M. Anthony Mills in The New Atlantis:
As with so many other scientific controversies in our political life, public opinion on Covid origins has come to track — and serve as a signifier for — partisan identity. This bodes ill for dispassionate investigation, which we must have if we want to know the truth about what actually threw the world into chaos for years and killed 27 million people.
At the same time, the controversy over Covid origins thrust into the center of our culture wars a substantive debate in science policy that has been raging among experts for decades, and will continue regardless of when or whether the true origin of the virus is established. That debate turns on the risks and benefits of the very kind of research alleged to have caused the pandemic.
On the one hand are virologists, specialists in the subfield of microbiology who study viruses. Many of them have long argued that experiments in which pathogens are genetically manipulated in ways that can render them more pathogenic, virulent, or transmissible — so-called “gain-of-function” experiments — provide invaluable sources of knowledge to help us prepare for future pandemics. On the other hand are critics, including microbiologists as well as experts in biosecurity, biosafety, and public health, who have long questioned whether these experiments are worth the risk.
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