Paul vs. Fauci: What does gain-of-function research have to do with COVID-19?

Use of gain-of-function research has been heavily debated in the scientific community and most recently, on Capitol Hill. For months, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) have disagreed on the definition of gain-of-function research during Senate hearings.

Gain-of-function occurs “when any organism acquires a new ability or property,” Colorado State University biosafety expert Rebecca Moritz said. “It’s very common throughout microbiology and it is a part of doing fundamental microbiology research. So an organism can gain a function through natural selection or a researcher’s experiments.”

Gain-of-function through laboratory experiments has made this type of research so controversial.

“When you are modifying organisms, any organisms…there’s always the possibility that they could become more harmful than the original organism,” Moritz said.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China conducted this type of research on coronavirus in bats, fueling theories about the origin of COVID-19.

Dr. Fauci has called those new theories “molecularly impossible,” but Sen. Paul has proposed legislation to ban American funding of gain-of-function research in China.