cases fall prey to the nefarious.
In his famous Farewell Address, President Dwight D. Eisenhower:
Ike, COVID, and Fauci
Thanks again to American Thinker for running this piece. You can visit the website at: https://www.americanthinker.com/ This we all – if we have a sense of history – remember from Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address three days before John F. Kennedy became president in 1961:
did not only warn of a “military-industrial complex,” but also of the perils of scientific “white whales” and other research being funded by the government:
“The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Note - this story obviously references the recent “Gain of Funciton Has Never Worked” piece but does add a new perspective I think. And I’m pretty sure In-Q-Tel will get a closer look in the near future.
As a former food industry trade association official, my organization utilized a "biohazard" lab that employed GOF on foodborne bacteria (not the same as viruses) to see how they might evolve under traditional "sterlization" methods (extreme heat), if at all. That was useful, and it was highly regulated. We never had a lab leak in downtown DC, and the lab and the trade association no longer exist. But the thought of resurrecting ancient bacteria never was considered, nor should it, for the reasons you well stated.