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I don't think they purposely weaponized it but they know for a fact that they were stealing pathogens from a Canadian facility and the data/pathogens were going directly to that Wuhan research centre. The exact kind of research and pathogens you would take to do that kind of research. This is fact and there is a big to do about it in Canada right now. Is it not possible they let the virus do its own fun inside mice and that one just got out? That same lab had been cited for containment issues in the past.
You don't need to engineer a virus to (accidentally) start a pandemic. Depending on the research being done in a given lab, that lab probably had a lot of naturally occurring variants of coronviruses, and a lot of possible opportunities to test out infecting human workers. I'm not sure Stewart at least is saying that lab was trying to start a pandemic, but rather it could've started there by accident. Which seems at least plausible.
But you can actually engineer a virus. You can cut and splice together genetic codes for exact protein you need to a virus. And yes, it is genetic engineering. Many people in the comment section seem to believe that just because thunderf00t said it, it is not possible
Or people trying to eat something that nature goes beyond its' way to not be eaten. I'm sure we will get another virus from some deep sea creature that humans naturally wouldn't have access to
Right except for the fact there is zero evidence of that. Did you magically forget about the part in the video where a lot of the consipiracy that covid started in lab came from a book making a guess about how a virus could potentially spread from any lab in the world nothing to do with china or the weird ideas spread by Stewart.
yeah, the video starts pretty dumb. Its pretty obvious stewart was just saying it was a virus they were examining in the lab and it would have infected someone and escaped. The comparison to a tornado research center or an earthquake research centre is pretty dumb. Tornado centres don't keep live tornado's for studying that could escape.
Phil, I've been a fan for years, but you missed the point entirely on this one. You're not the only person with a grasp on how viruses work, and I've worked in these sorts of labs before. Yes, "engineering" a virus to do a specific task is insanely complicated, but that doesn't rule out simple trial and error, like you know, how evolution works. The entire point of gain of function research is to try every possible mutated form of the virus to see if it does a better job at spreading. These labs have the power to create variants orders of magnitude faster than nature can. Yes, I highly doubt the covid virus was engineered, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it escaped from the lab out of the millions of variants that are tested.
Yeah me too. I get the impression youtubing isn't his "day job", just a hobby, so they're a bit lazily and hurriedly put together, but he's got so much reach now he has to be careful about cobbling something together too clumsily and discredting himself. There's not enough clarity in this video. Doesn't define the argument he's debunking, then doesn't define the argument he's making against it. Most of the individual statements aren't wrong, but the comparisons don't work, and it's mostly a motley collection of ideas that don't make a coherent case.
And again, it's not a gain of function. Making a virus do what it does but slightly better is not a new ability. And compatible virulent genes are available from SARS and MERS. This is more like giving pest resistant corn a drought resistant gene from another corn plant.
He's also missing the knowledge that computational models for designing sequences have become incredibly more accurate. We used such software in my lab to find all manner of domains and make predictions on sequence compatibilities, then designed our experiments to prove the predictions... and it was correct quite often! There are also the mutational screening methods, where 10,000 cultures can be created by a machine and tested within a week! All automated! Frankly, I'm more surprised there haven't been a ZILLION bioweapon viruses by now! Hell, I could make one targeting the chimeric insulin-IGF1R expressed on cells of people with obesity (inflammatory molecules secreted by hypoxic adipose cells directly upregulate IGF1R expression, which forms a chimeric duplex with insulin receptor that has low insulin affinity, hence insulin resistance in obese people) and thus wipe out fatties! Fit, healthy people would be untouched!
I assume he was intentionally leaving out this, arguing against one aspect of this problem and hoping for engagement (as we are delivering it now. The algorithm will love it). I don't have too many problems with this video except that he only argued against this one argument "engineering" while leaving it appear as if that debunked the whole "originated in China's lab" theory. It only debunks the stupid theories like "engineered a specific virus to be able to control hongkong protests" and the like (which are stupid and should be debunked). But coming to the conclusion that it can't originate from the lab is far fetched. No proof that it did either but it doesn't rule that out, so that should at least be mentioned.
But "leak theory" isn't saying that virus was produced from scratch as bioweapon. But that in Wuhan was lab working on "gain-of-function" research where they worked on experiments (done also on other viruses) to make existing viruses more agressive, and that because some cutting corners or simple bad luck one of those viruses infected human (or animal) and this started pandemic.
Depends. The leak theory promoted by the super crazy MAGA people does claim that it's a bioweapon designed to "destroy the west". Due to the scale of MAGA media, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the more popular variant, rather than the sensible one you propose.
There is no evidence that this occurred period and it has been debunked thousands of times. You can identify engineered viruses. Also, GoF has a wide area and without it, we would have no understanding of viruses and how they work. Simple evolution can be considered GoF.
Thunderf00t's videos are always weakest when he delves into biology (e.g., stating that we breathe out most of the energy we take in [we don't. We burn it as heat], or showing how a N95 mask doesn't impair O2 intake by just sitting around on camera instead of trying to do anything even moderately strenuous). Thunderf00t's take-downs of physics and chemistry-based arguments (with their stricter math) are great, but once we get into the wishy-washy world of biology, the quality of these take-down attempts really falters.
I am a nurse and we used to wear well fitted N95 masks into tuberculosis rooms(also negative air flow) and I would get exhausted and short of breath just from talking and walk around in the room. But also, I watched kids play soccer outside in N95 masks and they seemed to do just fine.
@@uche007us I think the well fit part plays a big role there. I used to wear fitted N95s when teaching and I'd always find myself breaking the seal an hour in because of lightheadedness. I suspect kids wearing them may have been "cheating" a bit that way too. That, or they adapted to the strenuous activity by breathing harder.
I work for a biochemical company where we use rapid evolution via artificial selection to genetically engineer organisms to produce commercially useful enzymes. We produce all sorts of things with these enzymes or with the organisms themselves. One reaction I'm developing to industrial scale is an enzymatic copolymerization. I don't think it's completely absurd to imagine that a large lab could use artificial selection to create a highly virulent and deadly virus over years.
And you do realize virulence is a much more complex thing than one enzyme? It involves both host and pathogen working together. You can make a pathogen that perfectly binds to a receptor in immunocomprimized mice, but the moment you introduce it to its intended host it doesn't work because reasons. Biology is funny like that.
@@zenaku666 Complexity doesn't make a difference when you're using artificial selection. There are MANY ways a virus could evolve to become more virulent or lethal. You don't care which way it evolves, you just measure it's spread and lethality (or how much it hurts the animal) and breed it's most deadly form over and over, and over.
@@user-yl7kl7sl1g Sure... but doing it for humans is pretty difficult if you don't have a consistent train of living people coming in and dead people going out. And people are going to notice that.
Yeah its called directed evolution, it won a Nobel prize. There are many examples of engineered enzymes using this method. Some enzymes are literally designed de novo through computational simulation, there is even one for celiac disease called TAK-062. I didn't understand his whole cellulose spiel. If you want to break down cellulose industrially pour some sulfuric acid on it and call it a day.
@@user-yl7kl7sl1g 1. How you "breed" these viruses? Cell culture isn't a good representation of entire human body. 2. The virus will overoptimize to cell culture reproduction and not human body. 3. Even if you overcome those, lethality is (mostly) inversely related to infectivity. 4. Lastly, a weapon that kills your troops is just kamikaze-level stupidity.
0:39 "Coronavirus" refers to an entire family of viruses, so named because of their shape when viewed under a microscope. The common cold is a type of coronavirus.
"the common cold" is also not the name of a specific virus but rather a catch-all-term for "it's not worth investigating which relatively harmless virus this is, so go home, rest, and tell the nurse to bring in the next patient"
most colds are picorniviruses, some are coronaviruses, some are adenoviruses or echoviruses. Though many other echoviruses can be more like stomach flu or norovirus like symptoms
The structure of a corona virus is way to small to be viewed under an optical microscope. You need to use electron microscopy. Their total size is just a tenth of a visible light wave so it's physically impossible to distinguish using light.
@14:20 it was already demonstrated in multiple papers (which yt prevents me linking, thanks for that btw) that most mitigation efforts of the last pandemic were ineffective. Secondly, the point was missed entirety. A high lethality is exactly what you want in a bioengineered virus. Something that can kill quickly and infect a target area killing the local population before burning itself out. Its not about area denial which can be achieved through nuclear or chemical means. Anthrax being an example.
Yeah the comment section is scary because it's crazy to see how many people still buy into creationist-level conspiracy theories. From those claiming that there's evidence the viriuses were enginered, to claiming that a BSL4 lab could have 'easily' performed illegal human experimentation on their own employees without anybody noticing...
@@falxnecisI think a guy who made his name on RUclips debunking theists claims since there is no proving negatives should not now ignore the claims being made by making strawman fallacies, mound of other logical fallacies which really amount to trying to prove negatives.
a MD wouldn't be the most qualified person for this topic. thunderfoot is a biochemist, which is exactly what you want to be if you want to study viruses. (i'm speaking as a biochemist who has modified viruses for cancer research). if you modify a virus you will see the modification in its dna or rna.
"You cannot engineer a virus." Yeah, you cannot engineer a dog either. Still we have been selectively breeding them before we invented the written language. Nobody was claiming that they were building viruses from scratch.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Such an odd argument to say, there’s no way Covid could have been weaponized because if it was then we could have cured cancer??? Firstly, who says they don’t have the cure for cancer already. Second, you don’t need to know the outcome of a genetic modification, you only need to modify until you get your desired result. Isn’t this is exactly what science has been doing since the beginning? Such a bizarre argument
@@geelee1977 Okay but barring that we can absolutely engineer them. The Thought Emporium engineered a virus to infect his gut cells to make him lactose tolerant. Is that not engineering?
@@geelee1977It doesn’t explicitly do that, but it’s certainly using a peculiar understanding of “engineering” if guided evolution and the mix and match of several different already functioning bits of genomes to produce or significantly improve a virus’s ability to do something don’t qualify as “engineering”, or are as close to engineering as banging two rocks together is from making a car.
Thought emporium has engineered a virus to modify cells in his stomach to produce lactase. Now yes, it is made in the lab and doesn't replicate, but it is an engineered virus and it did work. Obviously creating a virus from scratch would be incredibly hard, but that is why you use existig virus parts (or in this case code for a enzyme) as building blocks and only combine features known to work in other ones. Making chimeras out of existing virus is not that hard, and the effects of adding for example a furin cleavage site is well known, and there are papers on that topic out there. You don't need to understand the virus in detail or create new enzymes to do this, so what even is the point of this video?
Also, even if you can create a virus that breaks down cellulose doesnt mean it would destroy humanity. If you also have to invent a way to easily spread it across most plant species and then keep them from developing resistance to them. Thunderf00t has lost his mind
Hanlon's razor. I don't recall many people saying it was manufactured or engineered. Both those things would imply some kind of intention. If it did come from a lab, it was just shoddy or unsafe practices, poor safety protocols, etc. This type of research needs to be evaluated in terms of gain/benefit vs. risk is the main thing. Especially in these foreign labs from countries and regimes that can't be trusted to begin with.
The problem is, there is a high probability that the virus was engineered, probably for protective research reasons, but possibly not. The PLA and American DARPA (military) already fund this type of research. We have an application from EcoHealth that proposes the exact type of research that could have led to CV19 (Insertion of a furin site in coronaviruses). We have chimeras created in WIV in papers back from 2016. And CV19 appears to be a bat virus and pangolin virus chimera with a furin site inserted. The possibility doesn't just exist, the target was painted and missiles were being shot in this direction.
Yes. It comes from the lab. Yes, engineering is possible. Engineering does not mean creating, and it does not mean they know what they're doing 100% yet. This is still very young. But yes, it's from there and yes, "engineering" to some extent is possible.
