lab leak

11 results back to index

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

Off the drawing board, away from the theory, that central problem of uncontained technology holds even with the best of intentions. GOF research is meant to keep people safe. Yet it inevitably occurs in a flawed world, where labs leak, where pandemics happen. Regardless of what did happen in Wuhan, it’s still grimly plausible that such research on coronaviruses was taking place and leaked. The historical record of lab leaks is hard to overlook. * * * — Gain-of-function research and lab leaks are just two particularly sharp examples of how the coming wave will introduce a plethora of revenge effects and inadvertent failure modes. If every half-competent lab or even random biohacker can embark on this research, tragedy cannot be indefinitely postponed.

…

To reiterate: these risks are not about malicious harm; they come from simply operating on the bleeding edge of the most capable technologies in history widely embedded throughout core societal systems. A lab leak is just one good example of unintended consequences, the heart of the containment problem, a coming-wave equivalent of reactor meltdowns or lost warheads. Accidents like this create another unpredictable stressor, another splintering crack in the system. Yet stressors might also be less discrete events, less a robot attack, lab leak, or deepfake video, and more a slow and diffuse process undermining foundations. Consider that throughout history, tools and technologies have been designed to help us do more with less.

…

The disease hit young people hardest, a possible sign they had a weaker immunity than those around a few decades earlier. Theories abound over what happened. Had something escaped from the permafrost? Was it part of Russia’s extensive and shadowy bioweapons program? To date, though, the best explanation is a lab leak. A version of the earlier virus likely somehow escaped during lab experiments with a vaccine. The epidemic was itself caused by well-meaning research intended to prevent epidemics. Biological labs are subject to global standards that should stop accidents. The most secure are known as biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) labs.

Uncontrolled Spread by Scott Gottlieb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Atul Gawande, Bernie Sanders, Citizen Lab, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, fear of failure, global pandemic, global supply chain, Kevin Roose, lab leak, Larry Ellison, lockdown, medical residency, Nate Silver, randomized controlled trial, social distancing, stem cell, sugar pill, synthetic biology, uranium enrichment, zoonotic diseases

Department of State, “Ensuring a Transparent, Thorough Investigation of COVID-19’s Origin,” press release, January 15, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20210116020513/https:/www.state.gov/ensuring-a-transparent-thorough-investigation-of-covid-19s-origin/; Wuhan Institute of Virology, “French Prime Minister Visits Wuhan P4 Laboratory,” press release, February 27, 2017, http://english.whiov.cas.cn/ne/201802/t20180208_189991.html; and NBC News, “Meet the Press—May 30, 2021,” May 30, 2021. 51.Natasha Loder, interview with Peter Daszak and Filippa Lentzos, Babbage from Economist Radio, podcast audio, April 14, 2021. 52.Filippa Lentos, “Natural Spillover or Research Lab Leak? Why a Credible Investigation is Needed to Determine the Origin of the Coronavirus Pandemic,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May 1, 2020. 53.Reference to Josh Rogin, Chaos Under Heaven, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021). 54.Katherine Eban, “The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins,” Vanity Fair, June 3, 2021. 55.Natasha Loder, interview with Peter Daszak and Filippa Lentzos. 56.Yi Fan et al., “Bat Coronaviruses in China,” Viruses 11, no. 3 (2019): 210.

…

If a virus has been manipulated, whether by a seamless method where a characteristic is deliberately inserted into the virus’s genetic sequence, or by serial passage through cell cultures, there’s probably no way of knowing for certain in this case simply by evaluating the virus’s sequence.48 These are all speculations, of course, and critics of these theories sometimes blame those who advance them for imprecision, but the concerns that a lab leak could have been the origin of COVID persist largely because the Chinese government has withheld information that could help put such theorizing to rest. For some observers, the question becomes: When do too many coincident facts become hard to overlook? Adding further weight to the theory that there was a connection between the lab and the epidemic were persistent concerns that the WIV had poor controls.

