Peter Duesberg, a Ph.D. in molecular biology / retrovirology who taught at Berkley and was a member of the National Academy, who maintained that HIV does not cause AIDS and that antiretroviral drugs do more harm than good.

Walter Freeman, M.D. academic neurologist and first chair of neurology at George Washington University who believed that severing frontal-lobe connections could stabilize personality and stop pathological cycles of thought.

Charles B. Davenport, Ph.D. in biology, geneticist and founder of the Eugenics Record Office.

Henry H. Goddard, Ph.D. in psychology, intelligence-testing researcher and later professor of abnormal psychology who believed intellectual disability, poverty, prostitution, and criminality constituted a hereditary family type.

Clarence Cook Little, Harvard Ph.D., mammalian geneticist and prominent cancer researcher who insisted for years that the evidence did not establish a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer.

Fun game. We could laugh at all of them, and your examples too, if not for the damage they caused.

“The road to developing this standard was smooth once the journey began... However, beginning the journey was a challenge in finesse ... After some behind-the-scenes finessing with the head of the Canadian national delegation and with C.S.E., the stage was set for N.S.A. to submit a rewrite of the draft ... Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor.”

https://macleans.ca/society/technology/nsa-says-it-finessed-...

That's classism. Indirectly associated with racism in this country, sure. But naming the thing accurately communicates the full breadth of it's effect.

$599 for 30x coverage sequencing of any whole genome: https://www.the-odin.com/whole-genome-sequencing-30x/

Or purchase the equipment you need to DIY.

You still haven't offered your own credentials.

Not a word yet about your motivation. Huh. You'd think anyone out here demanding others' credentials would lead by presenting their own.

Enough.

> Even if lab leak is true, what is the proposal, that we do not study viruses at all?

People love to think in black and white. All on or all off. It is metabolically inexpensive to reduce reality to the binary. But reality is all the colors in between. To the best of anyone's ability to reconstruct the events which led to the outbreak (I think Quay makes a compelling case in that testimony which summarizes a great deal of investigative work by others) many things went wrong. Many of which were predictable. Many choices were made. All that suggests opportunity to reduce risk through less extreme means: restricting gain of function research to higher-BSL labs, removing those labs further from population centers, more closely monitoring inflows and outflows around such research, changes are possible in the review and approval process, the list of possibilities is extensive.

What would your motivation be for seeing it any other way?

I spent a decade at a national Science and Technology Research Center responsible for a twelfth of NSF's research budget. We studied biology at all scales and the algorithms it uses to solve difficult problems. I've looked for holes in Quay's testimony and didn't find any big ones. Most of his claims seem to be independently verified.

One thing I can say from my decade of experience is that scientists are not dumb people, and are acutely aware of how their work is perceived, and the connection that has to their research funding. You'll find as many scientists warning about the dangers of lax lab regulation as you will coal miners warning about climate change. Private conversations are very different.

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Testimony-Qu...