This would be hilarious if Thunderf00t's first-year undergrad level of understanding of the matter at hand didn't result in horrendous misinformation. Directed change in a specific function of one already optimised protein to becoming more optimised is difficult, increasing the frequency of mutations in one gene that has been identified as influencing pathogenicity/virulence and then doing mass screenings for more pathogenic and/or virulent viruses that result is easy for any lab with sufficient staff, facilities, and funding. Peter Daszak bragged about how easy doing just that was and what great results the lab in Wuhan he helped fund (large lab, BSL4 facilities, and funding most labs would never dream of having, all in a country that encourages GoF research) was having weeks before the outbreak. You equate finding the one single way to make something nearly perfect actually perfect to throwing a mountain of money at finding any way to make something extremely inefficient and unoptimised slightly more optimised with no regard for how. "Debunking" something you clearly don't fully understand when most other debunks are actually accurate is even more dangerous than channels that only peddle misinformation spreafing the same message.
He's not just a little bit wrong. He's completely wrong. Ralph Baric invented the field of synthetic virology 20 years ago. We don't need to 'direct change'. We just need to splice an analog with DNA and then use reverse transcriptase to get an RNA resultant. This doesn't mean every recombination will work. Most won't. But many do.
Well said, thunderf00t is a fool. The exact sort who would take experimental gene therapy for a virus with the risk profile of seasonal flu. The fact that he still can't see the truth is astounding. His pride won't let him admit he was wrong. People like him need to be studied.
You mentioned many times that engineering a virus is dumb since the virus already evolves. I think the concern would be that labs evolve the virus in a contained environment and would then release it. This would cause greater harm than if humans had more time to interact with it and develop antibodies.
How would you even do this? Get the virus to transmit to rats which is hard all on it's own. Then get like 5 sperated rat colonys of like 50 rats spread the virus and pick the colony with the fastest spread repete 20 times that's like 4000 rats just to get a fast spreading virus (assuming that's even enough generation, probebly not) then do the same agine to get the virus apropriatly deadly. Then you have to get human subject to transmit the virus to which again is really hard to do, only to hope that the virus is good at spreading in humans too. Then you inefct your own people for no reason. Like ok sounds about right.
The way you design a bioweapon is to start with something that kills the target organism pretty fast most of the time, apply some artificial selection to make it kill very fast every time, and reduce any symptoms that encourage easy person to person transmission all by trial and error. Then deploy it by oversaturating an area with the disease-causing agent vastly beyond what would naturally occur to guarantee infection, such that any target organism which goes into the area until the stuff is inactivated dies, and any target organism which does not go into that area or sleep next to the infected survives.
Well, when you are lecturing others, yes. That's exactly what Thunderf00t/Dr Phil Mason does here, in this video, in all his videos. With the singular exception about UFOs, UAPs, and aliens. Otherwise, you should force yourself to learn new things: i.e. things you don't know.
No one ever said it was engineered, even the guy in the video at the start said it came from there (which you agree with at the end) and did not come out of anywhere else like a food market.
"No one ever said it was engineered" - you know this isn't true. He even highlighted articles at the start suggesting as much so you didn't need to go looking
Just watch the first 13 seconds... When asked "is there a chance it was created in a lab?", Jon Stewart replies "A chance?!!!" as if it was something obvious. So, the guy in the video seems to think that it's the case. That's what Thunderf00t is addressing and that doesn't mean that it couldn't have leaked from a lab.
This is so wrong. Why was there so much push back on the vaccines then, with people claiming that its some plan to kill off people? That the virus was not a "normal" corona virus, it was made to target humans, specifically older people. And that the social distancing, the wearing of masks and so on, was a way for the government to control people. All of this stuff is out in the open. Most people believe the virus was man made or at least manipulated in a lab and released on purpose as some form of governmental control. Which is why there are still people on here claiming thunderfoot is talking rubbish, and that you can create a virus like that.
@@IronFreeeIt's semantics over the word 'engineered'. Most people think it was 'created' in that lab using some kind of tinkering. The components of the virus were not created but they were combined to create something new.
@@Jac70 What do you mean by "it was 'created' in that lab using some kind of tinkering"? Whatever Jon Stewart intended to say, this video is still worth watching for the explanation.
As someone who 'engineers' viruses every week, its amusing to a dude whose 'career' is being snarky on YT tell me I dont actually do genetic engineering. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 I would wipe the floor with you in 5 minutes of a conversation
Gene therapy by using modified viruses is possible in avery limited fashion, but incredibly expensive. We are talking about millions of dollars per single patient.
When I've heard the theory that the virus was intentionally made, I always questioned the motive. Why would a country release a virus on its own people first? No motive there. Alternatively, a lab is studying new novel coronaviruses in hopes of developing vaccinations or learning more about viruses in general and there's an accidental leak. This theory sounds more plausible as there exists motive and people are bad at following policies and make mistakes constantly.
The reason gain of function is pursued is because it is hoped - much in vain - that it will allow for the production of counter measures for a threat that has yet to emerge. The problem is that there is no bio-containment procedure that remotely approaches full-proof status. For example, MRSA is most commonly acquired in hospitals and those facilities are perpetually scrubbed down with glutaraldehyde. Furthermore, gain of function research is inherently dual use, whatever gains in virulence that are achieved for the hope of prevention can be banked for subsequent military use. Particularly if the originating power can develop treatment protocols. You are correct in that it would be foolish for them to release it on themselves, but it appears that it was an accidental leak.
@@memeticist "The reason gain of function is pursued is because it is hoped - much in vain - that it will allow for the production of counter measures for a threat that has yet to emerge." This is utter nonsense.
This shouldn't be a busted. Yes, it's from the lab and yes, they "banged rocks together." And most of the rest you said was correct as well. But you're making assumptions based purely on your research knowledge without looking at the geopolitical, the local situation, the historical, etc. I don't know what the idea was, or who did what. But I know it got out and it got out from there. And it was "banged with rocks." Someone else mentioned it was possible they were trying to get a weaker version for a vaccine as well. There are a million possibilities between nuke and no idea. And we know it's neither of those, so it has to be somewhere in the middle.
Why do we assert they, "banged rocks together"? Shi Zhengli is one of the top scientists in her field and she regularly consulted with Raph Baric, whose specialty is synthetic virology, literally re-engineering viruses.
@@elus89"Banging rocks together" is a fitting metaphor because it translates gain of function to the layman. They do the same thing again and again until a slight, barely noticeable change happens. They log it, study it, and then go back to "banging rocks". It doesn't mean that it's not a research with highly educated scientists behind it
Hi thunderf00t i dont think your reasoning is correct here. There are some ideas for making deadly viruses that would almost certainly be simple to implement. For example, one way would be to add at a virus genetic code for antibodies that neutralize cytokines essential for immunity to the virus. Such antibodies and their genetic codes are known. Or adding genetic code for things that interfere with other essential functions of the immune system.
Very poor video, this doesn't disprove anything. You've taken one word "engineering" and focused on that in a dishonest attempt to disprove a wider discussion. This is very disappointing. For one thing genetic modification of bacteria has been used for many years in the biotechnology industry, for producing insulin for example. Yet you try to create an idea this is impossible. Then there's the problem of it's origins. As I'm certain you know, evolution takes time and this virus was sudden. It's highly likely that an evolved strain of a novel coronavirus would come from a coronavirus laboratory. I don't think that's an absurd assumption to make. It's certainly where I would start my investigation. Which is the point John Stewart was making. You drew a comparison between different research organisation centred around weather and a coronavirus lab. Unless those weather organisations are creating 'bottled lightning' and performing experiments on it they are a poor choice of comparison. Creating a new protein or enzyme is beyond current capability, adding existing proteins and enzymes to an organism is not. The discussion is whether this has taken place. So, has it taken place? If it has, where is the most likely place those changes took place?
The entire premise is false. Ralph Baric synthetically creates viruses. It's literally his specialty. He's been doing it for twenty years. ThunderFOOT is just out over his skis (again).
We already have engineered viruses. In fact, for the last 20 years. We call it “Gene Therapy” Viruses were found to be the best vectors we needed to get the modified genes into cells. This is the goal for Cystic Fibrosis. I really have no idea why Philip is doing this piece. He did a PhD in biochemistry like I did, this is common knowledge with literally thousands of peer reviewed articles on Clarivate (Web of Knowledge) Just weird.
Please make a gain of function video. How would a lab create evolutionary pressure to lead to an outcome that is wanted? Man has breed many things to get what we want, dogs, plants etc… how would it be done with viruses?
What part of "viruses mutate" prevents you to understand that the end result will not necessarily be what you intend!? You can't stop the calendar at 2024 just because you think this is the year we all desired and is the bestest...
@@thelazy0ne What part of " the end result will not necessarily be what you intend" is a strawman? Why the part where you assume the researchers were trying to get a specific function, not just tinkering until they got something that was close enough to a general target. Which is exactly what selective breeding and GMOs are.
The problem is that nature do that all the time and much better than any lab will ever do because the virus has bigger sample size, billions and billions of genetically diverse cells instead of a few cells in a lab.
@@elchippe Actually, nature kind of sucks. Limited environments, for example; a lab can slow walk a species from an environment where they thrive and into one where they can't survive at all, slowly enough for the species to evolve. Natural environmental change tends to be inconsiderate.
He can't tell you that because he doesn't have a degree in it. He is just a chemist and you are not allowed to believe him on anything else so sayeth he, so sayeth the comments (who by this logic also shouldn't be allowed to have an opinion on it either way without going to get a degree first, but what would religions be without hypocrisy?)
things evolve, so companies/gov can selectively breed something to change its trait. so yes u can not engineer but u can mutate them. ofc no one can build one from the ground up, but mutate one that already exists and is effective in other organisms, yes, you can. in fact we often use them to our advantage, we make or use weaker strains to use in vaccines. i'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish with this video.
It's really a shame what happened to this channel. The man became what he once defeated... a total Karen. Only anti Musk hate videos and virus virus virus... this man is stuck in the past. Worst of all he is not even honest and uses 1 straw man after the other. I am unsubbing now this channel is dead. Can't believe I actually supported this guy and his channel in the past. Worst midlife Karen crisis I have ever seen.
@@uche007us I don't like Musk and his products and companies as well. It's fine to debunk a few of his claims. But this guy is obsessed with him. Like 10 videos only about him?? Boring and vengeful.
Because Thunderpuss is practically apart of the "establishment". He peddles the same propagandist BS that the main stream media puts out. He only became obsessed with Musk after the "left" was told to attack him. You know, immediately after Musk took over one of the US government's propaganda outlets.
Main argument against this video: hurricane and earthquake research stations study phenomenon where they occur. With pathology, this isn't the case. The CDC headquarters in Atlanta studied pathogens from all over the world, because they can be isolated and brought into a lab. To correct the analogy, it's as if a hurricane research station in Ohio, which studies and had stocks of live hurricane in the lab, was hit by a category 5 hurricane. It's possible that a hurricane made it's way very far inland and this happened naturally, but it's also possible a lab leak was the cause. An investigation could get to the bottom of it, but unfortunately the Ohio government has blocked all external investigation and is refusing to share comprehensive data about the lab, which isn't reassuring (though it likely comes down to national pride more than espionage). There's no reason to think that this Ohio hurricane lab had bad intent, (nor is it likely they could have engineered a hurricane selectively) and they were probably studying the hurricane to find ways to prevent it. They also were probably taking really normal precautions to prevent a lab leak. But the issue is that, if a leak occurred, it would be responsible for causing trillions of dollars in damage and killing millions of people, and at some point we might have to come together and decide whether this type of research with such a devastating subject can ever be performed safely enough to mitigate risk
@@noconsent I'm not completely sure what you're getting at, SARS-COV2 is endemic to every continent but Antarctica, and many people in the U.S have died of COVID-19, including at least two of my close family members
Finally... you made an ORIGINAL and GOOD point against Thunderf00t's video, Spencegolde. EVERYBODY ELSE JUST DID APPEAL TO AUTHORITY BS: "Thundy's not a PhD biologist blah blah"
Or or other option just because you were studying sars doesn't magically mean you can modify it to create COVID. It's like saying a hurricane research center can create a hurricane and accidentally released it out into the wild after researching hurricanes. Also how do you argue about the point where you only evidence that anything came out of a lab is news articles that are probably misinterpreting a book that had fuck all to do with labs in china.
