The “gain of function” research to engineer nightmare viruses may have been the other half of the quest to create flexible vaccine platforms that could create “24 hour bug to drug” preventives as powerful defenses against pandemics. But it was not exempt from the risk of lab accidents.
The vaccines are in some sense the redemption for the sin of engineering target monsters. The good news is we have powerful drugs; bad news is science needed pathogens to test them against.
Expect not only a debate into China and the US government’s role into brewing up lab monsters for public health causes but into the larger issue of moral and transcendental choice in technology. If as Ernst Mayr observed, “intelligence is a lethal mutation”, could the key to long term species survival be a sense of transcendental moral limits rather than mere cleverness? Did our biotechnicians, AI developers and climate engineers learn anything from our brush with nuclear extinction during the Cold War? Or do we have to take the test again?
