The 'invented persona' behind a key pandemic database

April 23, 2023 5:53 AM

A mysterious man, known to some as Steven Meyers, lies at the heart of the world's largest database of virus genomes.
posted by lemoncake (24 comments total)

It remains astonishing to me what people with a lot of money can get away with. To do anything in science, normal scientists have to have our identities confirmed dozens of different ways, prove our degrees by submitting official transcripts, sign oaths that we are not going to misuse government money, and submit to constant auditing and questioning about every expense report, but this guy has somehow managed to get trusted by all these scientists to handle their intellectual property and get all these grants from multiple governments despite it not being clear who he is, what his background is, or if he has any academic training in the field at all.
posted by hydropsyche at 6:11 AM on April 23, 2023 [13 favorites]

This is an amazing story, well reported. It's well worth the effort to read.
posted by lalochezia at 6:34 AM on April 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Great piece, love the ski videotape subplot that elevates it into Tim & Eric territory.
posted by johngoren at 6:40 AM on April 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

He's like the Anna Delvey of viral genomes.
posted by euphorb at 7:07 AM on April 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

So, what, this guy runs a dropbox clone that's probably just a shim over Amazon Object Storage, has no accountability, and gets million dollar grants? Seems like he's found the perfect scam, a legitimately useful service. No idea why he'd want to fuck it up with all this sketchiness, it's so easy to run, just shut your mouth and serve the data. Bizarre!
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:13 AM on April 23, 2023 [12 favorites]

Metafilter: the perfect scam, a legitimately useful service.
posted by mhoye at 8:27 AM on April 23, 2023 [19 favorites]

I fully thought this was something about human-centered design going in, but it turned out to be more interesting than that.

Thanks for posting!
posted by JoeXIII007 at 8:33 AM on April 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

I am starting to think that every person is either constantly plagued by impostor syndrome and underselling their knowledge and expertise, or a complete fraud telling nonstop lies and running elaborate scams, with nothing in between.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 8:36 AM on April 23, 2023 [34 favorites]

Wow, this is a hell of a thing. Thank you for posting it.
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:43 AM on April 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

On the other hand, it sounds like... ...he actually put together a good, useful project/product? And it addressed some needs for less-wealthy countries that other databases weren't? So there's a baby/database bathwater/fake-identity-governance-problems-founder problem here?
posted by clawsoon at 9:10 AM on April 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

I feel like there’s potentially a really interesting story on the other side of a serial grifter who wakes up one day to find that just another of his prospective scams has accidentally started having real, world-changing impact, leaving him stuck in a very high-stakes game with no clear exit strategy. Perhaps also with an unfamiliar sense of conscience and responsibility surrounding the result, demanding a certain amount of playing-it-straight he finds himself psychologically ill-equipped to handle.

It’d be reading too much into the article to suppose this is the reality, but it could make a hell of a novel.
posted by gelfin at 9:16 AM on April 23, 2023 [15 favorites]

There's a lot of potential for grift in this database. Beyond pocketing donations, there is excising info that might make sequences look like they came from a Chinese lab leak OR putting in info that makes the virus look like it comes from a Chinese lab leak.
The database operators can give a better set of sequences to certain vaccine developers.
Above board operations and a transparent appeals process is essential, or else I would say this could just be hiding scams.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 9:28 AM on April 23, 2023 [1 favorite]

There was a petition on biostars (an online community for bioinformatics folks) to get GISAID to align its data licensing terms with those legally mandated by Germany, its main source of funding and host country. It sparked a lot of discussion and votes, but has since been deleted. GISAID even got to biostars!
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:18 AM on April 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

Metafilter: Just shut your mouth and serve the data!
posted by slater at 10:18 AM on April 23, 2023 [3 favorites]

In this world, everything is for sale.
posted by Oyéah at 11:09 AM on April 23, 2023

a serial grifter who wakes up one day to find that just another of his prospective scams has accidentally started having real, world-changing impact