The fact that you think that's some gotcha... This is like saying "We use Hydrogen for stuff and nuclear fusion also uses Hydrogen so we clearly already have the capability for fusion power"
Says “you can’t weaponize viruses” then says “they do it themselves” -what do you think “gain of function” research is? Just because it’s hard to breakdown cellulose doesn’t mean respirator viruses can’t be made more pathogenic!?!
I am not sure about your line of arguing of this topic. I would like to point out 3 things: first: the comparison to Tornados are not so good. I mean the Tornado Research center may be does not have a tornado chamber and when it get loose by accident the tornado will grow exponentially. secoand: I think there are many ways to alter life. For instance, by domesticating plants and animals, we alter this form of life pretty much. I am not a biologist, bit i can think of a way of "breeding" viruses to alter their behavior and this may work even without special equipment, just with Animal experiments. thired: we can check it statistical, so how many cities are there with virus research in this area and what are the probability that the a virus mutation come from a city that have one of those. And to the Tornado comparison, a Virus research lab don't has to be in a spot where the risk of the virus is high, a tornado facility with sensors and other stuff is a good bet to build it where it is needed. Just my thoughts... but please let me know yours
About point 1: the comparison was only about the location, not the other parts of the conspiracy theory. The fact that Tornado Research centres cannot provoke a tornado by accident is precisely the point. That shows that the causation link is not "research centre caused tornado" but "tornadoes caused the research centre to be at this location".
@zenaku666 Considering there are only two genders I don't think anyone needs to cover that. It's clear he has turned the corner of making genuine content and now is focused on how many clicks he can get.
Earthquakes are studied in earthquake zones because they are not portable. Volcanologists go to volcanoes for the same reason. We in the UK studied bio weapons at Porton Down. It's not for it's bio diversity, tropical diseases or it's environmental proclivity for viral mutation. It's the same way that say if you study why sodium explodes in water you don't have to travel to a sodium processing plant. Small things are portable, and can be taken to places to study them. Tectonic fault lines are big, making their postage prohibitively expensive.
theory!?! HA! If @thunderf00t would read the published research, *from the lab in question* , his utter ignorance of modern *practical engineering* viral-functions, would be disabused. Nat Med 21, 1508-1513 (2015) That's the controversial paper, oft-cited as the smoking gun, if you will... details their steps in bioengineering the *first* (bat-borne) coronavirus vaccines. Open and shut case Would you like to know more? Then there's the episode of _This Week In Virology_ (ep635 iirc) featuring guest, and co-author of the aforementioned papers : Peter mf'ing Daszac! *explaining how trivial it is to swap binding affinities of virii* . (TL;DR : 30m mark of the video iirc..also.. don't let it blow your mind when you check the broadcast date of this episode)
@@alterego2421 Thunderf00t could read the *published research* from the lab in question . Nat Med 21, 1508-1513 (2015) That's the controversial paper, oft-cited as the smoking gun, if you will... details their steps in bioengineering the *first* (bat-borne) coronavirus vaccines. Open and shut case. Would you like to know more? Then there's the episode of _This Week In Virology_ (ep615) featuring guest and co-author of the aforementioned papers : Peter _mf'ing_ Daszac! *explaining how trivial it is to swap binding affinities of virii* . 25-30minute mark fyi (ps. don't let it blow your mind when you check the approx date this episode aired)
I would still categorize it as a “leak”, taking it from its natural habitat and then accidentally introducing it to a densely populated area would classify it as such. Now you’re right that it wasn’t engineered, just worked upon.
@@josho225 to study mutations and be better prepared for these mutations if they do appear in the wild. "Scientists perform these manipulations for many reasons, including wanting to understand how the microbes evade detection by our immune systems." "Researchers argue the work can offer a peek at what a virus can do before it goes into the natural world and poses a threat to people."
@@josho225 To investigate the likelihood of a virus mutating in the wild to become dangerous to humans and designing vaccines before this happens. This is public research, just read the papers, they tell you the precise purpose.
All human beings are inherently good and would never make anything to harm another human being or any being in a matter of fact. Especially those with power and high intelligence, they are especially good
@@Gelatinocyte2 Dunning-Kruger says that people who know a little about a subject, think they are experts. While I have a lot of respect for TF as chemical-physicist, his biology expertise is not great, and the things he is saying things in this video are decisevely false. He claims that it is above our technological knowhow to engineer organisms. Viruses in his case, but the priniciples used are the same really. So GMO - Genetically Modified Organisms - are massive classes of genetically engineered organisms we see in the supermaket every day. Monsanto is one of the largest companies producing seeds for various crops. They have gained various functions - like resistance to draught, certain pests, faster growing cycle, resistance cold, etc. to name a few. They also make RoundUp which is herbecide, and then design their own plants to be specifically resistant to it. All this is done through gain-a-function genetic engineering. So TF claiming how this is virtually impossible is clearly, demonstrably, think-about-it-for-10-seconds-while-getting-your-massive-ego-off-the-soap-box false.
@@Gelatinocyte2 So Dunning Kruger refers to people who know a bit about something thinking they are experts. TF is by all accounts a great chemical physicist (I respect him for that). I am not sure he is necessarily an amazing biologist (note: RUclips ate my comment and I am retyping it, but in the meantime I looked at your profile, and it seems you are molecular biologist, so you probably know a lot more about this than I do). GMOs are all around us. They represent organism that are engineered by humans by various means. They resist drought, cold, grow faster, etc. than their 'natural' bretherin. TF claims in this video that we can't manipulate organisms (I know viruses are not really organisms, but close enough for today's purposes). This is patently false. GMOs are a simple, plentiful, obvious counterexample. Monsanto is a massive conglomerate that sells seeds, herbecites and other agg stuff. They make RoundUp - a very powerful herbecite. Then they sell seeds that are specifically engineered to resist RoundUp. They literally make a plant chemical weapon that kills most everything, and then design specific plants to resist it. Long story - my point is that TF's over-inflated ego on occasion makes him blind to obvious things.
15:31 yes, that's gain of function, make a bad virus worse for humans. You can call it modification instead of engineering if it makes you feel better. I love your videos but this one seemed to debunk an idea that hardly anyone is proposing, namely a whole cloth manufacturing of a new virus. Also, you were criticizing the idea of a government doing this because it would hurt their own population in the end after it mutates but I would like to point out that harming your enemies is not the only motivation for releasing a virus, population control via killing off the old and unhealthy (unproductive) is a quite feasible motivation for certain people or countries.
@1:15 ehhh not the strongest point, I mean had there been notable outbreaks in the past in this 1 area, that would makes sense to put a institution there. But to have the institution precede the outbreak is statistically unlikely, it would be like picking a random spot of land and building a gold mine and finding a huge amount of gold only to conclude, well of course, you wouldn't put a gold mine where there isn't any gold
Yeah. It would be more akin to a lab studying disease in Floridian gators in NY. The bats carrying it are in the China/IndoChina Border. Kunming is where the caves are 1k miles from Wuhan..
I don't think it's as statistically unlikely as you think. Pandemic start points are not truly random and uniformly distributed. A pandemic is going to likely start in some heavily populated area. You're also going to build national labs in very populated areas. The existence of a lab studying coronaviruses in China isn't exactly surprising either. The two occurring simultaneously is also not exactly hard to imagine.
@@zenaku666 Wuhan is a thousand miles from Yunnan. Its a different climate. Wuhan is a place of no wildlife. Kunming would make more sense, or Guangzou. Guangzhou is bigger, and is in the area.
@@zenaku666 " heavily populated area" - China has one of the highest density of people in the world, they could have effectively opened up the centre anywhere but just so happened to pick the spot where the breakout occurs...? By definition that has to be statistically unlikely. I mean do we have any other examples where a disease has started around a disease centre, but where the disease centre was not at fault for its origins? "The existence of a lab studying coronaviruses in China isn't exactly surprising either. " - No, but that's not the claim, you've strawmanned it, the claim is that it originated at the same location. "The two occurring simultaneously is also not exactly hard to imagine." - in a country the size of China, with the size of its population, yea it kind of is. Unless China has more disease centres than the USA has fast food outlets, which I don't believe is the case.
@@mcbean1 "By definition that has to be statistically unlikely" Nope, not at all. Coincidences do happen, and given enough opportunity occur quite frequently. To make that claim you must know the actual probabilities of the pandemic occurring in that area. Unless you know that there is no statistical claim to be made. Perhaps you need to reevaluate your assumptions? The virus is known to have originated in the market as they found both of the early viral strains there mixed amongst the cages, and the pattern of early cases matches up with the market hypothesis. Why the market why there if the virus originated in the lab? Why not in the residential section, or a restaurant, theater, park, or school? Do the people working in that lab not have social lives outside of this one wild life market?
Taking the dumbest take on internet, then debunking it by nitpicking it out of existence. Its just straw-manning at that point. Whats next? Debunking reddit comments?
I respect a lot of what you make and say, but this unfortunately is your worst video. Please stick to physics which you’re clearly gifted at, biology isn’t for you..
To create a bacteria that can break down cellulose? We've had that for millions of years... they are called fungi. Not only do they break down cellulose, but they learned like 40 million years ago how to also break down lignin. It took them a few million years to figure that one out, during which time all of the world's coal was formed.
It's actually crazy how far enzymes and proteins are beyond our full understanding. I mean, personally, I think most security agencies can break RSA and similar with a bit of effort using quantum computers today, but true custom-made protein creation is on another level. It's like NP hard times a billion, I like to call it NP-harder.
AI approaches to protein folding (which is like 3 huge steps from enzyme design) have proved promising recently. I'm really hopeful we can find a more rigorous way to determine protein folding sequences, but it's a really thorny problem.
Yeah, that's what you get when nature is trying really hard to do something for 3 billion years, even if the process is slow it had vastly more time to work with than human science even existed, and that's before considering the difference between the number of scientists and the cells trying to invent new ways of doing something...
The thing is, we don’t have quantum computers YET. If humanity put it’s energy into building a better future instead of arguing constantly and waging wars against eachother, we might already have had mars colonies, and might have cured cancer. I’m so pissed that space exploration stopped when the cold war was over. Come on FFS do we really need a war to show eachother wether USA or USSR have the bigger d1ck to land on the moon?!? As long as we’ll argue left vs right, blue vs red, west vs east, democracy vs communism, we’ll never work together as a whole to better our planet. Instead we destroy our atmosphere, kill entire animal species, use up all of our resources, for what? For proving who is right? The scientist who really care about our future and evolution are drowned in a sea of nonsense and have to literally beg the government for funding their projects. Nothing gets funded if it’s not profitable. Ffs…
On a side note, this reminds me of the movie The Andromeda Strain, based on the book by Micheal Crichton, (who wrote a ton of sci-fi novels, many that were adapted into movies - for better or worse). Spoilers for those who want to read the book or see the movie. A virus infects a small town and eventually the scientists realise what kept the only two people who have survived alive, only to then realise the virus had evolved so quickly it was no longer deadly. I can't recall exact details, but I think there was a time pressure since the town was going to be nuked to prevent further infection.
Here I think you are wrong, but some background information is still interesting, as usual.Someone wanting, and trying, to produce a virus, and someone managing to produce a virus, are two different things.
another hit video from the chemistry, astronomy, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, virology, biology, earth science, astrophysics, geophysics, paleontology, archaeology, climatology, microbiology, genetics expert. 🙃
Selective breeding can be done trivially with viruses just like it's done with bacteria, I completely agree with the fact that we can't engineer a virus from scratch, that would be just plain stupid and practically impossible. It's way easier to just put a whole bunch of viruses / bacteria samples in a room near a strong radioactive source and wait until one of the samples evolves the traits you want, then allow it to grow, and repeat. I can't say whether or not the release of the virus was intentional or even if it came from the lab. If it was intentional, I think the virus done far more damage to China then it done to the US.
