Contra the other answers, I contest that virologists haven’t been running studies like that because they believed they had already been run.
And they are correct, studies had been run, from the 1940s to the 1960s. You are also correct—the setup you propose is exactly the one which cracked the problem for tuberculosis. Those results were published in 1962 by William Firth Wells.
The problem is that the WHO mostly deferred to the CDC, and the CDC guidance was accidentally written for weaponized airborne transmission rather than airborne transmission in general. So everyone, virologists included, believed the question of airborne transmission was largely settled and 5 microns was the magic number for airborne transmission in general, when in fact that was the magic number for bioweapons which can bypass our mucous lining instead. In addition to this error, the head of the CDC at the time the 5 micron number was recorded had for most of his career criticized the group of people who made the airborne transmission discovery, and to make matters worse Wells died in 1963 so there was no persistent authority to correct the matter. Also worth mentioning is that Wells was an engineer, and not a virologist.
The only people who had cause to question the “established facts” are people who a) had deep domain expertise that applied to the physical problem or b) were highly sensitive to the contradictions provided by the evidence.
I feel like this is basically expected, since the levels at which we expect most virology to work won’t encounter this naturally. Wrong disease prevention guidelines won’t show up if you are studying the shape of a virus, or its impact on tissues, or its genetic code; they also won’t show up obviously in big picture characterizations like R number because these include multiple factors without making clear what they are up front.
In summary, virologists weren’t doing the studies because they thought they had been done and we had our answer, but that answer was wrong in the exact same fashion as a wrong entry in a published steam table. In my view the problem is not with virologists the practitioners or virology the field, but with the fact that a bunch of bureaucrats were using a wrong reference. The reference would normally be corrected, but the best person to do so died too early and was a disparaged outsider to boot.
In my view the problem is not with virologists the practitioners or virology the field, but with the fact that a bunch of bureaucrats were using a wrong reference.
If bureaucrats get things wrong about virology, I would expect professors of virology to speak up, try to educate the bureaucrats, and speak to the public if that doesn’t work. Even if the CDC gives stupid guidance, I would expect there to be scientists who understand the evidence.
Why were the virologists missing in action?
If there’s a healthy field of virology I would expect professors of virology to understand the evidence for the core beliefs in the field.
I agree that if we had a healthy field, then the field should move to correct wrong information.
That being said, I don’t expect professors to understand the evidence for the core beliefs in their field, chiefly because I do not see where in the doctoral path such a comprehensive historical survey would take place. I expect them to know what the conclusions are, but no particular details about how they were reached, and to know even those chiefly through references. Even physics is shot through with apocrypha and folk tales about fundamental findings. I only expect a professor to know about the evidence for the core of their specialization, because this much is included in graduate course curricula I have seen.
At least as far as the United States is concerned, my default expectation regardless of field is that they will fail to immediately catch an error like happened with covid unless it directly conflicts with standard references in the field.
To sum up: I agree, but I think this problem affects basically all academic fields, rather than virology being especially deficient.
If you wanted to know the truth, you would need to start with all the raw data and recalculate your conclusions.
But since the raw data is often old, and only “positive” data was published and “negative” data not, and collected usually by poorly paid humans...you need to throw it all out and start over.
Would help to have enormous amounts of robotics to make this possible in a short timespan.
I assume that this is what you would need to do to solve “difficult” problems, such as biology.
I think about this periodically in the context of likelihood functions. My bet for the biggest problem is that there isn’t prior work for people to cite or data for them to build on, so it seems to me a good thing to do would be to things like:
Find good public datasets to run likelihood functions against.
Run very basic experiments in huge numbers to get strong effect sizes for fundamental findings.
I think the robotic laboratories would be a great fit for 2.
Contra the other answers, I contest that virologists haven’t been running studies like that because they believed they had already been run.
And they are correct, studies had been run, from the 1940s to the 1960s. You are also correct—the setup you propose is exactly the one which cracked the problem for tuberculosis. Those results were published in 1962 by William Firth Wells.
The problem is that the WHO mostly deferred to the CDC, and the CDC guidance was accidentally written for weaponized airborne transmission rather than airborne transmission in general. So everyone, virologists included, believed the question of airborne transmission was largely settled and 5 microns was the magic number for airborne transmission in general, when in fact that was the magic number for bioweapons which can bypass our mucous lining instead. In addition to this error, the head of the CDC at the time the 5 micron number was recorded had for most of his career criticized the group of people who made the airborne transmission discovery, and to make matters worse Wells died in 1963 so there was no persistent authority to correct the matter. Also worth mentioning is that Wells was an engineer, and not a virologist.
The only people who had cause to question the “established facts” are people who a) had deep domain expertise that applied to the physical problem or b) were highly sensitive to the contradictions provided by the evidence.
I feel like this is basically expected, since the levels at which we expect most virology to work won’t encounter this naturally. Wrong disease prevention guidelines won’t show up if you are studying the shape of a virus, or its impact on tissues, or its genetic code; they also won’t show up obviously in big picture characterizations like R number because these include multiple factors without making clear what they are up front.
In summary, virologists weren’t doing the studies because they thought they had been done and we had our answer, but that answer was wrong in the exact same fashion as a wrong entry in a published steam table. In my view the problem is not with virologists the practitioners or virology the field, but with the fact that a bunch of bureaucrats were using a wrong reference. The reference would normally be corrected, but the best person to do so died too early and was a disparaged outsider to boot.
I sourced most of this from this old linkpost from 2021 and my own spot-checks.
If bureaucrats get things wrong about virology, I would expect professors of virology to speak up, try to educate the bureaucrats, and speak to the public if that doesn’t work. Even if the CDC gives stupid guidance, I would expect there to be scientists who understand the evidence.
Why were the virologists missing in action?
If there’s a healthy field of virology I would expect professors of virology to understand the evidence for the core beliefs in the field.
I agree that if we had a healthy field, then the field should move to correct wrong information.
That being said, I don’t expect professors to understand the evidence for the core beliefs in their field, chiefly because I do not see where in the doctoral path such a comprehensive historical survey would take place. I expect them to know what the conclusions are, but no particular details about how they were reached, and to know even those chiefly through references. Even physics is shot through with apocrypha and folk tales about fundamental findings. I only expect a professor to know about the evidence for the core of their specialization, because this much is included in graduate course curricula I have seen.
At least as far as the United States is concerned, my default expectation regardless of field is that they will fail to immediately catch an error like happened with covid unless it directly conflicts with standard references in the field.
To sum up: I agree, but I think this problem affects basically all academic fields, rather than virology being especially deficient.
If you wanted to know the truth, you would need to start with all the raw data and recalculate your conclusions.
But since the raw data is often old, and only “positive” data was published and “negative” data not, and collected usually by poorly paid humans...you need to throw it all out and start over.
Would help to have enormous amounts of robotics to make this possible in a short timespan.
I assume that this is what you would need to do to solve “difficult” problems, such as biology.
I think about this periodically in the context of likelihood functions. My bet for the biggest problem is that there isn’t prior work for people to cite or data for them to build on, so it seems to me a good thing to do would be to things like:
Find good public datasets to run likelihood functions against.
Run very basic experiments in huge numbers to get strong effect sizes for fundamental findings.
I think the robotic laboratories would be a great fit for 2.