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On the TWiV (This Week in Virology) podcast at one point they discussed what would be some of the consequences if the lab leak theory were to be proven. One as
by 323 5y ago
On the TWiV (This Week in Virology) podcast at one point they discussed what would be some of the consequences if the lab leak theory were to be proven.
One aspect mentioned was that all the virology labs doing dangerous research would be moved outside of big cities. Then they concluded that such an act would be a terrible thing to do, since no virologist would want to work and live in the middle of nowhere.
- pbj1968 5y agoInevitably what happens is “middle of nowhere” eventually becomes “middle of the city.” Look to the BSL4 primate lab in San Antonio to observe this phenomenon.
- hef19898 5y agoSo the basis of the theory that virologists would do everything to hide a lab leak is, hold fast, that virologists don't want a long commute. That is what it looks like whem you run of straws to grasp in order to maintain your favorite theory...
- anshorei 5y agoHow about: they don't want to lose their jobs. And they don't have to cover up a lab leak, nearly all of them are not involved in any lab leak to cover up, most may just be unwilling to believe that it could've been a leak for personal convenience.
- chiefalchemist 5y agoThey don't want to work in the middle of nowhere? But they're comfortable with the possibility of an international pandemic? So the science doesn't trust The Science?
- ethbr0 5y agoThere's a constant, non-zero possibility of a (international-implied-by-the-term) pandemic. And even if this one was a lab leak, chances are extremely high the next will be zoonotic spillover. So pathologists and virologists see reality as a default high risk of pandemic, with an optional managed risk of high-BSL research labs near population centers. And that total risk is dominated by the former. But the general public doesn't react well when you run around screaming "Nature is constantly dreaming up better ways to kill us! And the latest creation might hitch a ride out of the forest any day now!" Which leads to some odd pro/con weighing in the public debate.
- taylorius 5y agoNot all pandemics are equal though. Whatever nature might throw at us, might not be as bad as a virus that has been purposefully designed to be deadly and highly contagious, through gain of function research.
- ThunderSizzle 5y agoJust because the chance of a new pandemic is non-zero doesn't mean we should invite and encourage dangerous behavior that could trigger or quickly spread a strain to the point it turns into a pandemic. Experimenting with deadly viruses in a major population center is like testing in production if your an AWS or Azure engineer. You might not care too much if it doesn't work, but your screwing over everyone else for your convenience if something does go wrong.
- chiefalchemist 5y agoThere is risk in doing lab based research. There are clear and obvious ways to mitigate that risk. The science is clear both of these. Covid was a warning. But scientists are going to ignore that and the science? And we're going to make excuses for that? What could go wrong?
- ethbr0 5y agoYour response is a bit confusing, so I'm assuming what you mean is that you believe physically isolating high BSL labs in remote areas is a clear and obvious way to mitigate that risk? And that COVID was a warning that we should do more of that? And that scientists are ignoring that warning? In which case, all of that is predicating on this actually being a lab leak. But there is no "bury head in sand" option. Eventually something as transmissible and much more lethal is going to spread. At that point, it's too late. The reason SARS-CoV-2 had a vaccine a year later is because of previous work in exactly these sorts of facilities. BSL labs are the safest places on the planet to work on dangerous pathogens. They aren't perfect. We should continually work to make them more perfect, and fund them to be so. But they're already multiple orders of magnitude more secure biologically than the alternates. Any country on the planet can work with any dangerous pathogens they can get ahold of. In any way they want. You can only set standards, contribute foreign aid to fund improvement, and try to improve the safety level of the global community. The "lab leak possibility means we shouldn't do lab research" argument feels like the suggestion that after Nagasaki the world should have abandoned nuclear weapons and ceased research. In which case, we'd be living under the flag of whichever country ignored that and pursued it anyway.
- hetspookjee 5y agoAs terrible as that may sound I wonder if they thought about the idea to move nuclear reactors back into big cities for the convenience of the people working in them. Sound as if they neither see a problem with that.
- scotty79 5y agoActually moving reactors (back?) into the cities would be a great move because that would make people understand how incredibly safe those thing are. Meanwhile we have coal power plants in the cities spewing out harmful particulates, gases and even radiation and people percieving them as safe because they live next to them.
- cronix 5y agoA lot (most?) of them are. Trojan, in Portland Oregon, wasn't. It left a bitter taste in the mouths of many Oregonians, especially the main population center of the state in Portland, to the point the basically banned it. Also a lot of Washingtonians were not happy that the leftover nuclear waste was buried up in their state as well as increased radioactive levels in the Columbia River detected since then, and higher than average deformation of fish. It was on the ballot year after year to get it closed down and finally leaked docs from the US NRC sealed the deal. I got to watch them blow it up! :) > After 16 years of irregular service, the plant was closed permanently in 1992 by its operator, Portland General Electric (PGE),[3] after cracks were discovered in the steam-generator tubing. Decommissioning and demolition of the plant began the following year and was largely completed in 2006 > The Trojan steam generators were designed to last the life of the plant, but it was only four years before premature cracking of the steam tubes was observed.[citation needed] In October 1979, the plant was shut down through the end of the year for repairs.[14][15][16] The plant had an extended shutdown in 1984, with difficulty restarting. > In December 1992, documents were leaked from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission showing that staff scientists believed that Trojan might be unsafe to operate.[26] In early January 1993, PGE chief executive Ken Harrison announced the company would not try to restart Trojan > In 2005, the reactor vessel and other radioactive equipment were removed from the Trojan plant, encased in concrete foam, shrink-wrapped, and transported intact by barge along the Columbia River to Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, where it was buried in a pit and covered with 45 feet (14 m) of gravel, which made it the first commercial reactor to be moved and buried whole.[31] It was awaiting transport to the Yucca Mountain Repository until that project was canceled in 2009. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Nuclear_Power_Plant
- andrewclunn 5y agoWhich episode was that?