I remember reading about cellulose-dissolving bacteria back in the late 1990s. I thought that might be a bad idea especially if the engineered bacteria got loose. We could potentially lose almost all organic matter in the soil (the humus) which could be a disaster. But could it live in nature or would it be like a domesticated hybrid crop plant that requires special conditions and monitoring to survive and grow. Probably the latter.
Humans need an enemy and we are going to blame the easiest thing to blame. I majored in Evolutionary Biology at ASU, but I now work at a tech company, I didn't keep up with the science of my field like someone who went into a career of it... but I promise you the amount of people I meet on a weekly basis who still spout things like from the a legitimate Heliocentric view of the Solar System right down to, "okay Microevolution, sure, but Macro? No way!" just makes me jaded. I've given up. When I was fiercely pro science and in the face of others about it in my early 20's I would've burned with passion, but now nearing my 40's I simply take a more nihilistic approach to humanity, especially Americans. I think many of us have honestly thought, "well if I just explain science to someone, they'll surely change their mind" only to find out slowly how bad it gets with someone you're talking to getting further and further down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theory until it gets to a point where they just say, "oh so you're THEM!?"
I guess you left Biology at about the same time Ralph Baric was pioneering synthetic virology. Engineering viruses is not a conspiracy theory, it's established science.
@@elus89 nice try but already debunked Viruses cannot be engineered since 1. Viruses are micro organisms not your mom undies 2. They evolve. U can no more engineer viruses then create a human synthetically That's why p0tholer54 video was attached . Virology
I'm five minutes in, i love thunderfoot and waiting on the answer. I'm guessing that he's gonna argue semantics rather than arguing that viruses can't be modified or selectively reproduced.
So you are saying that labs that handle infectious diseases and perform research such as gain of function are immune to mishaps ? source: Journal of Infectious Diseases - Management of Accidental Exposure to Ebola Virus in the Biosafety Level 4 Laboratory, Hamburg, Germany
Fun coincidence: the day Thunderfoot posted this video, CBS aired a new episode of their cop series NCIS... The plot revolved around saving a defecting Chinese scientist who was weaponizing a virus.
Can't a lab just collect naturally occuring viruses and artificially select the shit out of them? Making a somewhat deadly virus out of just breeding enough viruses hardly seem unreasonable. It would be a stupid Idea because it would be impossible to control. But the "Impossible" bothers me.
The thing is, we know that they have been doing much more than that. Shi Zhengli was creating chimeras at WIV. Not just pushing biological strain variations, but actively taking components and combining them together.
This is the first time I've given a thunderf00t video a thumbsdown. The Jon Stewart clickbait was unnecessary. He did not assert or imply that covid-19 was a bioweapon. This video showed why covid-19 would've been a terrible bioweapon. It does not contradict what Jon Stewart said.
Do I believe the Wuhan lab thingy yes, but it is also normal to have those labs near those places. why do you think every update regarding the swine flu starts in asia and travels westward to europe ?
Can you make a video on why it Is it not possible that the virus could have accidently "leaked" from the lab in Wuhan? I would find it really enlightening to hear from someone who is actually educated on this what they labs like that do, and don't do, to prevent their work from "leaking".
I agree. Not many people (besides a comedian I guess) have really said they thought a virus was created from scratch, rather people were being irresponsible with dangerous viruses and when one leaked they covered it up. This is what more people believe happened. It could have been a bat pooping on a pig, like in the movies, but irresponsible humans have done so much harm ...
@@nerfherder4284 have you watched the full clip? if not you should. because I have a funny feeling Mr Stewart's reply to this video would be similar...
@@falxnecis 1) I disagree I don't trust the FBI as far as I can throw them 2) he's not saying that's not not what happened [which is what I was pointing out]
Why couldn't SarsCov2 have leaked from your pants? We know where novel viruses come from. They come from cases where you have wild animals meet factory farming. And where different species of animals meet. Novel viruses that are deadly occur when a virus gains the function to infect humans. Viruses don't leak from research labs.
I'm not a molecular biologist, but I have the following intuition. I might well be wrong. Not sure, so posing it as a question: Isn't increase in successful self-replication a very evolutionary goal of viral microorganisms, which would make breeding such organisms through mutation and selection a lot easier than the needle-in-haystack problem of synthesizing a novel cellulose-hungry enzyme? It is my understanding that cellulase enzymes aren't that good at the thing, presumably due to a poor reward for the function they perform, resulting in us dispatching most of the fibers we ingest together with the rest of the anorganic matter after metabolising. Thank you for consideration, and the rest of the content you create on your channel.
Glad to know specialized, biological weapons can't exist. By the way, if your interested in free medical insurance in the US, would you like to sign up as a "volunteer " for the wonderful Tuskegee Program, just sign your paperwork at Unit 731 anytime after 10am.
Even though i agree with thunder nearly on all his points, but i think you are creating a straw man argument here, by claiming its something 100% engineered to do something specific, i don't think that is general understanding of that theory. My personal understanding of that theory is that lab was working on viruses and that would have been one of the strains that somehow leaked outside of the lab. China does tons of messed up things and having secrecy behind it all after the virus adds quite a lot to that theory.
The Department of Defense wrote this in 1970: "eminent biologists believe that within a period of 5 to 10 years it would be possible to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired." He goes on to say "Withing the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. >>Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease."
Yes, those kind of labs are there precisely because there is a great possibility of outbreak, environment is favorable for viruses. Like astronomical observatories are built where environment is good for observing the Universe. It is basic logic.
There was no outbreak. Just an illusion created by bogus tests. Did you see the infamous and dramatic scenes of people collapsing in the streets of Wuhan repeated anywhere else? No hospitals overrun, no novel symptoms. Just mass hysteria and junk science.
Basically any time there's some new tech we have a period where it's gonna do everything, and then ten years later life is basically identical to how it was before the tech came out and nobody cares anymore.
This really amuses me. While AI like LLMs is definitely well short of being AGI, all people are is a "pattern recognition trick." That's what our brains encode, just with greater complexity. LLMs and AI like them also have the issue that they are static. That is, they effectively lack the ability to create new long-term memory. Of course, so do some actual people.
Possible it is possible. If you build something close enough to a human brain we know it will work at least well as a human brain. How hard it will be is another beast...
As my dad said a few times in the early 2000's "we're overdue for a major outbreak of some kind". He's also said we're overdue for a major ice age. We had a small one back during the Civil War and haven't seen another since.
The funding was for gain of function work. I can see you like I are no expert. But my understanding is that it was to move functionality onto a virus ie starting with a known virus and placing a spike protein on it. I have no idea if this is possible. However as the US had provided funding for the work to be done, somebody was convinced it could be and persuaded others.That's how investment works.
..... to anyone typing 'gain of function'....... thanks for showing us you never watched the video!
Thanks for educating me, Thunderf00t!
They're typing "gain of function" because that's what people are referring to when they say engineering a virus.
You "debunked" your own strawman.
@@Davidson0617 interesting form of 'engineering' that requires no actual understanding or engineering.
I don't think they purposely weaponized it but they know for a fact that they were stealing pathogens from a Canadian facility and the data/pathogens were going directly to that Wuhan research centre.
The exact kind of research and pathogens you would take to do that kind of research.
This is fact and there is a big to do about it in Canada right now.
Is it not possible they let the virus do its own fun inside mice and that one just got out?
That same lab had been cited for containment issues in the past.
Yes, viruses evolve. The Chinese took the virus and "engineered" it just like a dog breeder selectively breeds dogs. That is "gain of function."
You don't need to engineer a virus to (accidentally) start a pandemic. Depending on the research being done in a given lab, that lab probably had a lot of naturally occurring variants of coronviruses, and a lot of possible opportunities to test out infecting human workers. I'm not sure Stewart at least is saying that lab was trying to start a pandemic, but rather it could've started there by accident. Which seems at least plausible.
But you can actually engineer a virus. You can cut and splice together genetic codes for exact protein you need to a virus.
And yes, it is genetic engineering. Many people in the comment section seem to believe that just because thunderf00t said it, it is not possible
Yeah, naturally accruing is not the same as mass production a lab might do.
Or people trying to eat something that nature goes beyond its' way to not be eaten. I'm sure we will get another virus from some deep sea creature that humans naturally wouldn't have access to
Right except for the fact there is zero evidence of that. Did you magically forget about the part in the video where a lot of the consipiracy that covid started in lab came from a book making a guess about how a virus could potentially spread from any lab in the world nothing to do with china or the weird ideas spread by Stewart.
yeah, the video starts pretty dumb. Its pretty obvious stewart was just saying it was a virus they were examining in the lab and it would have infected someone and escaped. The comparison to a tornado research center or an earthquake research centre is pretty dumb. Tornado centres don't keep live tornado's for studying that could escape.
Phil, I've been a fan for years, but you missed the point entirely on this one. You're not the only person with a grasp on how viruses work, and I've worked in these sorts of labs before. Yes, "engineering" a virus to do a specific task is insanely complicated, but that doesn't rule out simple trial and error, like you know, how evolution works. The entire point of gain of function research is to try every possible mutated form of the virus to see if it does a better job at spreading. These labs have the power to create variants orders of magnitude faster than nature can. Yes, I highly doubt the covid virus was engineered, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it escaped from the lab out of the millions of variants that are tested.
Yeah me too.
I get the impression youtubing isn't his "day job", just a hobby, so they're a bit lazily and hurriedly put together, but he's got so much reach now he has to be careful about cobbling something together too clumsily and discredting himself.
There's not enough clarity in this video. Doesn't define the argument he's debunking, then doesn't define the argument he's making against it.
Most of the individual statements aren't wrong, but the comparisons don't work, and it's mostly a motley collection of ideas that don't make a coherent case.
And again, it's not a gain of function. Making a virus do what it does but slightly better is not a new ability. And compatible virulent genes are available from SARS and MERS. This is more like giving pest resistant corn a drought resistant gene from another corn plant.
He's also missing the knowledge that computational models for designing sequences have become incredibly more accurate. We used such software in my lab to find all manner of domains and make predictions on sequence compatibilities, then designed our experiments to prove the predictions... and it was correct quite often!
There are also the mutational screening methods, where 10,000 cultures can be created by a machine and tested within a week! All automated!
Frankly, I'm more surprised there haven't been a ZILLION bioweapon viruses by now! Hell, I could make one targeting the chimeric insulin-IGF1R expressed on cells of people with obesity (inflammatory molecules secreted by hypoxic adipose cells directly upregulate IGF1R expression, which forms a chimeric duplex with insulin receptor that has low insulin affinity, hence insulin resistance in obese people) and thus wipe out fatties! Fit, healthy people would be untouched!
The janitor responds
I assume he was intentionally leaving out this, arguing against one aspect of this problem and hoping for engagement (as we are delivering it now. The algorithm will love it). I don't have too many problems with this video except that he only argued against this one argument "engineering" while leaving it appear as if that debunked the whole "originated in China's lab" theory. It only debunks the stupid theories like "engineered a specific virus to be able to control hongkong protests" and the like (which are stupid and should be debunked). But coming to the conclusion that it can't originate from the lab is far fetched. No proof that it did either but it doesn't rule that out, so that should at least be mentioned.
But "leak theory" isn't saying that virus was produced from scratch as bioweapon. But that in Wuhan was lab working on "gain-of-function" research where they worked on experiments (done also on other viruses) to make existing viruses more agressive, and that because some cutting corners or simple bad luck one of those viruses infected human (or animal) and this started pandemic.
Depends. The leak theory promoted by the super crazy MAGA people does claim that it's a bioweapon designed to "destroy the west". Due to the scale of MAGA media, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the more popular variant, rather than the sensible one you propose.
Calling something that actually happened a "theory" is kinda weird.
@@Jobocan.you dont know what theory means
@@Jobocan.Where are the proofs?
There is no evidence that this occurred period and it has been debunked thousands of times. You can identify engineered viruses.
Also, GoF has a wide area and without it, we would have no understanding of viruses and how they work.
Simple evolution can be considered GoF.
