2 Chinese virologists praise gain-of-function viral research

   The Wuhan lab at the center of the controversy had for years been engaged in gain-of-function research.  What exactly is it?  It’s a line of research where scientists take viruses and study how they might be modified to become deadlier or more transmissible.  https://www.vox.com/2020/5/1/21243148/why-some-labs-work-on-making-viruses-deadlier-and-why-they-should-stop
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  significant risks inherent in the kinds of research the Chinese scientists (at Wuhan Virology Lab) were conducting….The risks were not limited to interactions with animals.  Dozens of routine studies required extracting viruses from bat feces and growing them in batches for use in a wide array of experiments.  For some projects the researchers spliced genetic material from different coronaviruses to create chimeras that could more easily infect human cells for laboratory experiments. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/chinese-lab-conducted-extensive-research-on-deadly-bat-viruses-but-there-is-no-evidence-of-accidental-release/2020/04/30/3e5d12a0-8b0d-11ea-9dfd-990f9dcc71fc_story.html
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  3-3-20      For PLA Maj-Gen.

Chen Wei, the Chinese military’s top epidemiologist and virologist:  “What we need is to build … a powerful ‘lead scientists’ system so that they can spend their life studying and researching certain types of viruses and germs....

It would mean that whenever an epidemic occurs we will have the best and most authoritative team available and it will not be like what’s happened now when the coronavirus came, and nobody is doing much.”  https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3064677/meet-major-general-chinas-coronavirus-scientific-front-line

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5-1-20  Shi Zhengli and her co-authors (in Nature Medicine, 2015) recognized that their work was high risk, and they worried that it might be severely restricted moving forward.  They wrote:  “On the basis of these findings, scientific review panels may deem similar studies building chimeric viruses based on circulating strains too risky to pursue, as increased pathogenicity in mammalian models cannot be excluded… research into CoV emergence and therapeutic efficacy may be severely limited moving forward.”...

“When you find the viruses” Junhua explains in the video, “you are also most easily exposed to the viruses.”

https://thebulletin.org/2020/05/natural-spillover-or-research-lab-leak-why-a-credible-investigation-in-needed-to-determine-the-origin-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic/
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4-22-20    If you hear anyone claim “we know the virus didn’t come from a lab”, don’t buy it--it may well have.  Labs around the globe have been creating synthetic viruses like CoV2 for years.   https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748
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