Lab-Made Coronavirus Triggers Debate

The creation of a chimeric SARS-like virus has scientists discussing the risks of gain-of-function research.

Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of to one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in

The results demonstrate the ability of the SHC014 surface protein to bind and infect human cells, validating concerns that this virus—or other coronaviruses found in bat species—may be capable of making the leap to people without first evolving in an intermediate host, Nature reported. They also reignite a debate about whether that information justifies the risk of such work, known as gain-of-function research. “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory,” Simon Wain-Hobson, a virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, told Nature.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/lab-made-coronavirus-triggers-debate-34502?fbclid=IwAR2uglhpHglJTDnZwUKn4iTinKkYBqMMxg1S7fyIAHkjSvvTIzqMbe0IS1Y

Notable.. there are no coincidences