Thunderf00t's videos are always weakest when he delves into biology (e.g., stating that we breathe out most of the energy we take in [we don't. We burn it as heat], or showing how a N95 mask doesn't impair O2 intake by just sitting around on camera instead of trying to do anything even moderately strenuous). Thunderf00t's take-downs of physics and chemistry-based arguments (with their stricter math) are great, but once we get into the wishy-washy world of biology, the quality of these take-down attempts really falters.
I am a nurse and we used to wear well fitted N95 masks into tuberculosis rooms(also negative air flow) and I would get exhausted and short of breath just from talking and walk around in the room.
But also, I watched kids play soccer outside in N95 masks and they seemed to do just fine.
@@uche007us I think the well fit part plays a big role there. I used to wear fitted N95s when teaching and I'd always find myself breaking the seal an hour in because of lightheadedness. I suspect kids wearing them may have been "cheating" a bit that way too. That, or they adapted to the strenuous activity by breathing harder.
The N95 thing is physics too. Could be expressed in minimum cubic feet of air per second vs maximum lung capacity input.
Could also measure blood oxygen vs exercise vs time. These aren't pseudo-logical measures, though they would be somewhat unique to TF's physiology.
Nah, his takes on economy are far worse than that. Directly followed by anything politics.
I work for a biochemical company where we use rapid evolution via artificial selection to genetically engineer organisms to produce commercially useful enzymes. We produce all sorts of things with these enzymes or with the organisms themselves. One reaction I'm developing to industrial scale is an enzymatic copolymerization. I don't think it's completely absurd to imagine that a large lab could use artificial selection to create a highly virulent and deadly virus over years.
And you do realize virulence is a much more complex thing than one enzyme? It involves both host and pathogen working together. You can make a pathogen that perfectly binds to a receptor in immunocomprimized mice, but the moment you introduce it to its intended host it doesn't work because reasons. Biology is funny like that.
@@zenaku666 Complexity doesn't make a difference when you're using artificial selection. There are MANY ways a virus could evolve to become more virulent or lethal. You don't care which way it evolves, you just measure it's spread and lethality (or how much it hurts the animal) and breed it's most deadly form over and over, and over.
@@user-yl7kl7sl1g
Sure... but doing it for humans is pretty difficult if you don't have a consistent train of living people coming in and dead people going out. And people are going to notice that.
Yeah its called directed evolution, it won a Nobel prize. There are many examples of engineered enzymes using this method. Some enzymes are literally designed de novo through computational simulation, there is even one for celiac disease called TAK-062. I didn't understand his whole cellulose spiel. If you want to break down cellulose industrially pour some sulfuric acid on it and call it a day.
@@user-yl7kl7sl1g
1. How you "breed" these viruses? Cell culture isn't a good representation of entire human body.
2. The virus will overoptimize to cell culture reproduction and not human body.
3. Even if you overcome those, lethality is (mostly) inversely related to infectivity.
4. Lastly, a weapon that kills your troops is just kamikaze-level stupidity.
0:39 "Coronavirus" refers to an entire family of viruses, so named because of their shape when viewed under a microscope. The common cold is a type of coronavirus.
"the common cold" is also not the name of a specific virus but rather a catch-all-term for "it's not worth investigating which relatively harmless virus this is, so go home, rest, and tell the nurse to bring in the next patient"
most colds are picorniviruses, some are coronaviruses, some are adenoviruses or echoviruses. Though many other echoviruses can be more like stomach flu or norovirus like symptoms
The structure of a corona virus is way to small to be viewed under an optical microscope. You need to use electron microscopy. Their total size is just a tenth of a visible light wave so it's physically impossible to distinguish using light.
@@thulyblu5486They do research the Rhino Viruses that cause the common cold.
Bro, you literally cannot classify picornaviridae as coronaviridae don't spread misinformation
@14:20 it was already demonstrated in multiple papers (which yt prevents me linking, thanks for that btw) that most mitigation efforts of the last pandemic were ineffective. Secondly, the point was missed entirety. A high lethality is exactly what you want in a bioengineered virus. Something that can kill quickly and infect a target area killing the local population before burning itself out. Its not about area denial which can be achieved through nuclear or chemical means. Anthrax being an example.
After watching the video it all seemed so clear to me. Then I started reading the comments...
Always read the comments.
@@Maartenkruger324 Comments first, videos second on RUclips. Saves you a lot of time.
Yeah the comment section is scary because it's crazy to see how many people still buy into creationist-level conspiracy theories. From those claiming that there's evidence the viriuses were enginered, to claiming that a BSL4 lab could have 'easily' performed illegal human experimentation on their own employees without anybody noticing...
The hive mind knows best.
When did Thunderf00t become an MD?
He studied under the tutelage of Dr. Jon Stewart.
@@falxnecisYou can have an opinion but you shouldn't present it as a fact.
@@falxneciswhen he's outside of physics he's a rambling mess
@@falxnecisI think a guy who made his name on RUclips debunking theists claims since there is no proving negatives should not now ignore the claims being made by making strawman fallacies, mound of other logical fallacies which really amount to trying to prove negatives.
a MD wouldn't be the most qualified person for this topic. thunderfoot is a biochemist, which is exactly what you want to be if you want to study viruses. (i'm speaking as a biochemist who has modified viruses for cancer research). if you modify a virus you will see the modification in its dna or rna.
"You cannot engineer a virus."
Yeah, you cannot engineer a dog either.
Still we have been selectively breeding them before we invented the written language.
Nobody was claiming that they were building viruses from scratch.
This video does not make the claim that "from scratch" is the only thing that qualifies as engineering
He's doing a classic "straw man" argument. Most people aren't even claiming what he's arguing against
This is exactly what I was thinking. Such an odd argument to say, there’s no way Covid could have been weaponized because if it was then we could have cured cancer???
Firstly, who says they don’t have the cure for cancer already. Second, you don’t need to know the outcome of a genetic modification, you only need to modify until you get your desired result. Isn’t this is exactly what science has been doing since the beginning? Such a bizarre argument
@@geelee1977 Okay but barring that we can absolutely engineer them. The Thought Emporium engineered a virus to infect his gut cells to make him lactose tolerant. Is that not engineering?
@@geelee1977It doesn’t explicitly do that, but it’s certainly using a peculiar understanding of “engineering” if guided evolution and the mix and match of several different already functioning bits of genomes to produce or significantly improve a virus’s ability to do something don’t qualify as “engineering”, or are as close to engineering as banging two rocks together is from making a car.
Thought emporium has engineered a virus to modify cells in his stomach to produce lactase. Now yes, it is made in the lab and doesn't replicate, but it is an engineered virus and it did work. Obviously creating a virus from scratch would be incredibly hard, but that is why you use existig virus parts (or in this case code for a enzyme) as building blocks and only combine features known to work in other ones.
Making chimeras out of existing virus is not that hard, and the effects of adding for example a furin cleavage site is well known, and there are papers on that topic out there.
You don't need to understand the virus in detail or create new enzymes to do this, so what even is the point of this video?
This was my thought. Sure we can't make one from scratch yet...
But we can Frankenstein one out of other viruses.
Also, even if you can create a virus that breaks down cellulose doesnt mean it would destroy humanity. If you also have to invent a way to easily spread it across most plant species and then keep them from developing resistance to them.
Thunderf00t has lost his mind
yeah xD 😂 same thought here
Learned more from the comments on this video than the actual video.
So thank you all for the great comments.
Thought the same
Man usually has some decent points or insights, this one was just… bad
Hanlon's razor. I don't recall many people saying it was manufactured or engineered. Both those things would imply some kind of intention. If it did come from a lab, it was just shoddy or unsafe practices, poor safety protocols, etc. This type of research needs to be evaluated in terms of gain/benefit vs. risk is the main thing. Especially in these foreign labs from countries and regimes that can't be trusted to begin with.
The problem is, there is a high probability that the virus was engineered, probably for protective research reasons, but possibly not. The PLA and American DARPA (military) already fund this type of research. We have an application from EcoHealth that proposes the exact type of research that could have led to CV19 (Insertion of a furin site in coronaviruses). We have chimeras created in WIV in papers back from 2016. And CV19 appears to be a bat virus and pangolin virus chimera with a furin site inserted. The possibility doesn't just exist, the target was painted and missiles were being shot in this direction.
Yes. It comes from the lab. Yes, engineering is possible. Engineering does not mean creating, and it does not mean they know what they're doing 100% yet. This is still very young.
But yes, it's from there and yes, "engineering" to some extent is possible.
This would be hilarious if Thunderf00t's first-year undergrad level of understanding of the matter at hand didn't result in horrendous misinformation. Directed change in a specific function of one already optimised protein to becoming more optimised is difficult, increasing the frequency of mutations in one gene that has been identified as influencing pathogenicity/virulence and then doing mass screenings for more pathogenic and/or virulent viruses that result is easy for any lab with sufficient staff, facilities, and funding. Peter Daszak bragged about how easy doing just that was and what great results the lab in Wuhan he helped fund (large lab, BSL4 facilities, and funding most labs would never dream of having, all in a country that encourages GoF research) was having weeks before the outbreak. You equate finding the one single way to make something nearly perfect actually perfect to throwing a mountain of money at finding any way to make something extremely inefficient and unoptimised slightly more optimised with no regard for how. "Debunking" something you clearly don't fully understand when most other debunks are actually accurate is even more dangerous than channels that only peddle misinformation spreafing the same message.
He's not just a little bit wrong. He's completely wrong. Ralph Baric invented the field of synthetic virology 20 years ago. We don't need to 'direct change'. We just need to splice an analog with DNA and then use reverse transcriptase to get an RNA resultant. This doesn't mean every recombination will work. Most won't. But many do.
i really dont get his point? there is obviously gain of function research and bio labs for it. Why the hell would we build those for nothing xD?
Well said, thunderf00t is a fool. The exact sort who would take experimental gene therapy for a virus with the risk profile of seasonal flu. The fact that he still can't see the truth is astounding. His pride won't let him admit he was wrong. People like him need to be studied.
You mentioned many times that engineering a virus is dumb since the virus already evolves. I think the concern would be that labs evolve the virus in a contained environment and would then release it. This would cause greater harm than if humans had more time to interact with it and develop antibodies.
How would you even do this? Get the virus to transmit to rats which is hard all on it's own. Then get like 5 sperated rat colonys of like 50 rats spread the virus and pick the colony with the fastest spread repete 20 times that's like 4000 rats just to get a fast spreading virus (assuming that's even enough generation, probebly not) then do the same agine to get the virus apropriatly deadly. Then you have to get human subject to transmit the virus to which again is really hard to do, only to hope that the virus is good at spreading in humans too. Then you inefct your own people for no reason. Like ok sounds about right.
The way you design a bioweapon is to start with something that kills the target organism pretty fast most of the time, apply some artificial selection to make it kill very fast every time, and reduce any symptoms that encourage easy person to person transmission all by trial and error. Then deploy it by oversaturating an area with the disease-causing agent vastly beyond what would naturally occur to guarantee infection, such that any target organism which goes into the area until the stuff is inactivated dies, and any target organism which does not go into that area or sleep next to the infected survives.
There is a saying in my country that essentially translates to: Stick to the things you know (otherwise you might make a fool of yourself).
Well, when you are lecturing others, yes.
That's exactly what Thunderf00t/Dr Phil Mason does here, in this video, in all his videos.
With the singular exception about UFOs, UAPs, and aliens.
Otherwise, you should force yourself to learn new things: i.e. things you don't know.
In America, we do the opposite.
Nice gatekeeping :)
U should file that yourself
@@theultimatereductionist7592 prove him wrong
No one ever said it was engineered, even the guy in the video at the start said it came from there (which you agree with at the end) and did not come out of anywhere else like a food market.
"No one ever said it was engineered" - you know this isn't true. He even highlighted articles at the start suggesting as much so you didn't need to go looking
Just watch the first 13 seconds... When asked "is there a chance it was created in a lab?", Jon Stewart replies "A chance?!!!" as if it was something obvious. So, the guy in the video seems to think that it's the case.
