(RNS) ‘The minute we realized the question was values, we all went to tikkun olam,’ said Eric Lander, incoming director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Scientific American
The U.S. Needs a National Strategic Computing Reserve
One year after supercomputers worked together to fight COVID, it’s time to broaden the partnership to prepare for other crises
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Last spring, as the world was coming to grips with the frightening scale and contagion of the COVID pandemic, scientists started to make rapid progress in understanding the disease. For many discoveries, progress was aided by world-class supercomputers and data systems, and research results advanced with unprecedented efficiency from understanding the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to modeling its spread, from therapeutics to vaccines, from medical response to managing the virus’s impacts.
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Even if we never learn whether Covid-19 escaped from a lab or jumped to humans from animals, the public is entitled to a closer look at what’s going on in virology labs.
Some scientists worry that laboratory scientists are getting too little oversight on projects that could potentially start pandemics. Others worry about the global proliferation of labs that work with dangerous viruses and other pathogens.
The journal Nature accused politicians and the press of stirring up a “divisive” argument over the origins of the pandemic, but it’s only reasonable to want an explanation for some curious facts. The virus that has killed 3.5 million people so far and upended the lives of billions of others seems to have its closest relative in horseshoe bats, yet there are no horseshoe bat colonies close to Wuhan, China, where the pandemic was first identified. Wuhan does, however, host a lab holding the world’s largest collection of bat coronaviruses.
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