…

“The Chinese increasingly cut them out and made the oversight impossible,” one former US official told me, “so the French eventually withdrew those people.” It was around 2017 that the WIV was also believed to have begun conducting classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military.50 In an effort to dismiss the plausibility of a lab leak being the original source of SARS-CoV-2, the WHO team would cite the WIV’s stringent controls in its higher-security (BSL-4) labs. The WIV’s careful handling of specimens made an accident implausible, the WHO team argued. “It was a very well-run lab,” said Dr. Peter Daszak, one of the WHO team members.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, critical race theory, defund the police, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, inventory management, lab leak, lockdown, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, obamacare, Oculus Rift, Paris climate accords, Ponzi scheme, power law, QR code, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, statistical model, tech billionaire, TikTok

* * * While there are still many unknowns, a year later the consensus of both American intelligence agencies and the broader medical community is that it’s very likely COVID-19 originated not at a wet market, but at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Soon after President Biden came into office, the Trump administration’s investigation into whether the Wuhan lab leaked the virus was shut down. But by May 2021, Biden announced with great fanfare he was ordering America’s intelligence agencies to investigate the lab leak theory. The same day Biden relaunched the investigation, Facebook announced it would no longer censor posts discussing whether the COVID-19 virus leaked from a lab, as it had been doing for a year. PolitiFact, which had sanctimoniously made “coronavirus disinformation” its lie of the year, ended up retracting it’s harsh “pants on fire” fact-check on Dr.

…

The Washington Post responded to the interview by accusing Cotton of fanning “the embers of a theory that has been repeatedly disputed by experts.”179 Worse than that, the Post excoriated Cotton for something he never asserted, claiming that Cotton had said the virus was a bioweapon engineered and deliberately released by the Chinese. This is not what Cotton said, and one of the experts quoted by the Post to “debunk” Cotton would later acknowledge on Twitter that Cotton had been clear in his remarks and that Cotton was correct to suggest the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan “cannot—and should not—be dismissed.”180 Even though the virus caused millions of deaths and catastrophic damage to the global economy, Trump said at his home in Mar-a-Lago in May, “I never thought China did it on purpose. I thought it was done out of incompetence and I may be wrong because they were the biggest beneficiaries.

…

And look, some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them.” Other journalists still couldn’t bring themselves to consider the possibility that Trump had been vindicated. Apoorva Mandavilli, one of the New York Times reporters on the COVID beat, was not happy the truth was coming out. “Someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe admit its racist roots. But alas, that day is not yet here,” she tweeted that same week Karl begrudgingly credited Trump. The final indignity came in June, when BuzzFeed obtained over three thousand pages of emails from Dr. Fauci through a Freedom of Information Act request. The emails detailed the country’s top infectious diseases bureaucrat’s thoughts on the handling of the pandemic, and the emails revealed top government officials had been disingenuous in their messaging to the public, as had been long suspected.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

If I’m honest, I accepted it because it served my own motivated reasoning and reinforced my worldview: the pandemic was a little less frightening to me if it was yet another example of humans overstressing nature and getting bitten on the ass for it. Then, as time went on, and the “lab leak theory” became a key talking point from people like Wolf and Bannon in the Mirror World, where it was mixed with baseless claims about bioweapons, along with plenty of anti-Asian racism, there seemed to be further reason not to take another look at the facts. Even though more and more facts and documents were piling up that supported a serious consideration of the lab leak hypothesis, most liberals and leftists didn’t bother looking for months because we didn’t want to be like them, in the same way that I didn’t want to be like her.

…

Russia accused Ukraine … “mirror imaging”: “Putin Accuses Ukraine of ‘Dirty Bomb’ Plans, Says Risks of World Conflict High,” Reuters, October 26, 2022; “Ukraine Says Russian Troops Will Fight for Key City as Proxy Government Flees,” New York Times, October 24, 2022. feigning outrage … gloves-off U.S. interference: Julian Barnes, “Russian Interference in 2020 Included Influencing Trump Associates, Report Says,” March 16, 2021; Elaine Sciolino, “U.S. to Back Yeltsin If He Suspends Congress,” New York Times, March 13, 1993. “lab leak theory”: Rob Kuznia et al., “Weird Science: How a ‘Shoddy’ Bannon-Backed Paper on Coronavirus Origins Made Its Way to an Audience of Millions,” CNN Politics, October 21, 2020; “His Glory Presents: Take FiVe w/ Dr. Naomi Wolf,” His Glory, July 28, 2022, at 28:54. Monsanto lobbies ceaselessly … linked with cancer: Zach Boren and Arthur Neslen, “How Lobbyists for Monsanto Led a ‘Grassroots Farmers’ Movement Against an EU Glyphosate Ban,” Unearthed, October 17, 2018; “IARC Monograph on Glyphosate,” WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer; “Roundup Weedkiller ‘Probably’ Causes Cancer, Says WHO Study,” The Guardian, March 21, 2015.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