That's what Thunderf00t is addressing and that doesn't mean that it couldn't have leaked from a lab.
This is so wrong. Why was there so much push back on the vaccines then, with people claiming that its some plan to kill off people? That the virus was not a "normal" corona virus, it was made to target humans, specifically older people. And that the social distancing, the wearing of masks and so on, was a way for the government to control people. All of this stuff is out in the open. Most people believe the virus was man made or at least manipulated in a lab and released on purpose as some form of governmental control. Which is why there are still people on here claiming thunderfoot is talking rubbish, and that you can create a virus like that.
@@IronFreeeIt's semantics over the word 'engineered'. Most people think it was 'created' in that lab using some kind of tinkering. The components of the virus were not created but they were combined to create something new.
@@Jac70 What do you mean by "it was 'created' in that lab using some kind of tinkering"?
Whatever Jon Stewart intended to say, this video is still worth watching for the explanation.
As someone who 'engineers' viruses every week, its amusing to a dude whose 'career' is being snarky on YT tell me I dont actually do genetic engineering. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
I would wipe the floor with you in 5 minutes of a conversation
yes, do it chronic!!!
Gene therapy by using modified viruses is possible in avery limited fashion, but incredibly expensive. We are talking about millions of dollars per single patient.
So he's wrong?
No. I am reinforcing his argument by stating how difficult it is in the rare occasions, where we actually know how to do it.
@@rickyfitness252 Yes. It has been tested, and is trialed in patients with terminal cancer. Not hard to find information from credible sources.
I doubt the guy who cured his own lactose intolerance for a year spent millions on that.
So like, the kind of money government research labs have?
1:26 The Florida research center for hurricanes is NOT going to be happy with you exposing them like that...
They're trying to weaponize hurricanes! Dr. Franklin would be proud.
Ah, I get it. You’re not on the team of science but on the team of Science™️
At least we now know.
You can't get around trademark law that easily. It is The Science™.
Could hurricanes escape from the hurricane research lab?
Why not? I make hurricanes all of the time when I use my air compressor, they only last about a nanosecond though.
finally a non musk video, it took some time lol
When I've heard the theory that the virus was intentionally made, I always questioned the motive. Why would a country release a virus on its own people first? No motive there. Alternatively, a lab is studying new novel coronaviruses in hopes of developing vaccinations or learning more about viruses in general and there's an accidental leak. This theory sounds more plausible as there exists motive and people are bad at following policies and make mistakes constantly.
"Why would a country release a virus on its own people first?"
They wouldn't. Obviously the leak was unintentional.
Because „muh Gina Bad“! Trump and Alex said so!
@@qapplor China indeed bad. They were warned two years prior that a leak would happen in that lab unless they improved security.
The reason gain of function is pursued is because it is hoped - much in vain - that it will allow for the production of counter measures for a threat that has yet to emerge. The problem is that there is no bio-containment procedure that remotely approaches full-proof status. For example, MRSA is most commonly acquired in hospitals and those facilities are perpetually scrubbed down with glutaraldehyde. Furthermore, gain of function research is inherently dual use, whatever gains in virulence that are achieved for the hope of prevention can be banked for subsequent military use. Particularly if the originating power can develop treatment protocols. You are correct in that it would be foolish for them to release it on themselves, but it appears that it was an accidental leak.
@@memeticist "The reason gain of function is pursued is because it is hoped - much in vain - that it will allow for the production of counter measures for a threat that has yet to emerge."
This is utter nonsense.
This shouldn't be a busted.
Yes, it's from the lab and yes, they "banged rocks together." And most of the rest you said was correct as well. But you're making assumptions based purely on your research knowledge without looking at the geopolitical, the local situation, the historical, etc.
I don't know what the idea was, or who did what. But I know it got out and it got out from there. And it was "banged with rocks." Someone else mentioned it was possible they were trying to get a weaker version for a vaccine as well.
There are a million possibilities between nuke and no idea. And we know it's neither of those, so it has to be somewhere in the middle.
Why do we assert they, "banged rocks together"? Shi Zhengli is one of the top scientists in her field and she regularly consulted with Raph Baric, whose specialty is synthetic virology, literally re-engineering viruses.
@@elus89"Banging rocks together" is a fitting metaphor because it translates gain of function to the layman. They do the same thing again and again until a slight, barely noticeable change happens. They log it, study it, and then go back to "banging rocks". It doesn't mean that it's not a research with highly educated scientists behind it
Hi thunderf00t i dont think your reasoning is correct here. There are some ideas for making deadly viruses that would almost certainly be simple to implement. For example, one way would be to add at a virus genetic code for antibodies that neutralize cytokines essential for immunity to the virus. Such antibodies and their genetic codes are known. Or adding genetic code for things that interfere with other essential functions of the immune system.
Very poor video, this doesn't disprove anything. You've taken one word "engineering" and focused on that in a dishonest attempt to disprove a wider discussion. This is very disappointing.
For one thing genetic modification of bacteria has been used for many years in the biotechnology industry, for producing insulin for example. Yet you try to create an idea this is impossible.
Then there's the problem of it's origins. As I'm certain you know, evolution takes time and this virus was sudden. It's highly likely that an evolved strain of a novel coronavirus would come from a coronavirus laboratory. I don't think that's an absurd assumption to make. It's certainly where I would start my investigation. Which is the point John Stewart was making.
You drew a comparison between different research organisation centred around weather and a coronavirus lab. Unless those weather organisations are creating 'bottled lightning' and performing experiments on it they are a poor choice of comparison.
Creating a new protein or enzyme is beyond current capability, adding existing proteins and enzymes to an organism is not. The discussion is whether this has taken place.
So, has it taken place? If it has, where is the most likely place those changes took place?
The entire premise is false. Ralph Baric synthetically creates viruses. It's literally his specialty. He's been doing it for twenty years. ThunderFOOT is just out over his skis (again).
We already have engineered viruses. In fact, for the last 20 years. We call it “Gene Therapy” Viruses were found to be the best vectors we needed to get the modified genes into cells. This is the goal for Cystic Fibrosis. I really have no idea why Philip is doing this piece. He did a PhD in biochemistry like I did, this is common knowledge with literally thousands of peer reviewed articles on Clarivate (Web of Knowledge) Just weird.
Please make a gain of function video. How would a lab create evolutionary pressure to lead to an outcome that is wanted? Man has breed many things to get what we want, dogs, plants etc… how would it be done with viruses?
What part of "viruses mutate" prevents you to understand that the end result will not necessarily be what you intend!?
You can't stop the calendar at 2024 just because you think this is the year we all desired and is the bestest...
@@thelazy0ne What part of " the end result will not necessarily be what you intend" is a strawman? Why the part where you assume the researchers were trying to get a specific function, not just tinkering until they got something that was close enough to a general target. Which is exactly what selective breeding and GMOs are.
The problem is that nature do that all the time and much better than any lab will ever do because the virus has bigger sample size, billions and billions of genetically diverse cells instead of a few cells in a lab.
@@elchippe Actually, nature kind of sucks. Limited environments, for example; a lab can slow walk a species from an environment where they thrive and into one where they can't survive at all, slowly enough for the species to evolve. Natural environmental change tends to be inconsiderate.
He can't tell you that because he doesn't have a degree in it.
He is just a chemist and you are not allowed to believe him on anything else so sayeth he, so sayeth the comments (who by this logic also shouldn't be allowed to have an opinion on it either way without going to get a degree first, but what would religions be without hypocrisy?)
things evolve, so companies/gov can selectively breed something to change its trait. so yes u can not engineer but u can mutate them. ofc no one can build one from the ground up, but mutate one that already exists and is effective in other organisms, yes, you can. in fact we often use them to our advantage, we make or use weaker strains to use in vaccines. i'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish with this video.
Its impossible for a bunch of smart people to work out how to do this, because it hasn't yet happened by accident
Yeah, we all know these kind of things never happen... well more than a few times a year anyways. Per lab.
It's really a shame what happened to this channel. The man became what he once defeated... a total Karen. Only anti Musk hate videos and virus virus virus... this man is stuck in the past. Worst of all he is not even honest and uses 1 straw man after the other. I am unsubbing now this channel is dead. Can't believe I actually supported this guy and his channel in the past. Worst midlife Karen crisis I have ever seen.
I like his elon Musk videos because I don't like the man. But from now on, I will keep an eye open for flawed points he uses to attack him.
@@uche007us I don't like Musk and his products and companies as well. It's fine to debunk a few of his claims. But this guy is obsessed with him. Like 10 videos only about him?? Boring and vengeful.
Because Thunderpuss is practically apart of the "establishment". He peddles the same propagandist BS that the main stream media puts out. He only became obsessed with Musk after the "left" was told to attack him. You know, immediately after Musk took over one of the US government's propaganda outlets.
@Thunderf00t The Dunning-Kruger effect is strong with this one.
Projection
Main argument against this video: hurricane and earthquake research stations study phenomenon where they occur. With pathology, this isn't the case. The CDC headquarters in Atlanta studied pathogens from all over the world, because they can be isolated and brought into a lab. To correct the analogy, it's as if a hurricane research station in Ohio, which studies and had stocks of live hurricane in the lab, was hit by a category 5 hurricane. It's possible that a hurricane made it's way very far inland and this happened naturally, but it's also possible a lab leak was the cause. An investigation could get to the bottom of it, but unfortunately the Ohio government has blocked all external investigation and is refusing to share comprehensive data about the lab, which isn't reassuring (though it likely comes down to national pride more than espionage). There's no reason to think that this Ohio hurricane lab had bad intent, (nor is it likely they could have engineered a hurricane selectively) and they were probably studying the hurricane to find ways to prevent it. They also were probably taking really normal precautions to prevent a lab leak. But the issue is that, if a leak occurred, it would be responsible for causing trillions of dollars in damage and killing millions of people, and at some point we might have to come together and decide whether this type of research with such a devastating subject can ever be performed safely enough to mitigate risk
Yeah that's why no one in the US got covid 19, because SARs can only exist in certain ecoregions.
@@noconsent I'm not completely sure what you're getting at, SARS-COV2 is endemic to every continent but Antarctica, and many people in the U.S have died of COVID-19, including at least two of my close family members
Finally... you made an ORIGINAL and GOOD point against Thunderf00t's video, Spencegolde.
EVERYBODY ELSE JUST DID APPEAL TO AUTHORITY BS: "Thundy's not a PhD biologist blah blah"
@@Spencergoldeyeah i had the same thought the second i heard his argument cuz the bats the lab researches are from 1000km away if i remeber right 😂😂
Or or other option just because you were studying sars doesn't magically mean you can modify it to create COVID. It's like saying a hurricane research center can create a hurricane and accidentally released it out into the wild after researching hurricanes. Also how do you argue about the point where you only evidence that anything came out of a lab is news articles that are probably misinterpreting a book that had fuck all to do with labs in china.
Thunder, what about growing of using Cellulose as a building covering? Plants are waterproof, sun resistant, and generate solar energy. So...
The fact that you think that's some gotcha...
This is like saying "We use Hydrogen for stuff and nuclear fusion also uses Hydrogen so we clearly already have the capability for fusion power"
Says “you can’t weaponize viruses” then says “they do it themselves” -what do you think “gain of function” research is? Just because it’s hard to breakdown cellulose doesn’t mean respirator viruses can’t be made more pathogenic!?!
He talks about gain of function in the video, watch the whole thing before you comment...
I am not sure about your line of arguing of this topic. I would like to point out 3 things:
first: the comparison to Tornados are not so good. I mean the Tornado Research center may be does not have a tornado chamber and when it get loose by accident the tornado will grow exponentially.
secoand: I think there are many ways to alter life. For instance, by domesticating plants and animals, we alter this form of life pretty much. I am not a biologist, bit i can think of a way of "breeding" viruses to alter their behavior and this may work even without special equipment, just with Animal experiments.
thired: we can check it statistical, so how many cities are there with virus research in this area and what are the probability that the a virus mutation come from a city that have one of those. And to the Tornado comparison, a Virus research lab don't has to be in a spot where the risk of the virus is high, a tornado facility with sensors and other stuff is a good bet to build it where it is needed.
