Dogma, or the silver lining of the "settled science"...
More in-depth material on why it is not possible to make pandemic-causing GOF viruses in a lab.
This is going to be Part 1 of several articles I plan to write on the topics of the stalled, corrupted and falsified biological science, using some specific examples such as claims of creating living things in the lab.
I often get into arguments about “weaponized gain-of-function (GOF) viruses”. I am going to provide my working definition of this concept, so that we are on the same page for the purposes of this discussion. “Weaponized virus” is the idea that someone can design and make a new virus that, if released from the lab, can transmit by air or casual contact human-to-human and infect a substantial % of the population of the world (e.g. >10% or >800M people in all regions of the world simultaneously) while causing severe illness and millions of deaths.
In government parlance, the allegedly pandemic-causing pathogens are called “select agents”, as they are subject to all sorts of biosecurity fears and regulation. There is a listing of presumed naturally occurring select agents maintained by the HHS and the USDA:
Under United States law, Biological select agents or toxins (BSATs)—or simply select agents for short—are bio-agents which (since 1997[1]) have been declared by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) or by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to have the "potential to pose a severe threat to public health and safety". The agents are divided into (1) HHS select agents and toxins affecting humans; (2) USDA select agents and toxins affecting agriculture; and (3) overlap select agents and toxins affecting both.
The problem with the select agents - they are not scary enough! You see, they can’t be used for real bioterrorism. For one, it’s mostly illegal to work with them under international law. The samples, if they exist, are allegedly locked up in just a few government facilities. Almost nobody is allowed to work with them, so the facilities, labs and expertise are very limited. Collecting, storing and deploying natural pathogens in quantities that could produce any noticeable biological attack is not feasible. Once released, these things quickly denature. Even if some infections occur, they quickly attenuate into nothing and self-extinguish.
On the other hand, we have the idea of novel, man-made, chimeric, engineered, GOF weaponized bioterrorism agents that are not on this list because they don’t exist in nature but, as the GOF narrative claims, can be potentially invented by evil scientists. This makes a very effective scary story. Secret, unknown, invisible, deadly pathogens ready to pounce from a lab at any moment! “Worse than nuclear weapons!” (Rand Paul and many other purveyors of weaponized virus fearporn).
I have stated in the past that it is not possible to manufacture pandemic-causing pathogens with existing state of tech and science.
I will highlight some of the scientific and technical challenges in this article which boil down to:
Viral transmissible causes of mass illness is a false biological theory.
Even if we assume that viruses can cause mass illness, i.e. that the viral theory is correct, the science dogma safely prevents any progress toward solving the technical challenges of making such agents.
This book was published in 2010 by the National Research Council of the National Academies:
By some very learned authors:
The objectives of this scientific and technical committee:
In other words, the task of this committee was to determine if the current state of technology allows for making novel, transmissible, pandemic causing pathogens in a lab. If the answer to artificially making new, not yet listed or known to science pathogens is “yes”, then the committee was supposed to propose a system to classify such novel agents based on their genetic makeup.
Here are the categories of “pandemic pathogens” that the biodefense industry is concerned with (BTRA = bioterrorism agents):
Quoting from the summary, the report states that currently and in the foreseeable future there is no technical ability to predict functions of the pathogen from a new genetic sequence. Therefore, there is no possibility to construct a system/database that would categorize the agents into increasingly restricted classes based on their so-called “genetic code” (which doesn’t code, but you must think in terms of computer analogies that are pushed on you by the likes of Bill Gates, regardless):
[1] For example, one microorganism may be highly virulent, but poorly transmissible from person to person, whereas another agent may spread easily, but produce only mild illness
Oh! So here, nonchalantly, we have an admission that the science of genetics has failed. Right?
The book also accidentally acknowledges that the viral theory of disease is a failure:
Despite admitting that genetics and virology are both failed theories, the authors insist on using genetics and virology. They state that to solve the problem of predicting protein function from its genetic structure, the following major issues in science must be solved:
Protein structure and function;
Gene expression and regulation;
Pathogenic mechanisms;
Animal models of disease;
Data and information management for systems biology;
Synthetic biology;
Metagenomics and phylogenomic, including the human microbiome.
If only we solve the genetic code thingy (that doesn’t code), and then figure out the “pathogenic mechanisms” (meaning, what actually causes illness? wait, so it’s NOT viruses???) and “synthetic biology” (you are saying you CAN’T make biology synthetically today???)…
What about designing new pathogenic viruses in labs?
In further admission that genetic theory is bunk, the report states that nobody can predict pathogenicity or transmissibility from a genomic sequence:
Furthermore, nobody can predict whether a vaccine will work for any “novel” virus:
On the question of designing viruses de-novo (these new, chimeric, weaponized, GOF things that are worse than nukes…) the report is unequivocal - that is not possible!
Quick, someone please inform Rand Paul, that he doesn’t need to make a new regulatory agency with Rick Bright and Bob Malone in charge to regulate the weaponized viruses after all…
“Alternative approaches”, whatever they are, also fail:
The report states that progress has come mostly from the growing database of experimentally determined structures (the Protein Data Bank contains over 60,000; http://www.rcsb.org/pdb), which enable the modeling of new sequences on the basis of homology to known, related structures. Homology modeling can occasionally predict structure and function based on previously obtained experimental models, but not consistently and not for anything very new or different from existing data.
In summary, the yet unsolved technical barriers to making new chimeric pandemic causing viruses in the lab include:
Accurate prediction of protein structure and function;
Accurate understanding, prediction and implementation of protein-protein interactions within a host cell (orders of magnitude greater complexity vs a lab designed “virus”).
Ok, but you might say with enough effort and money these technical challenges will be solved, or maybe already secretly solved.
Let’s look at the protein structure problem.
