Per DARIO AMODEI:
- Expects Chinese developers will be able to replicate Mythos’s capabilities within 6-12 months
- Mythos was a big step for cyber. Expects a "Mythos-like jump" in biorisk capabilities within 6-12 months
R to @Ayjchan: A reminder that scientists are human and there is workplace drama in research labs.
The culprit "Mr. Kuroda said that T.M. [the poisoning victim] had been promoted repeatedly, while he had not, and that T.M. “felt he was better” than him, the complaint said."
Poisoning attempts by scientist who worked on Ebola & Covid at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He "used ChatGPT to calculate dosage, and brushed off warnings from the chatbot about his questions."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/20/us/university-wisconsin-coworkers-poison.html?unlocked_article_code=1.clA.35S4.fxg0AscsU2jB&smid=tw-share
Viruses stolen by a PhD student from a high-security lab in Brazil.
The university refused to report the full list of viruses stolen to "avoid misinterpretations."
An even higher containment BSL4 lab is being constructed nearby.
I believe the reason top research institutions & societies refuse to organize a public scientific forum on Covid origin is that it will reveal the scarcity of evidence for a natural origin and highlight the inability of the scientific community to address catastrophic lab leaks.
And I asked both the @royalsociety and the @acmedsci to organise debates on the origin of covid.
For free.
They refused.
R to @Ayjchan: There should be a Genesis Mission equivalent for governing research that can cause pandemics. Such research has immense national security & economic consequences. Covid-19 showed this is one of the most challenging problems of this century & requires a historic national effort.
R to @Ayjchan: Even if one's main concern is AI-designed biothreats, the absence of independent oversight and the ease of acquiring materials by legitimate scientists and apparently even criminals (eg Reedley biolab) constitute a major problem as AI tools become more accessible and useful.
R to @Ayjchan: It's still not required by law - in the U.S. or China or several other major countries - to report infections that are acquired in the laboratory or while performing research.
R to @Ayjchan: All 3 bills are sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats. Governing research that can cause pandemics is a non-partisan issue that affects everyone in the U.S. and worldwide regardless of their politics.
There should be more progress on this front.
R to @Ayjchan: Bills on the independent oversight of dangerous gain-of-function research, gene synthesis screening, and the tracking of pathogen sales have not been passed into law. This makes it very easy for people to acquire or create pandemic pathogens in a fully legal manner.
R to @Ayjchan: Regardless of where anyone stands politically, a scientist in the U.S. can legally collect novel animal coronaviruses, enhance these genetically under low biosafety conditions, have an accidental leak, and potentially upend the country's healthcare infrastructure and economy.
R to @Ayjchan: Regardless of where anyone stands politically, this means there is still no national policy on research that can kill millions of people and no U.S. strategy to track and govern such research.
There's less than a month till the 1-year anniversary of the executive order on dangerous gain-of-function research.
The executive order asked for a new national policy within 120 days and a strategy to track and govern such research within 180 days of the order.
The origin of Covid is highly divisive, even among subject matter experts.
It would be great if @POTUS or Congress creates an independent commission to conduct a full investigation of the origin of a pandemic that killed 1 million Americans & cost 🇺🇸 an estimated $16 Trillion.
R to @ScienceMagazine: Kudos to @mbw61567742 for getting this rebuttal through peer review. And @nizzaneela "a patent expert with no academic affiliations" for doing a deep dive and discovering both coding errors and an imbalanced hypothesis testing framework.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.20076
If @ScienceMagazine @hholdenthorp believes in upholding a high standard of science, they should retract Pekar et al. 2022.
Basic coding and logic errors, when fixed, reverse their conclusion that Covid spilled at a Wuhan market twice.
R to @Ayjchan: For those who prefer listening over reading:
https://econjwatch.org/podcast/michael-weissman-on-lab-leak-and-science
@mbw61567742 describes how fixing fundamental logic and coding errors in Pekar et al. observed by @nizzaneela reverse the conclusion that Covid spilled from animals twice at the market.
"The problem, however, with a reflexively defensive approach [to a lab origin of Covid] is that when a scientific community abandons error-correction, that community is no longer doing science."
For those who only follow the science, Anthony Fauci said in 2024 that he is open-minded and thinks the case for a natural #OriginOfCovid is "not convincing" and "not a slam dunk".
This week, influential accounts claimed a US lab created Covid while other influential accounts said the lab leak hypothesis has long been debunked.
It would save me & others a lot of work if these two factions would resolve their misunderstandings with each other.
R to @slatestarcodex: These experiments produce no clear benefit to society.
Scientists prospecting for faraway SARS-like viruses for over a decade did not predict or prevent the same virus species causing an outbreak in their city. Their own data showed Wuhan was not a place at high risk of bat SARS-like virus spillover.
