Gain of function

It says something about the Trump administration that they can lift the moratorium on government funding of gain of function research and it doesn’t make headlines. There’s hypothetical benefit to making known viruses deadlier — more readily transmitted, deadlier, survive longer outside the body — but there’s non-hypothetical risk. And not just the thriller movie plot where someone smuggles a sample out of the lab to infect the millions of passengers a day on the Underground. Time will tell, and hopefully I’m wrong … but my tax dollars going to make a worse Ebola (or whatever) isn’t on my happy list.

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