The molecules are structures in a 3D space (or 4D including time). Proteins are very large molecules made of polypeptide chains that twist and fold into complex 3D forms. Molecular structures are stable, because they are believed to be “minimum energy” structures.
Let’s stop right here. Where does the notion of “minimum energy” come from? Well, of course, that’s the product of using the Newtonian model of physics and applying it, inappropriately I must add, to biology. You may say - but there is no other model to use! And you would be correct. That is because all other models have been eliminated from the field a long time ago. If you don’t affirm the great Sir Isaac, you are not going to get funding for your research grant. You would also have to invent many things from scratch, as there isn’t any other physical theory with well developed mathematical toolkit for you to use. However, few scientists ever stop to consider that the Newtonian model of physics is merely a model, and it includes substantial simplifications. For example, calculations using the term “energy” are simplifications from the original ones based on “force”, and this simplification completely removes any ability to distinguish physical causes from effects, leading to purely statistical description of the world (including our focus, the proteins).
So, as there is no other model to use in biology, we are left with making an assumption that the molecules prefer the state of “minimum-energy”, i.e. thermodynamic equilibrium. There can be numerous other causes and drivers of the molecular structures, but we will have to assume the minimum-energy hypothesis as it’s simply the only model we are allowed to use in modern science.
In case of small molecules, it is a more or less workable model as their structures are simple (e.g., H2O or CO2 - even though that’s also an over-simplification, because H2O has many physical states). However the problem of predicting the “minimum-energy structure” for a large protein remains unsolved in science.
Here is a quote from Rupert Sheldrake’s “Science Set Free” (2010):
Calculations to predict the three-dimensional structures of proteins give far too many solutions… known as the “multiple-minimum problem”.
Each protein, when folding, must “examine” numerous pathways to reach that theoretical minimum-energy state. However, not so easy - it turns out that for an average protein, the number of these pathways is such that it would take approximately 10^26 years (!!!) to examine all possible conformations. It is currently believed that the age of the universe is 10^9 years.
The minimum-energy hypothesis fails from the start because there are multiple conformations that a protein can assume with the same minimum energy. Yet, all natural proteins fold into their own unique shape/assume their own unique path within minutes. How do they figure this out? Nobody knows. The Newtonian/standard model-based physics/chemistry cannot explain how.
So, what do we do when a scientific hypothesis fails? We search for another hypothesis, right?
WRONG.
The correct answer is - we codify the failure into dogma and award it the Nobel Prize!
Sheldrake points to Christian Anfinsen:
… Christian Anfinsen, who won the Nobel Prize for work in protein folding, put it thus: “If the chain explored all possible configurations at random… it would take too long to reach the native [correct] configuration.
Anfinsen’s dogma states the following:
Anfinsen's dogma, also known as the thermodynamic hypothesis, is a postulate in molecular biology. It states that, at least for a small globular protein in its standard physiological environment, the native structure is determined only by the protein's amino acid sequence.[1]
In fact, Anfinsen’s dogma hard-coded not one, but two false hypotheses into the entire molecular biology field since 1970s: the notion that protein’s structure is determined ONLY by it’s molecular sequence, and that the structure is found via the minimum-energy state. Clearly both of these ideas are wrong. There is no evidence that the molecular structure is the cause of the shape of the protein: there can be numerous other causes, and the molecular sequence can be the effect of the shape just as likely as the cause of it (simplified Newtonian physics can’t distinguish causes from effects).
And, as we already know, there are too many minimum-energy states for each protein. The ultimate low-energy conformation is not the only possible one. It remains an unsolved mystery how and why “the one” protein conformation is arrived at, and how it happens with remarkable precision, speed and reproducibility in nature, every single time. Energy state alone (Newtonian hypothesis) cannot select between these alternative possibilities and determine the specific structure taken up by the system.
Do you also see why it is not possible to solve the protein folding issue that you would need to solve to actually make pandemic causing viruses in a lab?
That’s why I sound so confident when I say this is not possible to do. I am feeling safe and secure knowing these asshats are safely and securely fenced into their viral theory + DNA/RNA+ the “minimum energy” $cience dogma. There is a silver lining to this whole mess…
We haven’t even touched on the protein-protein interactions within the cell. Recall that the complexity is orders of magnitude greater than that of the protein folding. So, that’s not going to be solved any time soon.
You can also see why the AI won’t solve this problem either. That’s because the AI models are going to assume the Newtonian-Anfinsen’s (wrong!) principles for protein folding and will try to solve the 10^26 years of the folding pathways, and even with all the nuclear power powering all the datacenters in the world, they will still not be able to find why the protein decided to fold along a particular low-energy pathway. Right on cue, the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2024 was awarded for AI software that “predicts protein structures”. Except it doesn’t. I will address this in more detail in the future posts.
In conclusion if you “settle” the science by ramming through failed ideas, dogmatizing them, awarding them Nobel Prizes and censoring/defunding any alternative ideas - good news! you can’t make any scientific progress to whatever goals, including making of GOF viruses in the lab.
Art for today: Hoopoe, oil on panel, 9x12 in.
What I learned from a long career in a high technology company is that so called experts, were, as a class but with notable exceptions, complicators not simplifiers. They were being paid to find solutions to problems. What that required, most often, was a simplifying mindset. The complicators, it seemed to me, were looking to write a PhD thesis on the company’s nickel. They wanted the spotlight to be on them and their expertise. They viscerally rejected the simplifying tendency, which to them was an existential threat. That tendency, was, however, the only thing that solved problems. Complexity, where it naturally existed, must always be simplified to extract progress. Truth and problem solving always required a kind of reductionism, a stripping away of complexity and superfluity. My go to problem solvers seemed to understand this. The career seeking experts, not so much.
I love that Hoopoe painting and I just bought it!