Did Fauci Lie to Congress? What Everyone Missed About Gain-of-Function

Gain a function.

Those three words have become so politically loaded that I don't think most people even hear the scientific meaning anymore.

When I first heard them, nobody was arguing.

Nobody was marching.

Nobody was accusing anybody of crimes against humanity.

It was just another Tuesday afternoon in the laboratory.

Let me tell you about one of the first gain-of-function viruses ever engineered.

And yes, I helped make it.

That first sentence sounds a lot scarier than it is, but let me take you back.

It was 1979.

I was working in the laboratory of Dr. Bernard Roisman at the University of Chicago.

I was a graduate student getting my PhD in virology.

And if you ever worked in herpes virology, Dr. Roisman was one of the giants in the field.

I was fortunate enough to spend three years there.

And one of the questions we wanted to answer was incredibly simple.

How does the herpes virus know when to turn on its genes? Simple question.

It wasn't, how do we make herpes more dangerous? How do we make it spread faster? How do we conquer the world? But it was, how does this switch work in this simple herpes virus vaccine, herpes virus? Now, if you've ever had an egg white omelet, and if you've been on a GLP-1, there's a pretty good chance you've had one.

You already know that egg whites are mostly protein.

And one of the major proteins is called ovabumin.

Forget the name, just think egg white protein.

Now, egg white protein is easy to detect and it's easy to measure.

Herpes virus proteins are not.

So what we did is we took the gene for egg white protein that tells the cell to make egg white protein and put it under the control of the herpes simplex virus promoter, meaning the thing that tells the gene to turn on.

So I realize that's one of those words that we throw around without people wondering what it is, but a promoter is basically the on switch.

It's the bit of DNA that says, make this protein now and make this protein after you've done all of these other things.