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Open up: That secretive committee on virus research + Most complex thing in universe

#1
C C Offline
Secretive committee on risky virus research should be more open, chair says
https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/22/sec...hair-says/

INTRO: The secret committee created to oversee federally funded “gain of function” research that can make dangerous viruses even more deadly should be more transparent in its review process, according to the chairman of that committee, House Republicans revealed this week.

The “review process continues to be unnecessarily shrouded in secrecy,” wrote House Committee on Energy and Commerce Ranking Member Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., in a letter to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra.

Gain-of-function research projects are supposed to be reviewed by a committee as part of guidelines known as Potential Pandemic Pathogens Control and Oversight (P3CO) Framework, created in 2017 after a three-year pause on such research following several lab-related incidents that raised public concerns.

Chris Hassell, the chairman of the P3CO virus research review committee and its only public member, “acknowledged a strong interest in improving the transparency of the HHS P3CO review process and the need for more transparency,” according to the letter.

“None of the HHS departmental review process for approving enhanced PPP [Potential Pandemic Pathogens] experiments is public,” the letter states. “HHS review should make public who participates in the review, as well as the basis of the decision that the research is acceptable to fund, including the U.S. government’s (USG’s) calculation of the potential benefits and risks of the proposed enhanced PPP research.”

HHS gave House Republicans the names of some but not all review committee members, “on a confidential basis because of personal security concerns,” the letter states.

NIH won’t even say how much research gets funded. Indicating the lack of transparency, National Institutes of Health officials will not disclose how many gain-of-function projects they have funded.

When Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was asked how many gain-of-function grants his agency had approved, he said “the answer would hinge on how the work was defined in a given year,” The Washington Post reported in August.

“To the extent that we can be transparent, that the system would allow us to be transparent, we go overboard to be transparent,” Fauci also said... (MORE - details)


The most complex thing in the universe
https://iai.tv/articles/the-most-complex...-auid-2110

When cosmologists try to make sense of the universe and its origin, they look at entropy and the number of different ways a universe like ours could arise. It is usually thought that blackholes and dark energy make the most significant contribution to the entropy of the cosmos. But new work by Marina Cortês, Stuart Kauffman, Andrew Liddle and Lee Smolin has quantified the complexity of life and compared it to that of the cosmos for the first time. The results? There is more to life on Earth than you might think.

INTRO: Biology. Cosmology. Biology and cosmology. Two fields that are normally thought to have nothing in common and nothing to teach each other. We — Stuart Kauffman, Andrew Liddle, Lee Smolin and I — are putting an end to this. By reformulating cosmological physics to include biological systems, we have developed a common currency with which their respective systems can be counted and compared. This ‘currency’ allows us to quantify the value of biologicals systems when set against the character cast of cosmology: galaxies, dark energy and black holes.

This synthesis of biology and cosmology required a shift away from reductionism and the belief that all systems can be understood by breaking them down into their constituent elements. Instead, the new way of thinking makes sense of complex systems and their evolution by considering the number of possible future states those systems could take.

In a technical sense, this synthesis uses the idea of a system’s expanding space of possible outcomes, which Stuart Kauffman established as the Theory of the Adjacent Possible (TAP).

In a general sense, this theory may prove to have vital implications for understanding many aspects of our lives, notably economics, innovation, and catastrophic climate change.

So, what is the Earth’s biosphere worth in this new currency? Our attempt to answer this question has deep implications for what theoretical physics should be, where it can reach, and what it will become... (MORE - details)
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#2
confused2 Offline
Quote:..quantified the complexity of life and compared it to that of the cosmos for the first time.
One of the starting points in electrical engineering is that at any time the number of electrons in a thing is the number that start off there plus the number that arrive minus the number that leave. Taking that a step further we might choose to put a few chemicals in a tupperware thing, seal it and after a few billion years be surprised to find tupperware professors arguing about whether the universe is closed or open. Metaphorically speaking one might be tempted to post them a message like "I think you'll find it's closed." before closing the thing up and putting it on the metaphorical fire. It would be spiritually satisfying if .. all sorts of things .. Shit. There's an ant wandering about on my desk. Is this a message from the gods? I may come back to this.
Still worrying about the ant situation but..
I was heading in the direction of (rather nastily) pointing out that tupperware professors go fss on the fire just like anything else that has climbed up the energy scale enough to generate heat when combined with oxygen.
Edit .. is the 'information/complexity' anything more than a lack of modesty (or understanding) of our place in the electrochemical scheme of things?
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