- 323 5y agoSorry, I don't know the exact episode. When the lab leak theory started being taken seriously by the media - end of 2020 start of 2021.
- enraged_camel 5y ago>> Then they concluded that such an act would be a terrible thing to do, since no virologist would want to work and live in the middle of nowhere. I mean, this is a solved problem in many fields. In medicine, for example, the way you convince good doctors and nurses to work in rural hospitals is to pay them a lot more.
- nyanpasu64 5y agoOn the other hand, I hear stories that VA has difficulty hiring doctors in rural areas, and ends up hiring bad doctors who harm patients.
- bradleyjg 5y agoThe VA and the government in general underpays doctors and white collar workers in general.
- nopenopenopeno 5y agoAre you intentionally implying that the blue collar workers are paid fairly but the white collar workers are not? That takes some serious nerve!
- anamax 5y agoThe Mayo Clinic started in the middle of no-where.
- 5y ago
- prpl 5y agoIn practice, this looks like Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah.
- WalterBright 5y agoThe genesis of JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) was rocket researchers doing it on the Caltech campus and the community fearing explosions. So JPL was created out of town, and named "Jet" instead of "Rocket" because it sounded less dangerous.
- dmix 5y agoI could imagine a university town or the Russian style nuclear cities developing. You go there for a certain industry and a mini culture develops, people understand the trade offs. It doesn’t have to be a negative thing but I do understand that getting pushed out of all urban areas in a hostile NIMBY culture we’ve developed could very well limit the field in many ways.
- travisjungroth 5y ago> people understand the trade offs. Or 90% do and 10% want to shut down the thing depressing their property values. The problem is that 10% votes and shows up to city council meetings.
- twaw 5y agoWorld is interconnected a lot right now by planes. For example, Novosibirsk is low populated area in the middle if nowhere, but it just 2 hours by plane to heavily populated China. BSL4 Lab Vector was created in relatively safe area, but now it is not safe anymore. The blast in Vector lab on Sep 16 2019 took immediate attention of scientific world, because blast is able to put virus particles into air from hidden surfaces, which cannot be cleaned properly. Scintists recommended to put Novosibirsk into carantine for 2 weeks at least, but Russians ignored that.
- itronitron 5y agoYeah, and the local High School mascot could be the 'Vector' >> http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/7/richland-washingtons-atomic-legacy.html http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/7/richland-wash...
- relaxing 5y ago
- vitaflo 5y agoThis feels a little strange since Rocky Mountain Lab is in Hamilton, MT which I think many people would consider in the "middle of nowhere".
- ddddfdohvsyknn 5y agoCovid has killed an order of magnitude more people than atomic weapons. We got to learn the hard way how destructive viruses can be. People clutching pearls over the potential to mislead are missing the point. There should be a frank and critical discussion about the risks of viral research, especially near populated areas. But entertaining the possibility of a catastrophic accident is now considered conspiratorial thinking
- WanderPanda 5y agoIf it is „just“ one order of magnitude then I would argue that the loss in quality adjusted lifetime is much lower given the demographics of severe covid cases
- alfor 5y agoMaybe not if you account for long covid. Many people got lost many year of life but don’t even know it. The fact that it affect heart muscle that have almost no regenerative capacity is chilling.
- jjeaff 5y agoSo I assume you also think the US should destroy all of its nuclear weapons today? You will never, ever keep people safe from something by plugging your ears and pretending it doesn't exist. The fact that viruses can cause so much damage is exactly why we need even more research into dangerous viruses, not less.
- ddddfdohvsyknn 5y agoViral research is useful I'm sure it just annoys me when the media is framing the lab leak theory as some absurd and incredibly unlikely possibility. My point is that like a nuclear exchange a low probability times a lot of damage is high risk
- serial_dev 5y ago> The fact that viruses can cause so much damage is exactly why we need even more research into dangerous viruses, not less. Isn't this line of thinking going to create a dangerous feedback loop? Scientists experiment to create the deadliest virus yet, this virus leaks (because part of being very dangerous is being very contagious), killing many, shutting down our life as we know it for years. And what did we learn from it? We need more research, we need to experiment and create even more dangerous viruses, because it can cause so much damage? Then repeat? That's not going to end well (but I'm afraid that will happen).
- tacitusarc 5y agoTWIV has some very smart, very biased people, who are entirely incapable of recognizing their own biases. A shame, really.
- mtmsr 5y agoSo what would be the difference? Through the lab-leak discussion we have identified labs as a _potential_ threat that need tighter security measures. Even if this virus did not originate in a lab we are just waiting for one that actually does.
- hef19898 5y agoAs far as media and general public are concerned, maybe. Everyone that watched one of the pandemic films of the 90s, or spend more then 5 minutes thinking about this stuff, figured that out long ago.
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago> all the virology labs doing dangerous research would be moved outside of big cities I imagine that might be helpful in making it more likely that an outbreak could be contained, but I wonder by how much. If I understand correctly the Pirbright Institute in England has a history of leaks, and is believed to have caused the 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. The lab is situated far from cities, but that didn't stop the outbreak. [0] (Of course, as foot-and-mouth disease affects livestock, rather than people, I imagine that putting the lab in a city might actually have been better in that particular case.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-mouth_outbreak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
- tim333 5y agoI'm not sure the outside big cities would make much difference given how these things spread. Lab worker gets it, goes home, partner flies to a conference etc.