This new and deadly virus – much deadlier than Covid-19 – took more than a year to trace back to its animal origin, which turned out to be the dromedary camel.11 Thankfully, while MERS was dangerous, it was not especially infectious, meaning that in the decade since its discovery, it has killed fewer than 1,000 people. We are not, at the time of writing, entirely certain that Covid-19 emerged from an animal reservoir, but researchers suspect that the virus may have emerged from bat populations. Even the ‘lab leak’ theory, which argues that the disease may have escaped from an infectious disease facility in Wuhan, doesn’t rule out the pathogen having originated in animals. The challenge of animal reservoirs is that we can neither control them nor predict what will emerge from them. The next disease to cross the barrier might be relatively innocuous (on a global scale, though not an individual one), like MERS, or a global catastrophe, like Covid-19.

…

‘Preppers’ are a predominantly US group who believe some form of societal-ending event is nearby, and so like to stock up on supplies and ammunition. 4. Chad P. Brown and Melina Kolb, ‘Trump’s Trade War Timeline: An Up-to-Date Guide’, www.piie.com, 21 June 2022. 5. Amy Maxmen and Smriti Mallapaty, ‘The COVID lab-leak hypothesis: what scientists do and don’t know’, www.nature.com, 8 June 2021. 6. ‘The territorial impact of COVID-19: Managing the crisis and recovery across levels of government’, www.oecd.org, 10 May 2021. 7. Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington and Edward Hurcombe, ‘“Corona? 5G? or both?”: the dynamics of COVID-19/5G conspiracy theories on Facebook’, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, November 2020. 8.

Spike: The Virus vs The People - The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar, Anjana Ahuja

"World Economic Forum" Davos, bioinformatics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, dual-use technology, Future Shock, game design, global pandemic, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, machine translation, nudge unit, open economy, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, side project, social distancing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, zoonotic diseases

Eddie in Sydney would be working when Kristian in California was asleep, and vice versa. I didn’t just feel as if I was working a 24-hour day – I really was. On top of that, we were getting phonecalls through the night from all over the world. Christiane was loosely keeping a diary and recorded 17 calls in one night. It’s hard to come off nocturnal calls about the possibility of a lab leak and go back to bed. I’d never had trouble sleeping before, something that comes from spending a career working as a doctor in critical care and medicine. But the situation with this new virus and the dark question marks over its origins felt emotionally overwhelming. None of us knew what was going to happen but things had already escalated into an international emergency.

Aftershocks: Pandemic Politics and the End of the Old International Order by Colin Kahl, Thomas Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, future of work, George Floyd, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, job automation, junk bonds, Kibera, lab leak, liberal world order, lockdown, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, mobile money, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, one-China policy, open borders, open economy, Paris climate accords, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, social distancing, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois, World Values Survey, zoonotic diseases

Jennifer Hansler and Devan Cole, “Pompeo Backs Away from Theory He and Trump Were Pushing That Coronavirus Originated in a Wuhan Lab,” CNN, May 17, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/17/politics/mike-pompeo-coronavirus-wuhan-lab/index.html.   65.  “Coronavirus: Trump Stands by China Lab Origin Theory for Virus,” BBC, May 1, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52496098.   66.  Abul Taher, “China Lab Leak Is the ‘Most Credible’ Source of the Coronavirus Outbreak, Says Top US Government Official, amid Bombshell Claims Wuhan Scientist Has Turned Whistleblower,” Daily Mail, January 2, 2021, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9106951/Lab-leak-credible-source-coronavirus-outbreak-says-government-official.html; “China Demands Evidence from US Following Adviser’s Hype on ‘Wuhan Lab Coronavirus Leak’ Conspiracy Theory,” Global Times, January 4, 2021, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202101/1211768.shtml.   67.  

