The Trump administration, in the person of NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, has decided to ban American gain-of-function research on the rationale that the risks to public safety or national security are too great for the gains.
This is a mistake, especially on national security grounds and public safety.
Our enemies are enthusiastically conducting gain-of-function research, as demonstrated by the PRC’s work on the Wuhan Virus. We need to be doing our own gain-of-function research in order to understand our enemies’ products and how to counter them in the event they loose their bioweapons deliberately.
We also need to be doing our own gain-of-function research in order to understand the mechanisms by which viruses, and bacteria, that are currently unique to animals or plants might cross species lines and infect humans, and were they to cross over, what effects they would have on us. That’s how we’ll be able to deal rapidly with a pandemic from such a virus or bacterium. We did nothing about the influenza pandemic of a century ago and got away with it. We don’t know if we were lucky, and we don’t know whether we might have mitigated its effects had we known more. It’ll be the same with any future global—or national—epidemic if we’re deliberately responding in the blind.