Baric Transcribed Interview (Redacted) — page 92

DC.Scheduling@LexitasLegal.com MS. SALAZAR: So is that what DARPA was -- I mean -- DR. BARIC: Yes. MS. SALAZAR: -- they explicitly -- DR. BARIC: The part one was they wanted to know what the threat potential was in certain wild areas of the world, so you did surveillance. MS. SALAZAR: So are you talking about what the DARPA PREEMPT program -- DR. BARIC: Yes. MS. SALAZAR: -- that they specifically said "we want you to do gain-of-function research." DR. BARIC: They said they want you to know, down to the nucleotide level what drives cross-species jumping events. MS. SALAZAR: And that's gain-of-function research. DR. BARIC: That's a gain-of-function experiment. There's no other way to think about it. You can do loss18 of-function, but it doesn't prove that it's jumping across there. All you say is you knock that mutation out, it loses the ability. Gain-of-function proves it, and it's causal. So in my opinion, when I read that, that's exactly what they're asking for. They mention in there that this could involve gain-of-function research in their announcement. So part one of that grant was to do surveillance in China, looking in that case for viruses.