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One way to increase the virulence of a virus in lab, is to let it infect cells in cell culture, and replicate for a large number of generations. This is sort of

• angelzen 5y ago
  We'll never know for sure. Which is too bad, because the plan of "Let's comb remote caves for hundreds of dangerous pathogens, bring them to a lab in the middle of a 10M metropolis, then perform gain-of-function research on them" is as nutty as it sounds.
  • noahtallen 5y ago
    I don’t know if it’s that nutty! “Let’s study the most dangerous pathogens” sounds like a good idea to me. So the nutty part would be doing it in a city, but would that actually make a huge difference compared to a remote lab? If it got out of a remote lab, one can imagine it would ultimately end up spreading quite far exponentially, even if it would take slightly longer to reach a metropolis. Seems to me the main thing would be ensuring foolproof protection from anything escaping at the lab — which obviously was lacking if the theory is true. So the idea seems fine to me.
    • bradknowles 5y ago
      If you think anything can be made foolproof, then all I can say is that you must not yet have met a sufficiently foolish fool. The one and only job that any fool has is to defeat any so-called “foolproof” system that they come into contact with. And, taken as a whole, history has proven that they are unbeatable.
• Metacelsus 5y ago
  Typically serial passage decreases the virulence (since there's no selection pressure from the immune system, mutations accumulate in immune evasion genes). But if it's an animal virus, this is a good way to evolve it to infect human cells.