Francis Collins is supporting the Lab Leak Theory! Is he ready to recant GOF, officially declared in this posting?
I could write a whole white paper explaining to general science readers why any genetic mods beyond traditional hybridization by sexual reproduction are inherently unsafe, unpredictable and untestable.
The only explanation I can find is professional jealousy of bio-science researchers for the fortunes and fame that came from mineral science discoveries and inventions. Reductionism is going to kill us all!
Gain of Function means humans engineering pathogens to be more infectious and virulent, which means CREATING BIO-WEAPONS like SARS-1 and SARS-2 (COVID19).
GoF was outlawed Internationally, and in the US by Obama Executive Order. Trump, of course, reversed that order because he is a fan of nasty high-tech weaponry; and NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci funded GoF research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who used the half a million dollars of US taxpayer money to collect hundreds of bat viruses and modify them, less than a kilometer from the first outbreak of COVID19 and hundreds of kilometers from where the bats live.
So many GoF researchers have played word games because they are forcing conditions that use immune systems and virus evolutionary adaptations to create novel viruses like SARS-nCoV1 and SARS nCoV2.
Bacteria and viruses needed to evolve faster than the generational gene mix and match of sexual reproduction, or face possible extinction from the efficacy of immune system adaptation and heredity. They have gene swapping mechanisms to do their own mix-and-match; but how did nCoV2 get an HIV gene? HIV does not survive in bats, and native bat viruses don't reproduce in humans.
We have traced zoonotic outbreaks to intermediary hosts, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology was using forced infections of intermediary species like civets and pangolins, and created forced co-infections of bat coronaviruses and HIV.
When two viruses infect the same cell which is manufacturing both, the naked DNA can exchange branches to make a hybrid virus with both higher infectivity across species, in humans and higher virulence through fooling the human immune system.
This process is how nCoV2 combined multiple Gains of Function, while in the wild viruses slowly add one gain at a time.