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid by Lawrence Wright

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blockchain, business cycle, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, full employment, George Floyd, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, lab leak, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, mouse model, Nate Silver, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, QAnon, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, the scientific method, TikTok, transcontinental railway, zoonotic diseases

., “SARS-CoV-2 and bat RaTG13 spike glycoprotein structures inform on virus evolution and furin-cleavage effects,” Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, July 9, 2020. 96 percent of its genome: Shi-Hui Sun, et al., “A Mouse Model of SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Pathogenesis,” Cell Host & Microbe, July 8, 2020. common ancestor: Jon Cohen, “Trump ‘owes us an apology.’ Chinese scientist at the center of COVID-19 origin theories speaks out,” Science, July 24, 2020. The NIH: Nicholson Baker, “The Lab-Leak Hypothesis,” New York magazine, Jan. 4, 2021. collected about 15,000: Nurith Aizenman, “Why The U.S. Government Stopped Funding A Research Project On Bats And Coronaviruses,” NPR, April 29, 2020. “alive and well”: Betsy McKay and Phred Dvorak, “A Deadly Coronavirus Was Inevitable. Why Was No One Ready?”

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Soon after the containment of that 2007 outbreak, there was a third outbreak, just a few weeks later, from the very same lab. The lab had failed to comply with the government’s conditions for resumption of their vaccine production and once again leaked foot-and-mouth into the environment.28 These are not isolated events; in fact, uncontrolled pathogen escapes are almost commonplace. In one of the deadliest confirmed lab leaks on record, over one hundred people died after being exposed to anthrax 836, the most powerful strain of anthrax in the Soviet bioweapons programme, in April 1979.29 A technician in a covert anthrax-drying plant in the city of Sverdlovsk removed a clogged filter without replacing it. He scribbled a note for his supervisor but forgot to record it in the logbook; his supervisor didn’t find the note and started up the plant, and anthrax escaped through the filterless vent and was carried to nearby buildings by the wind.30 In another instance, in 1971, a woman on an environmental research ship in the Aral Sea was exposed to a strain of smallpox that was probably used in a nearby bioweapon field test.31 The strain had been designed to be highly virulent and possibly vaccine-resistant, and it was aerosolised so that it could travel across large distances.32 While she was still asymptomatic, she returned to her home city of Aralsk, where nine others subsequently became infected, including a woman and two children who then died.33 Soviet officials locked Aralsk down, incinerated several properties, and vaccinated the entire population of fifty thousand people, preventing a larger outbreak of one of the deadliest viruses in the world, but perhaps only narrowly.34 Similarly, smallpox leaked from virology labs not once but three times in the UK during the 1960s and 1970s.

As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Apollo 11, Asilomar, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, Build a better mousetrap, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fellow of the Royal Society, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Higgs boson, lab leak, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, out of africa, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, Project Plowshare, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Wayback Machine, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

The third pause in genetic engineering took place more recently, in 2012, when a few dozen scientists became alarmed at the direction being taken by their research on the extraordinarily dangerous H5N1 bird flu virus, which they were manipulating in order to prepare for future pandemics. That self-imposed moratorium lasted about eight months and, as at Asilomar, was similarly resolved through the adoption of new safety procedures, which arguably saved us from an accidental lab-leak pandemic that would have dwarfed COVID-19. However, those procedures were not globally binding – different countries have different biosecurity standards, some of which may lead to disaster in the future. Both the recombinant DNA and the H5N1 research pauses were widely accepted and observed. The most recent call for a research moratorium, focused on heritable human gene editing, has not been met with such unanimity.

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

At one extreme was clearly harmful medical misinformation, such as touting quack cures and practices that could kill people. But Weiss found that Twitter was too willing to suppress posts that did not comport with official pronouncements, including ones on legitimate topics for debate, such as whether mRNA vaccines caused heart problems, whether mask mandates worked, and whether the virus emerged from a lab leak in China. For example, Twitter put Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya on the Trends blacklist, which meant that the visibility of his tweets was curtailed. He had organized a declaration by some scientists arguing that lockdowns and school closures would be more harmful than helpful, a controversial view that turned out to have some validity.