Just my thoughts... but please let me know yours
About point 1: the comparison was only about the location, not the other parts of the conspiracy theory. The fact that Tornado Research centres cannot provoke a tornado by accident is precisely the point. That shows that the causation link is not "research centre caused tornado" but "tornadoes caused the research centre to be at this location".
sad to see thunderfoot has decided to blend science with politics now for views, I miss the old channel
You were never lover of science so ef of.
@@dresscode4197 the irony is I am sure if TF made a video about how there are only two genders he'd sing his praises.
@zenaku666 Considering there are only two genders I don't think anyone needs to cover that. It's clear he has turned the corner of making genuine content and now is focused on how many clicks he can get.
@@zenaku666 Of course,
@@zenaku666 Wait didn't TF have the Anita Sarkeesian arc?
Earthquakes are studied in earthquake zones because they are not portable. Volcanologists go to volcanoes for the same reason. We in the UK studied bio weapons at Porton Down. It's not for it's bio diversity, tropical diseases or it's environmental proclivity for viral mutation. It's the same way that say if you study why sodium explodes in water you don't have to travel to a sodium processing plant. Small things are portable, and can be taken to places to study them. Tectonic fault lines are big, making their postage prohibitively expensive.
1:20 The lab location was chosen precisely *because* of it's geographic separation from the bat virii they were studying
100% my thought he hasnt even read the arguments for a lab leak 😂
theory!?! HA!
If @thunderf00t would read the published research, *from the lab in question* , his utter ignorance of modern *practical engineering* viral-functions, would be disabused.
Nat Med 21, 1508-1513 (2015)
That's the controversial paper, oft-cited as the smoking gun, if you will... details their steps in bioengineering the *first* (bat-borne) coronavirus vaccines.
Open and shut case
Would you like to know more?
Then there's the episode of _This Week In Virology_ (ep635 iirc) featuring guest, and co-author of the aforementioned papers : Peter mf'ing Daszac! *explaining how trivial it is to swap binding affinities of virii* . (TL;DR : 30m mark of the video iirc..also.. don't let it blow your mind when you check the broadcast date of this episode)
@@alterego2421
Thunderf00t could read the *published research* from the lab in question .
Nat Med 21, 1508-1513 (2015)
That's the controversial paper, oft-cited as the smoking gun, if you will... details their steps in bioengineering the *first* (bat-borne) coronavirus vaccines.
Open and shut case.
Would you like to know more?
Then there's the episode of _This Week In Virology_ (ep615) featuring guest and co-author of the aforementioned papers : Peter _mf'ing_ Daszac! *explaining how trivial it is to swap binding affinities of virii* . 25-30minute mark fyi
(ps. don't let it blow your mind when you check the approx date this episode aired)
@@alterego2421 and u can prime that's relevant ?
@@Metapharsicalagain . Where is your proof ?
Show peer reviewed research. I ll wait
I would still categorize it as a “leak”, taking it from its natural habitat and then accidentally introducing it to a densely populated area would classify it as such. Now you’re right that it wasn’t engineered, just worked upon.
But it has an HIV gene spliced into it. They're splitting genes while you're splitting hairs.
worked upon to achieve what exactly?
@@josho225 to study mutations and be better prepared for these mutations if they do appear in the wild.
"Scientists perform these manipulations for many reasons, including wanting to understand how the microbes evade detection by our immune systems."
"Researchers argue the work can offer a peek at what a virus can do before it goes into the natural world and poses a threat to people."
The result was designed (enhanced infectivity) and it was modified with a furin site to do so. Thus, engineered.
@@josho225 To investigate the likelihood of a virus mutating in the wild to become dangerous to humans and designing vaccines before this happens. This is public research, just read the papers, they tell you the precise purpose.
Been a fan since 2017 and agreed with most of his videos. This video isn’t really convincing me that covid wasn’t created in a lab.
be careful. The NPCs may attack you by considering "created" = "engineered" = "from scratch".
All human beings are inherently good and would never make anything to harm another human being or any being in a matter of fact. Especially those with power and high intelligence, they are especially good
Inherently good and inherently sarcastic.
Your Dunning Kruger is really showing on this one.
Ok prove it 😂
@@jacksmith-mu3ee GMOs. Monsanto's whole business model. I can get into science but I don't have to.
@@vessbakalov8958 how does this relate to Dinning Kruger? How is that _Monsanto business model_ thing relevant to this, even?
@@Gelatinocyte2 Dunning-Kruger says that people who know a little about a subject, think they are experts. While I have a lot of respect for TF as chemical-physicist, his biology expertise is not great, and the things he is saying things in this video are decisevely false. He claims that it is above our technological knowhow to engineer organisms. Viruses in his case, but the priniciples used are the same really. So GMO - Genetically Modified Organisms - are massive classes of genetically engineered organisms we see in the supermaket every day.
Monsanto is one of the largest companies producing seeds for various crops. They have gained various functions - like resistance to draught, certain pests, faster growing cycle, resistance cold, etc. to name a few. They also make RoundUp which is herbecide, and then design their own plants to be specifically resistant to it.
All this is done through gain-a-function genetic engineering. So TF claiming how this is virtually impossible is clearly, demonstrably, think-about-it-for-10-seconds-while-getting-your-massive-ego-off-the-soap-box false.
@@Gelatinocyte2 So Dunning Kruger refers to people who know a bit about something thinking they are experts. TF is by all accounts a great chemical physicist (I respect him for that). I am not sure he is necessarily an amazing biologist (note: RUclips ate my comment and I am retyping it, but in the meantime I looked at your profile, and it seems you are molecular biologist, so you probably know a lot more about this than I do).
GMOs are all around us. They represent organism that are engineered by humans by various means. They resist drought, cold, grow faster, etc. than their 'natural' bretherin. TF claims in this video that we can't manipulate organisms (I know viruses are not really organisms, but close enough for today's purposes). This is patently false. GMOs are a simple, plentiful, obvious counterexample.
Monsanto is a massive conglomerate that sells seeds, herbecites and other agg stuff. They make RoundUp - a very powerful herbecite. Then they sell seeds that are specifically engineered to resist RoundUp. They literally make a plant chemical weapon that kills most everything, and then design specific plants to resist it.
Long story - my point is that TF's over-inflated ego on occasion makes him blind to obvious things.
15:31 yes, that's gain of function, make a bad virus worse for humans. You can call it modification instead of engineering if it makes you feel better. I love your videos but this one seemed to debunk an idea that hardly anyone is proposing, namely a whole cloth manufacturing of a new virus. Also, you were criticizing the idea of a government doing this because it would hurt their own population in the end after it mutates but I would like to point out that harming your enemies is not the only motivation for releasing a virus, population control via killing off the old and unhealthy (unproductive) is a quite feasible motivation for certain people or countries.
@1:15 ehhh not the strongest point, I mean had there been notable outbreaks in the past in this 1 area, that would makes sense to put a institution there. But to have the institution precede the outbreak is statistically unlikely, it would be like picking a random spot of land and building a gold mine and finding a huge amount of gold only to conclude, well of course, you wouldn't put a gold mine where there isn't any gold
Yeah. It would be more akin to a lab studying disease in Floridian gators in NY. The bats carrying it are in the China/IndoChina Border. Kunming is where the caves are 1k miles from Wuhan..
I don't think it's as statistically unlikely as you think. Pandemic start points are not truly random and uniformly distributed. A pandemic is going to likely start in some heavily populated area. You're also going to build national labs in very populated areas. The existence of a lab studying coronaviruses in China isn't exactly surprising either. The two occurring simultaneously is also not exactly hard to imagine.
@@zenaku666 Wuhan is a thousand miles from Yunnan. Its a different climate. Wuhan is a place of no wildlife. Kunming would make more sense, or Guangzou. Guangzhou is bigger, and is in the area.
@@zenaku666 " heavily populated area" - China has one of the highest density of people in the world, they could have effectively opened up the centre anywhere but just so happened to pick the spot where the breakout occurs...? By definition that has to be statistically unlikely. I mean do we have any other examples where a disease has started around a disease centre, but where the disease centre was not at fault for its origins?
"The existence of a lab studying coronaviruses in China isn't exactly surprising either. " - No, but that's not the claim, you've strawmanned it, the claim is that it originated at the same location.
"The two occurring simultaneously is also not exactly hard to imagine." - in a country the size of China, with the size of its population, yea it kind of is. Unless China has more disease centres than the USA has fast food outlets, which I don't believe is the case.
@@mcbean1 "By definition that has to be statistically unlikely" Nope, not at all. Coincidences do happen, and given enough opportunity occur quite frequently. To make that claim you must know the actual probabilities of the pandemic occurring in that area. Unless you know that there is no statistical claim to be made. Perhaps you need to reevaluate your assumptions?
The virus is known to have originated in the market as they found both of the early viral strains there mixed amongst the cages, and the pattern of early cases matches up with the market hypothesis. Why the market why there if the virus originated in the lab? Why not in the residential section, or a restaurant, theater, park, or school? Do the people working in that lab not have social lives outside of this one wild life market?
Missed the mark entirely based on a single word.
On purpose. As intended
Story from movie:
I am Legend
Taking the dumbest take on internet, then debunking it by nitpicking it out of existence. Its just straw-manning at that point.
Whats next? Debunking reddit comments?
He didn't even debunk it. The field of synthetic virology exists. Ralph Baric invented it.
next week why nukes arent real
I respect a lot of what you make and say, but this unfortunately is your worst video. Please stick to physics which you’re clearly gifted at, biology isn’t for you..
Have to agree with you. His thesis was weak and all over the place in this video
Still, the best way would be to ask the Chinese about the lab. Oh, we did and they said hi, bye.
Americans ran that lab, ask Dr. Fauci
To create a bacteria that can break down cellulose? We've had that for millions of years... they are called fungi. Not only do they break down cellulose, but they learned like 40 million years ago how to also break down lignin. It took them a few million years to figure that one out, during which time all of the world's coal was formed.
Have you ever seen a cow? It eats cellulose all day long and bacteria in rumen turns cellulose to sugars and fatty acids.
It's actually crazy how far enzymes and proteins are beyond our full understanding. I mean, personally, I think most security agencies can break RSA and similar with a bit of effort using quantum computers today, but true custom-made protein creation is on another level. It's like NP hard times a billion, I like to call it NP-harder.
AI approaches to protein folding (which is like 3 huge steps from enzyme design) have proved promising recently. I'm really hopeful we can find a more rigorous way to determine protein folding sequences, but it's a really thorny problem.
Yeah, that's what you get when nature is trying really hard to do something for 3 billion years, even if the process is slow it had vastly more time to work with than human science even existed, and that's before considering the difference between the number of scientists and the cells trying to invent new ways of doing something...
There have recently been a few successes using AI to engineer proteins.
The thing is, we don’t have quantum computers YET. If humanity put it’s energy into building a better future instead of arguing constantly and waging wars against eachother, we might already have had mars colonies, and might have cured cancer. I’m so pissed that space exploration stopped when the cold war was over. Come on FFS do we really need a war to show eachother wether USA or USSR have the bigger d1ck to land on the moon?!? As long as we’ll argue left vs right, blue vs red, west vs east, democracy vs communism, we’ll never work together as a whole to better our planet. Instead we destroy our atmosphere, kill entire animal species, use up all of our resources, for what? For proving who is right? The scientist who really care about our future and evolution are drowned in a sea of nonsense and have to literally beg the government for funding their projects. Nothing gets funded if it’s not profitable. Ffs…
@@KuK137 It's also not just time. It's absolutely mind-bogglingly massively... perhaps even infinitely massively... parallelized.
Trust thunderf00t,
No government funded gain of function research,
Safe and effective,
What laptop?
On a side note, this reminds me of the movie The Andromeda Strain, based on the book by Micheal Crichton, (who wrote a ton of sci-fi novels, many that were adapted into movies - for better or worse).
