Vírus criados em laboratório: uma ameaça global?

are supercharged lab enhanced viruses becoming a global threat gain of function research function so-called gain of function research known as gain of function the controversy around so-called gain of function research has erupted alongside the heated debate around the coronavirus pandemic's origin it's a tale of two theories a lot of democrats pooh-poohed the whole idea of the lab leak prominent public health experts saying that the lab leak theory which was previously hawked by conspiracy theorists might actually be credible this has moved high-risk gain of function research from the secret of shadows into the public spotlight we've

set out to investigate why how and where this type of research is being done and what the risks and benefits are so what exactly is gaynor function it is a type of research that makes pathogens like viruses deadlier or more infectious to humans the researchers intentionally modify the virus and lab experiments to give it new functions for instance the ability to spread by air or attack human nerve cells gain of function research seeks to make a virus more easily transmissible between humans to increase the severity of the disease it triggers or to make it resistant

to existing treatments or vaccines sounds crazy two main reasons are given for why this type of research is done one is to better predict which viruses and animal populations might one day naturally mutate and become infectious for humans the second is to be better prepared when a new pandemic hits for instance by already developing a vaccine for it preemptively there are obviously valid reasons for gain of function research and the main reason is to understand pathogens better to understand the way they transmit and behave and thereby to make vaccines drugs etc so how many vaccines

have been developed as a result of gain of function research none there have been no preemptive vaccines to date have any pandemics been prevented thanks to gainer function research the answer is not that i know of not that i'm aware what's clear is that it didn't prevent this coronavirus pandemic actually none of the gain of function research that was done over the past decades however like none of it contributed to finding a vaccine or cure for sars coffee for kobe 19 but in the future there could be potential for that some scientists think this is

a perfectly legitimate endeavor others say it's akin to checking for a gas leak by holding a match to the gas pipe in the effort to protect us from a pandemic scientists could cause a pandemic so let's look a bit more closely at how gain of function research is done one method is to genetically re-engineer pathogens by inserting genes from one virus into another to make it more aggressive another simpler method is called animal passaging researchers inject a virus into ferrets or so-called humanized mice these mice have been genetically manipulated to have human lung receptors the

virus undergoes slight mutations as it passes through several generations of mice the scientists select the strongest mutations until the virus eventually becomes transmissible to humans the scientific technology today is so good that you can make a whole genome of a virus with no scars no no seams or anything it looks perfectly natural in 2011 an extreme gain of function experiment rocked the science world scientists used the serial passaging method to make the h5n1 avian flu virus more transmissible to humans the lead scientist ron fouchier claimed he created one of the most dangerous viruses you can

make they had taken a virus that was deadly but but not good at infecting humans and made it also very infectious so that kind of research i think is the risk are immensely high if it broke out that would be just widespread death but the benefits what are they many scientists look at this experiment and they think why why did you do this the thing with the avian flu is that it is extremely deadly with an infection fatality rate of approximately sixty percent compare that to a rate of under one percent for covet 19. luckily

this virus hasn't leaked from the lab so far but another worry is that a man-made virus like this one could end up in the wrong hands the main concern was the publication of the research because once you publish it then nefarious actors can also have access it's like if you publish a method on the internet on how to hack a bank account do you think someone's going to use it of course they're going to use it right and several you know terrorist groups have made their intention to use biological warfare known high security bsl for

labs built for research on highly infectious pathogens are booming around the world and three quarters of them are located in densely populated urban areas gain of function research is being conducted in some of these labs in the us china europe and other countries although nobody knows for sure in how many of them but surprisingly gain of function experiments are not done exclusively in highest security bsl4 labs some are done in level 2 and three labs we recently found out that the uh steel biology was doing a lot of this sas like virus research at a

very low biosafety level so at a level that you would feel unsafe working with airborne viruses at bsl2 you you may or may not be wearing a lag coat you definitely should be wearing gloves but normally you don't wear a mask at bsr2 so if you're working with airborne viruses live viruses and bsl2 viruses that can spread through the air like sars kov2 then you are completely exposed it was not an appropriate biosafety level for working with these cells like viruses researchers at the wuhan institute of virology were collecting and researching bad coronaviruses and using

humanized mice prior to the covet 19 outbreak but the top researcher dr xi zheng li denies she was conducting gain of function research we know from all of the records from the nih grant applications from papers published by the wuhan institute of virology experts that they were engaged in aggressive research and aggressive work that was making scary pathogenic viruses scarier better able to infect human cells dr she she says we did not do gain the function research to increase infectivity right she picked out just the one no she didn't do to increase infectivity she did

to change the host range to make it infectious to us [Music] making the disease the virus triggers more deadly is one possible aim of gain of function research another is to make a virus that would normally only attack animals better able to infect a different type of host humans what is making things murky is that different definitions of gain of function are circulating simultaneously the reason why it's so confusing and so complicated is because scientists do not know where to draw the line between regular experiments and gain of function experiments that are very concerning so

