We Need To Add The Concept Of Ethics Back Into Our Scientific Work

Hot Air posted an article today related to the origins of the coronavirus. However, there is some very troubling information about some other research carried out by the Chinese in the article. It is quite possible that the coronavirus pandemic was the result of a laboratory leak at the Wuhan Laboratory, but the question remains as to exactly what was being studied during the time of the leak.

The article reports:

Ed (Morrissey)  grabbed the big takeaway from the splashy new Vanity Fair piece this morning, that federal efforts to investigate the lab-leak theory were hamstrung by numerous conflicts of interest within the public-health bureaucracy.

But here’s a provocative bit of news buried deeper in the story that’s worth some attention.

There’s no smoking gun of wrongdoing, just an … interesting coincidence.

As the NSC tracked these disparate clues, U.S. government virologists advising them flagged one study first submitted in April 2020. Eleven of its 23 coauthors worked for the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, the Chinese army’s medical research institute. Using the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, the researchers had engineered mice with humanized lungs, then studied their susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. As the NSC officials worked backward from the date of publication to establish a timeline for the study, it became clear that the mice had been engineered sometime in the summer of 2019, before the pandemic even started. The NSC officials were left wondering: Had the Chinese military been running viruses through humanized mouse models, to see which might be infectious to humans?

Believing they had uncovered important evidence in favor of the lab-leak hypothesis, the NSC investigators began reaching out to other agencies. That’s when the hammer came down. “We were dismissed,” said Anthony Ruggiero, the NSC’s senior director for counterproliferation and biodefense. “The response was very negative.”

Please follow the link above to read the entire article and the related article. There seems to be a lot more to Chinese gain-of-function research than previously noted. Hopefully the truth of what was going on will be  uncovered in the near future.