Going Postal without Vetinari. Nice.
posted by clew at 11:10 AM on April 23, 2023 [6 favorites]

A friend of a former friend was underemployed out of college and decided to put together an astro-turfed fake annual award for achievement in an emerging field. Through I guess networking and luck, the award has become a legit credential that people compete for every year, and the friend pockets probably a decent fraction of a million bucks a year for owning the name.
posted by grobstein at 11:47 AM on April 23, 2023 [21 favorites]

It's an interesting story, but it feels like there is a big piece of the story missing out of the middle. How did Bogner come to create a database that clearly solved a problem in the scientific community? Did he have some experience in the domain? Some connection to someone who did? There's a brief mention of a conference and a train ride with Nancy Cox, but there's no context.

It seems pretty clear that GISAID did really improve the situation for genome sharing when it was launched. I'm left wanting to know how that happened, because that seems pretty important.
posted by ssg at 12:54 PM on April 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's an interesting story, but it feels like there is a big piece of the story missing out of the middle. How did Bogner come to create a database that clearly solved a problem in the scientific community? Did he have some experience in the domain? Some connection to someone who did? There's a brief mention of a conference and a train ride with Nancy Cox, but there's no context.

I believe the answer to that lies in this paragraph of the article:

"In early 2007, the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) had started developing and hosting the virus sequence database. A February 2008 contract formalized the arrangement, under which SIB would hire a manager, a database development and maintenance team, a bioinformatician, and an annotating team. The agreement called for an upfront payment of 135,000 Swiss francs (then about $145,000). But when the database went live in May, GISAID had yet to pay, according to SIB—and the nonprofit kept ignoring invoices as charges continued to accrue."
posted by Jane the Brown at 1:07 PM on April 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

It remains astonishing to me what people with a lot of money can get away with.

I think it's less that they're getting away with it as much as the whole point of our entire society is to give as much money to nameless rich people as possible.

To do anything in science, normal scientists have to have our identities confirmed dozens of different ways, prove our degrees by submitting official transcripts, sign oaths that we are not going to misuse government money, and submit to constant auditing and questioning about every expense report...

That is to minimize the amount of money not being given to rich people.
posted by Reyturner at 1:41 PM on April 23, 2023 [4 favorites]

GISAID is the worst. I was working at a small biotech company (with very well-regarded microbiologists) and tried to get access and never heard back. Then, when I got a job at with a govt agency email address, I got access immediately. They are such gatekeepers. They won't approve "free" email accounts (gmail, yahoo, etc). This cuts out a lot of smaller researchers in developing countries , yet they are storing data collected from those regions. This disenfranchises people directly affected by these infectious diseases.

It hampered actual research during the pandemic where people were trying to build analysis tools collaborating with people not at big institutions. Which left most analysis tools being in the hands of larder groups able to get access - so terrible.My current research group made a big push for researchers to submit their data to public INSDC databases instead or at least in addition to GISAID. Every single talk I went to during the pandemic which used data from Nextstrain/GISAID had a question from the audience about the ethics of depending on GISAID.

I'm glad to see this issue being deeply reported in the lay press.
posted by bluefly at 1:47 PM on April 23, 2023 [21 favorites]

Great post, lemoncake. 1999, Venice Beach: Joni Mitchell and Peter Bogner [not the Austrian art historian, which was a JM fan guess] listening to a premix of Herbie Hancock's Gershwin's World. Yacht rock, even accidental, is one thing, but does Mitchell like speed sailing?
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:02 PM on April 23, 2023

Yes, the person who added that image seems quite invested in one of its subjects.
posted by lemoncake at 4:28 PM on April 23, 2023 [2 favorites]

GISAID even got to biostars!

Not sure if people appreciate this - the bioinformatics community is made up of people where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, as far as data handling and use goes for what people were doing with SARS virus data.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 7:57 PM on April 23, 2023