it's only when there is a potential to cause harm to humans that it becomes gain of function research of concern but the question into the origins of the pandemic were stifled in early 2020 when an open letter was published in the medical journal the lancet that effectively snuffed out all the debates they were very well intentioned but even in the name of those good intentions engaged in what i call scientific propaganda and thuggery uh designed to drive uh consensus when the evidence didn't support that consensus it was basically trying to shut any scientific debate and

it was quite obvious because there is no way you can reach these conclusions when you don't have data people said that's a conspiracy theory that's that's no conspiracy theory that's an honest scientific possibility you'll probably note that most people who've been um shouting down the possibility of a lab leg are virologists um and you know i'm not not casting aspersions here you know there's many imminent virologists and we need them and their work is vitally important in in especially in pandemics but um you've got to think about vested interest if this came from a lab

that means that science has led to millions of people dying by accident so it's a very uncomfortable thing to think about they're very unpleasant idea for scientists it wasn't until a group of citizen journalists began to investigate and analyze online databases that the lab leak theory re-emerged the group calling themselves drastic revealed that the wuhan institute of virology was actively working with saskof2 viruses over many years including the closest noun relative to the pandemic virus using inadequate safety protocols they also discovered that the lab and chinese authorities have methodically attempted to conceal these activities i

start to get suspicious and start to investigate you have to play games to try to you know get a day time china is really good at removing things but if you get there on time you can get an awful lot there's been a lot of important information that's come out as a result of what they're calling internet sleuths but it's really it's people who are just recognizing that our world is at risk and our governments and the un system weren't doing uh what needed to be done when the wh looked into the question in early

2021 it concluded that a lab leak was extremely unlikely but the report was criticized due to the team's lack of access to key data president biden has since asked u.s intelligence agencies to look into the matter but so far there has been no thorough international investigation up till now we have not had an investigation of the origins of kobe 19. that china wh o joint study has been widely described as a investigation by a lot of media but they admit that they never had the mandate and they never had the powers or influence to be

able to go in there and investigate so all the evidence right now is circumstantial uh we need to have a credible investigation if it does turn out that this pandemic was caused by a lab leg it's going to change the practice of virology forever everywhere although the loud league theory has recently gained traction there is still no definitive proof of either a market origin or a lab leak and both theories remain plausible but the whole controversy around the origin of the corona virus has deflected from the larger and arguably more important question whether high-risk research

with deadly pathogens should be pursued at all the reason being that accidents happen and they happen a lot even from the highest security labs and it happens all over the world internationally not any one particular country as a result of a slew of accidents in u.s labs involving bird flu ebola and anthrax in 2014 the obama administration put a moratorium on gain of function research but the ban was full of loopholes first of all it was a funding moratorium you could go on working if you had money from someplace else from some other government or

out of your own university you could go and do what you want and of course people went all over the world and continued to do it the us moratorium however limited was lifted in 2017 but even if there are demonstrable and important scientific gains resulting from this type of research the question remains are the risks worth it such work can be important because you can argue that by such studies we will understand better what it takes to block it if an epidemic appears but at the same time you're going to ask as an interested intelligent

person not a virologist you can say yeah but by doing so aren't you creating something that will be more infectious for humans answers yes but we're learning and you could say yes you're learning but are you weighing the scale between risk and benefit is the gain which you're not even sure of this much but the risk is this much isn't that really plausible here then if so should we be doing those experiments i think that's a legitimate discussion what's happened in biology is very analogous to cyber security where the technology has just leapt ahead way

beyond the governance the governance our governance of these things is sitting in the last century right but the technology has just steamed ahead it cannot be that individual scientists are making species-wide decisions that doesn't mean there's not a very important role for scientists but we need to have broader more inclusive more democratic frameworks for figuring out the best ways forward i would not ban it but i would ask it to be reviewed with international standards and i would have on committees people beyond expert virologists i think the public needs to be involved so definitely this

problem should not be regulated by scientists and then performed by scientists ourselves so because the outcomes of a pandemic it's not just that only scientists get sick everybody gets sick so it affects the whole glow that's why this sort of research where the risks are extremely high uh they need to be discussed with non-scientists as well i think we need community consultation we need the community engaged and knowledgeable we actually did some research to find out how much do people in the general community know about this stuff and it's very little and when you give

them the information sort of factual information they don't find it acceptable you know they don't find it acceptable to begin with but the more information you give people the less acceptable it becomes for them so i think you know we need to involve the community because the community is the most important stakeholder for which all the benefits and the harms apply there should be transparency it is not normal that the public didn't know before what was gain of function the society has the right to know what is being done the worst case scenario is we

have another pandemic that's much worse than this one and we're entering the age of synthetic biology where it's easy to imagine a much more dangerous pathogen than the one we are facing now this could be a life or death moment for our species and we have this opportunity of this pandemic as terrible as it's been to learn the lessons and to learn those lessons we need to do a fearless examination of what went wrong with the growing number of labs in the world now working with these dangerous pathogens collecting them uh studying them maybe doing

a bit of gain or functional research with them we we are entering an era where it's quite likely that there will be a lab-based pandemic and if we don't deal with that we're just just flying blind [Music] regardless of the true origins of the covert 19 virus which we may never know for sure society still needs to grapple with where to draw the line for research that's done with good intentions and in good faith but that could put all of humanity at risk if anything goes wrong