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In fact it seems like a reasonable assumption that on many days at a BSL-3+ lab, we're trusting at least one hungover graduate student who is operating on two h

In fact it seems like a reasonable assumption that on many days at a BSL-3+ lab, we're trusting at least one hungover graduate student who is operating on two hours of sleep at 9 in the morning, not to commit human error while implementing biosafety protocols to protect against the accidental release of a synthetic pathogen to the local urban population. Another comment in this thread suggested building these labs in a desert or some other extreme environment where scientists can be isolated for months at a time. This seems like an obviously necessary mitigation against the unknown risk of introducing synthetic pathogens that haven't been created in billions of years of evolution. And yet, the secretive groups funding and regulating this research instead choose to build their labs in urban centers. Why?

inkcapmushroom 4y ago
An obvious answer is it's expensive to build and hard to staff and maintain labs in extreme environments.
heavyset_go 4y ago
Bioweapon labs have a history of being built on small islands for this reason. > This seems like an obviously necessary mitigation against the unknown risk of introducing synthetic pathogens that haven't been created in billions of years of evolution. I'd wager that it's likely that the COVID variant that was made in a lab was also created through evolution at some point. Every infected person with the virus has billions of viral replications taking place in their body, and each virus itself will have its own mutations. There's a high chance such mutations already took place, somewhere and in someone/something, but those mutants never created their own worldwide outbreaks. I think it's worthwhile to understand how mutations can affect a virus at the heart of a pandemic. Finding such mutations in the wild is a roll of the dice, and the chances of encountering something like it rise the longer and more widespread the epidemic is.
bayesian_horse 4y ago
None of that is practical. In reality, biosafety procedures in those labs are extremely good at preventing any incidents. If you think it's easy to infect yourself as a BSL-3 researcher, you probably have that impression from watching a movie or TV show. That's why isolating the researchers is not necessary. Also you underestimate the number of such labs and the amount and variety of work that such labs are doing. "Synthetic Pathogens" are not a thing. Synthetic viruses are hardly pathogenic at all.
- TechBro8615 4y ago
  If it's not practical to mitigate against some risk, then the potential reward isn't high enough. Ignoring the risk and continuing without optimal mitigation is only a logical course of action if the potential reward outweighs the possible downside. If research is sufficiently dangerous to necessitate a BSL-3+ lab, then it should have to meet a correspondingly high bar for demonstrating its potential reward. It's not clear to me that gain of function research could ever make such a justification. In an ideal world, we could do this research with remote controlled robots in an orbiting space capsule. If we can't do that yet, then we could at least do it in a desert. Otherwise, shouldn't we be asking the local population to approve each research proposal that could lead to a local outbreak of a dangerous virus?

inkcapmushroom 4y ago

An obvious answer is it's expensive to build and hard to staff and maintain labs in extreme environments.

heavyset_go 4y ago

Bioweapon labs have a history of being built on small islands for this reason. > This seems like an obviously necessary mitigation against the unknown risk of introducing synthetic pathogens that haven't been created in billions of years of evolution. I'd wager that it's likely that the COVID variant that was made in a lab was also created through evolution at some point. Every infected person with the virus has billions of viral replications taking place in their body, and each virus itself will have its own mutations. There's a high chance such mutations already took place, somewhere and in someone/something, but those mutants never created their own worldwide outbreaks. I think it's worthwhile to understand how mutations can affect a virus at the heart of a pandemic. Finding such mutations in the wild is a roll of the dice, and the chances of encountering something like it rise the longer and more widespread the epidemic is.

bayesian_horse 4y ago

None of that is practical. In reality, biosafety procedures in those labs are extremely good at preventing any incidents. If you think it's easy to infect yourself as a BSL-3 researcher, you probably have that impression from watching a movie or TV show. That's why isolating the researchers is not necessary. Also you underestimate the number of such labs and the amount and variety of work that such labs are doing. "Synthetic Pathogens" are not a thing. Synthetic viruses are hardly pathogenic at all.

TechBro8615 4y ago
If it's not practical to mitigate against some risk, then the potential reward isn't high enough. Ignoring the risk and continuing without optimal mitigation is only a logical course of action if the potential reward outweighs the possible downside. If research is sufficiently dangerous to necessitate a BSL-3+ lab, then it should have to meet a correspondingly high bar for demonstrating its potential reward. It's not clear to me that gain of function research could ever make such a justification. In an ideal world, we could do this research with remote controlled robots in an orbiting space capsule. If we can't do that yet, then we could at least do it in a desert. Otherwise, shouldn't we be asking the local population to approve each research proposal that could lead to a local outbreak of a dangerous virus?