None of the Covid-19 vaccines, therapeutics, or diagnostics in the U.S. relied on such research.
R to @slatestarcodex: Recently released emails from 2018 show Wuhan scientists trying to create chimeric MERS virus, which was not reported to the public, even though they had just published a paper on the same virus sequence:
https://x.com/Ayjchan/status/2031012143651312107
R to @slatestarcodex: When asked whether she had started on experiments that could've very plausibly created Covid-19, the Wuhan scientist refused to answer:
https://x.com/Ayjchan/status/1816116228655628785
R to @slatestarcodex: One well known virologist feared in 2020 that a lab origin of Covid would indict their entire field.
What would indict the field of virology is the resistance from its leaders to acknowledge a plausible lab origin and prevent more catastrophic lab leaks.
https://x.com/Ayjchan/status/1801689348548526274
R to @slatestarcodex: It says a lot that one of the world's leading coronavirologists, who would benefit from dismissing a lab origin of Covid, admitted to Congress in 2024 he did not think the pandemic started at the market and that the evidence for that hypothesis is poor:
https://x.com/Ayjchan/status/1821966939532743089
R to @slatestarcodex: We do not know how deadly or transmissible the MERS-like viruses in that study are, or, importantly, how further experiments might enhance them.
If they kill 20–30% of infected people like MERS and are as transmissible as Covid-19, a leak could end civilization as we know it.
R to @slatestarcodex: One doesn't have to look any further than the public research papers from last year to see that scientists are still studying potential pandemic pathogens under low biosafety.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/opinion/risky-virus-research.html
R to @slatestarcodex: What I do know is that the next pandemic of ambiguous origin is likely right around the corner and it will demolish what is left of public trust in science and public health.
R to @slatestarcodex: Perhaps the most frustrating thing I've encountered is an unwillingness among top institutions & think tanks to tackle bioerror.
Before Covid till now, it's all about natural pandemics vs bioterror. One major biosecurity funder doesn't believe lab leaks can be catastrophic.
R to @slatestarcodex: Over the past few years, I and others have approached several top research or public health organizations to beg them to organize a public scientist forum on Covid origins.
They are all afraid to let the public watch scientists disagree and present data on this topic.
R to @slatestarcodex: If there were overwhelming evidence for a market origin of Covid, there's no reason why the scientists at the German foreign intelligence service (80-95% certain of lab leak), the US Department of Energy, FBI, and CIA would all lean toward a lab origin of Covid.
R to @Ayjchan: Just about all the "overwhelming" evidence for a market origin of Covid has been refuted even by other peer-reviewed articles in the past few years.
Happy to sit down with @slatestarcodex and go through these rebuttals to inform an updated analysis.
https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/2038053721830269024
There are several people who have seen classified intel on Covid origins.
The mystery for them is not "Did Covid come from a lab?" but "What processes led to Covid leaking from a lab?"
Very telling that this person combines the two issues of COVID origin and the 2020 election. For a lot of people that’s still how the COVID origin topic functions in their minds.
R to @Ayjchan: One of the Proximal Origin authors thought he would get tenure for publishing their letter dismissing any lab based scenario.
Just saying a lab origin had to be considered in 2020 put my scientific career and reputation in jeopardy.
https://x.com/Ayjchan/status/1683663052942573570
R to @Ayjchan: In the past 6 years of advocating for a rigorous investigation into Covid origin, $ has never been a factor in my decision making. I believe the same is true for Matt.
Billionaires offered to fund my work on origins and I declined ALL of them - perhaps foolishly.
No sane person would endanger themselves (targeted by the Chinese gov) & suffer alienation from their peers & scientific establishment just for book earnings.
We wrote VIRAL to lay out the evidence for natural vs lab origin of Covid. A virus that has killed millions of people.
People sometimes claim that I am motivated to champion the lab leak theory of Covid origin by financial interest because I co-wrote a book about it.
But in the book we covered both sides of the debate.
And publishers paid me less for that book than any other I have written in decades.
I then halved that by sharing the authorship with @Ayjchan.
And I gave half of the remaining proceeds away to charity.
If money was my motivation I would never have written that book.
But if they really think money is such a motivator perhaps they could look into the far larger grants that those opposing the lab leak have received, and reflect on how those would have been at risk if they had gone against Anthony Fauci's insistence that the lab leak is a conspiracy theory.
Compelling Covid origin lecture by @mattwridley at @NIH's scientific freedom series.
For those who already know lots about the subject, you can skip to the part where Matt narrates messages from Anthony Fauci, Jeremy Farrar, and the Proximal Origin authors.