Spoilers for those who want to read the book or see the movie.
A virus infects a small town and eventually the scientists realise what kept the only two people who have survived alive, only to then realise the virus had evolved so quickly it was no longer deadly.
I can't recall exact details, but I think there was a time pressure since the town was going to be nuked to prevent further infection.
Solar Freaking Roadway Meets Virology!
Photosynthetic viruses is something I'd rather not think about, yikes.
0:40 that must be the dumbest comparison ever
Here I think you are wrong, but some background information is still interesting, as usual.Someone wanting, and trying, to produce a virus, and someone managing to produce a virus, are two different things.
got to admit this vid was a miss for me, very rare occurance but there we go.
another hit video from the chemistry, astronomy, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, virology, biology, earth science, astrophysics, geophysics, paleontology, archaeology, climatology, microbiology, genetics expert. 🙃
As a propagandist he's a fkin amateur.
@sonic-templeos just as much of a sham as well. at least philip doesnt delete critical comments against him unlike dave, i'll give him that.
Yeah this video is a bit weak but he’s never really missed on anything else, it’s always panned out pretty closely
@sonic-templeoswho is prof Dave?
What are his videos on astronomy?
Selective breeding can be done trivially with viruses just like it's done with bacteria, I completely agree with the fact that we can't engineer a virus from scratch, that would be just plain stupid and practically impossible. It's way easier to just put a whole bunch of viruses / bacteria samples in a room near a strong radioactive source and wait until one of the samples evolves the traits you want, then allow it to grow, and repeat. I can't say whether or not the release of the virus was intentional or even if it came from the lab. If it was intentional, I think the virus done far more damage to China then it done to the US.
☝️
I remember reading about cellulose-dissolving bacteria back in the late 1990s. I thought that might be a bad idea especially if the engineered bacteria got loose. We could potentially lose almost all organic matter in the soil (the humus) which could be a disaster. But could it live in nature or would it be like a domesticated hybrid crop plant that requires special conditions and monitoring to survive and grow. Probably the latter.
Lambast all you want. To believe the virus did NOT escape from that lab is foolish, and at the very least should have resulted in an investigation.
sounds like an intellectual design argument
I think you meant intelligent design.
Humans need an enemy and we are going to blame the easiest thing to blame.
I majored in Evolutionary Biology at ASU, but I now work at a tech company, I didn't keep up with the science of my field like someone who went into a career of it... but I promise you the amount of people I meet on a weekly basis who still spout things like from the a legitimate Heliocentric view of the Solar System right down to, "okay Microevolution, sure, but Macro? No way!" just makes me jaded.
I've given up. When I was fiercely pro science and in the face of others about it in my early 20's I would've burned with passion, but now nearing my 40's I simply take a more nihilistic approach to humanity, especially Americans.
I think many of us have honestly thought, "well if I just explain science to someone, they'll surely change their mind" only to find out slowly how bad it gets with someone you're talking to getting further and further down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theory until it gets to a point where they just say, "oh so you're THEM!?"
Agreed .
I guess you left Biology at about the same time Ralph Baric was pioneering synthetic virology. Engineering viruses is not a conspiracy theory, it's established science.
@@elus89 nice try but already debunked
Viruses cannot be engineered since
1. Viruses are micro organisms not your mom undies
2. They evolve. U can no more engineer viruses then create a human synthetically
That's why p0tholer54 video was attached .
Virology
@@zacksmith5644 what is a woman?
I'm five minutes in, i love thunderfoot and waiting on the answer. I'm guessing that he's gonna argue semantics rather than arguing that viruses can't be modified or selectively reproduced.
It's worse than that. He's basically wrong on every count. Including taking a comedians words meant to comedic effect literally.
@@elus89funniest shit to me is that he is bscly is arguing that bio weapon research isnt real thats insane gaslighting 😂
I don't think I can add anything other commenters haven't said already. Missed the mark.
4:15 🤦🏻♂️ sars 1 was literally first detected in Kansas at a military base in 1919 hence the name Covid 19 (sars 2) 👍🏼
Like dryrot does to wood?
So you are saying that labs that handle infectious diseases and perform research such as gain of function are immune to mishaps ? source: Journal of Infectious Diseases - Management of Accidental Exposure to Ebola Virus in the Biosafety Level 4 Laboratory, Hamburg, Germany
He said nothing of the sort.
So, basically thunderfoot just makes videos saying the opposite of anything Elon Musk says.
Elon lives rent-free in his head.
Stick with shitting on Musk.
They try, we die! 🤷♀️
Fun coincidence: the day Thunderfoot posted this video, CBS aired a new episode of their cop series NCIS... The plot revolved around saving a defecting Chinese scientist who was weaponizing a virus.
oh.. lets start a new conspiracy.. Thunderfoot is really working for the CCP under the guidance of the CIA..
I'm sure we can get some takers.
This video is basically an argument about semantics
And he's wrong. Synthetic virology is a thing. It's part of the reason we can confidently say what the coronavirus looks like.
No it isnt
@@ZakiHaider-y9o Fantastic argument, the point you explained in detail persuaded me totally.
NOT.
You can breed dog for specific purposes. Why not viruses?
Duh
Try telling a virus to sit or roll over.
@@chbu7081ah thats the difference between a pug and a german shepard one rolls the other sits finally a destinctive feature 😂😂😂😂😂😂
Can't a lab just collect naturally occuring viruses and artificially select the shit out of them?
Making a somewhat deadly virus out of just breeding enough viruses hardly seem unreasonable.
It would be a stupid Idea because it would be impossible to control. But the "Impossible" bothers me.
Yes they can. In fact, they have been doing that for decades under the name "gain of function" research.
The thing is, we know that they have been doing much more than that. Shi Zhengli was creating chimeras at WIV. Not just pushing biological strain variations, but actively taking components and combining them together.
To say bioengineering doesn't exist is just lazy or maybe thunder foot ran out of stuff to bust!
Well, it exists, it's just not up to the standards you think it is.
@@zenaku666Tell that to Ralph Baric! Or perhaps Peter Daszak! While you're at it, give Shi Zhengli a call!
Just stick to physics, that's your wheelhouse.
This is the first time I've given a thunderf00t video a thumbsdown. The Jon Stewart clickbait was unnecessary. He did not assert or imply that covid-19 was a bioweapon. This video showed why covid-19 would've been a terrible bioweapon. It does not contradict what Jon Stewart said.
It's a terrible bioweapon unless your aim is to coerce and control through the media (AKA what Event 201 was openly about).
Do I believe the Wuhan lab thingy yes, but it is also normal to have those labs near those places. why do you think every update regarding the swine flu starts in asia and travels westward to europe ?
Can you make a video on why it Is it not possible that the virus could have accidently "leaked" from the lab in Wuhan? I would find it really enlightening to hear from someone who is actually educated on this what they labs like that do, and don't do, to prevent their work from "leaking".
Simple, 1 leak is hard enough, let alone 2 leaks happened simultaneously, with different strains, onto 2 separate wet markets.
I agree. Not many people (besides a comedian I guess) have really said they thought a virus was created from scratch, rather people were being irresponsible with dangerous viruses and when one leaked they covered it up. This is what more people believe happened. It could have been a bat pooping on a pig, like in the movies, but irresponsible humans have done so much harm ...
@@nerfherder4284 have you watched the full clip? if not you should. because I have a funny feeling Mr Stewart's reply to this video would be similar...
@@falxnecis 1) I disagree I don't trust the FBI as far as I can throw them
2) he's not saying that's not not what happened [which is what I was pointing out]
Why couldn't SarsCov2 have leaked from your pants? We know where novel viruses come from. They come from cases where you have wild animals meet factory farming. And where different species of animals meet. Novel viruses that are deadly occur when a virus gains the function to infect humans. Viruses don't leak from research labs.
Isnt this done many many times!? Maybe you meant something else and the title is misleading. If not, you*re certainly wrong...
Come on guys we all know where it came from
The fucking lab.
I'm not a molecular biologist, but I have the following intuition. I might well be wrong. Not sure, so posing it as a question: Isn't increase in successful self-replication a very evolutionary goal of viral microorganisms, which would make breeding such organisms through mutation and selection a lot easier than the needle-in-haystack problem of synthesizing a novel cellulose-hungry enzyme? It is my understanding that cellulase enzymes aren't that good at the thing, presumably due to a poor reward for the function they perform, resulting in us dispatching most of the fibers we ingest together with the rest of the anorganic matter after metabolising. Thank you for consideration, and the rest of the content you create on your channel.
You missed the mark by a pretty wide margin on this one.
Nope, he's 100% right. There is no reason to worry about manufactured viruses when natural viruses are way more likely to occur and to be problematic.
That'z how prop^ganda workz. Juzt k33p mov^ng that goaIpozt
@@unduloid lol I see you missed the exact same mark
@@gem3020
Nope. I am just as correct as TF is.
Glad to know specialized, biological weapons can't exist. By the way, if your interested in free medical insurance in the US, would you like to sign up as a "volunteer " for the wonderful Tuskegee Program, just sign your paperwork at Unit 731 anytime after 10am.
Even though i agree with thunder nearly on all his points, but i think you are creating a straw man argument here, by claiming its something 100% engineered to do something specific, i don't think that is general understanding of that theory. My personal understanding of that theory is that lab was working on viruses and that would have been one of the strains that somehow leaked outside of the lab. China does tons of messed up things and having secrecy behind it all after the virus adds quite a lot to that theory.
The Department of Defense wrote this in 1970: "eminent biologists believe that within a period of 5 to 10 years it would be possible to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired." He goes on to say "Withing the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. >>Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease."
Hmmm, wait a minute. A lab near the outbreak?
Yes, those kind of labs are there precisely because there is a great possibility of outbreak, environment is favorable for viruses. Like astronomical observatories are built where environment is good for observing the Universe. It is basic logic.
First you heard of it?
Yeah, lab researching Coronaviruses
There was no outbreak. Just an illusion created by bogus tests. Did you see the infamous and dramatic scenes of people collapsing in the streets of Wuhan repeated anywhere else? No hospitals overrun, no novel symptoms. Just mass hysteria and junk science.
Oh my am anti china bot . How original
So what does this mean for the use of bacteriophages in medicine?
Bacteria 🤔
virus 🤔
You may have missed something
Same stuff with ai. People seem to think we are close to agi. Yet at this point we don't know if its even possible let alone when it will happen
Basically any time there's some new tech we have a period where it's gonna do everything, and then ten years later life is basically identical to how it was before the tech came out and nobody cares anymore.
Indeed, it is overhyped. I think it is possible, but not with deep Neural nets, they're just a pattern recognition trick.
Yup nothing too intelligent about LLMs.
This really amuses me.
While AI like LLMs is definitely well short of being AGI, all people are is a "pattern recognition trick." That's what our brains encode, just with greater complexity.
LLMs and AI like them also have the issue that they are static. That is, they effectively lack the ability to create new long-term memory. Of course, so do some actual people.
Possible it is possible. If you build something close enough to a human brain we know it will work at least well as a human brain. How hard it will be is another beast...
As my dad said a few times in the early 2000's "we're overdue for a major outbreak of some kind". He's also said we're overdue for a major ice age. We had a small one back during the Civil War and haven't seen another since.
The funding was for gain of function work. I can see you like I are no expert. But my understanding is that it was to move functionality onto a virus ie starting with a known virus and placing a spike protein on it. I have no idea if this is possible. However as the US had provided funding for the work to be done, somebody was convinced it could be and persuaded others.That's how investment works.
Oww you are losing it dude, misrepresenting what people say and then arguing against that.. strawmanning..
That's why he showed p0tholer video .
P0tholer already debunked lab leak and destroyed the lab made theory .
It was natural
@@zacksmith5644 visit palestine
@@guillermoelnino still waiting for proof Mr strawman
@@zacksmith5644 say something other than an NPC clapback and I might be tempted.
@@guillermoelnino ok prove it. Wake up as npc are in games
Grow up
Now prove it . Waiting
How did lou gehrig get lou gehrig’s disease? How unlucky