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.
The 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.
I 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.
World 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.
Covid 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
> 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).
Yes, it might create a feedback loop. But the fact is, no matter what the good guys do, the bad guys are going to keep at it. The only alternative is to try and stay ahead of the bad guys.
How is knowing more about Nukes keeping us safe from Nukes?
All nukes should be decommissioned, and all countries should be open to independent inspectors. (I will never happen, but it _should_). This week, of all weeks, this should be clear.
Non-proliferation treaties were a thing until the US decided not to play ball in the 90s. It is entirely feasible to conceive of nuclear containment via treaties, and indeed the world was headed in this direction after the cold war.
It doesn't help that any nuclear plant can make a "dirty bomb" btw, which is one more reason to be anti-nuclear. No nukes, no nuke weapons. Not a bad tradeoff all by itself. (And yes, such bans can be enforced, look no further than Iran's difficulty getting nuclear power going).
> Non-proliferation treaties were a thing until the US decided not to play ball in the 90s.
The Non-Proliferation Treaty is still a thing, and the US still plays ball with it.
Arms limitation treaties were an important thing until the US scrapped the ABM Treaty in 2002, followed almost immediately by Russia dumping START II, which is the closest real thing I can think of to what you said, differing in the kind of treaty involved and the decade the wheels came off.
It's oversimplifying a lot to say Russia "dumped START II" given the dishonesty surrounding US nukes in Europe at the time. NATO's "nuclear sharing" makes a mockery of NPT. There's the USs historic support of Israel not joining NPT. And so on ... the US is not serious about non-proliferation, to say the very least.
> It's oversimplifying a lot to say Russia "dumped START II"
It is perfectly accurate to say that they did so (and that it was a direct response to the US withdrawing from the ABM Treaty.)
> NATO's "nuclear sharing" makes a mockery of NPT
NATO’s nuclear sharing agreements predate the NPT, and no new ones have been entered since the NPT, and the continuation of the existing ones is consistent with the NPT.
Non-proliferation is possible if democracies like the US weren't determined to sabotage them. I say democracies because in theory they do what their population wants, and NPTs faced no opposition in the 90s (except from defense contractors of course).
Now it's too late for this crisis (and possibly humanity) but we must demand NPTs if/when this crisis is resolved.
Viral 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
Nuclear weapons are reasonably well controlled. I’d love to know that they were better controlled than they are though. The same applies to virus research.
Surely you don't think that would be a good idea? That leaves Russia with the most powerful weapons on earth. Something makes me think that wouldn't end well for the rest of the world.
If 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
As 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.
Actually 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.
A 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.
Random factoid: Kodak had a small nuclear reactor in the basement of its Rochester, NY headquarters for thirty years (until the plant and HQ was closed).
Emphasis on small. Not a true secret; fully regulated and licensed. But they didn't talk about it!
If it meant not having fossil fuel plants nearby instead, I 100% would want a nuclear pant near my backyard. Perhaps you don't realize how many people die per year due to air pollution. Comparing the safety records of fossil fuels and nuclear is frankly laughable.
Comparing the safety records of fossil fuels and nuclear,
while ignoring the safety of solar,
is dishonest.
>150% of my power requirements is produced by panels on my roof.
> the death toll of history’s two nuclear disasters we have added the death rate that Markandya and Wilkinson (2007) estimated for occupational deaths, most from milling and mining. Their published rate is 0.022 deaths per TWh.
> The sum of these three data points gives us a death rate of 0.07 deaths per TWh. We might consider this an upper estimate.
> For example, included in this database were deaths related to an incident where from a water tank ruptured during a construction test at a solar factory. It’s not clear whether these supply chain deaths should or shouldn’t be attributed as a death from solar technologies.
Deaths: Nuclear 0.07 vs Solar 0.02.
Greenhouse gasses: Nuclear 3 tonnes vs Solar 5 tonnes
Here's one from 2012[1] where they breakdown nuclear deaths to include Chernobyl and Fukushima and remove those (i.e. electricity). Nuclear wins by a lot.
Or a 2014 study[2] showing nuclear beating solar rooftop (note, concentrated solar is a lot safer than rooftop. Concentrated is actually safer than nuclear but the death rates are so small I'm not sure why we're arguing over them).
There's plenty of sources showing nuclear's death rates are roughly the same as solar, wind, and hydro. All of which are 2 orders of magnitude below biomass and natural gas and 3 below coal and oil. Similarly also 2-3 orders of magnitude less than coal, natural gas, and oil (1 magnitude less than hydro).
These discussions are absurd. We just end up sitting here quibbling over a small tradeoff between emissions and deaths (a very difficult thing to measure) while we just keep producing gas, oil, and coal. Pick your battles. When we have a clean grid we can quibble over these numbers because at that point they will be significant. But at this time they aren't even close. If you want to complain about the cost of nuclear, sure, that's a fair and honest discussion we can have. But there is no evidence to suggest that nuclear isn't safe and green. This is very concerning when it represents 50% of the zero carbon emission energy in the US.
you know what's really absurd?
you started off with a 50yo source claiming solar has >100 times the deaths of nuclear,
then fell back to claims that they're 'roughly the same' and 'just a small tradeoff'
but go on to say there is no evidence nuclear isn't safe.
I've picked my battle and I've picked a winner. solar has been giving me more power than I know what to do with for years. More than 10% of my suburb has rooftop, there are 3 small grid arrays within 100k, and a 10gw plant being built down the highway that will produce enough untapped energy to kickstart new manufacturing.
> More than 10% of my suburb has rooftop, there are 3 small grid arrays within 100k
Great! I'm not anti-solar. Nor is anyone I know that is pro-nuclear. We tend to also be pro-renewables. It is just that nuclear shouldn't be taken off the table when we're facing a crisis.
>> 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.
This is far from a solved problem in medicine. Higher salaries aren't enough to attract the number of doctors are needed, and there are also other issues that actively drive away doctors. (For example, fewer doctors to split the call pool in rural areas means that doctors may need to work more nights and weekends than they would in urban areas.)
That would require 1) budgeting more money for science or 2) hiring fewer scientists. Recent U.S. history has very much shown us unwilling to do 1), which means that we're going to get 2). I'm pretty sure that's not really an outcome scientists want either, and arguably it'd be bad for the nation's long-term competitiveness.
> 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.)
Inevitably 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.
So 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.
As 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.
I'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.
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.
There'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.
Just 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.
Your 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.
It isn't a ceteris paribus comparison, because we don't live in a society where you can force people of expertise to work where you would like them to.
They get to choose.
So you end up with the CDC in Atlanta or Ft. Detrick 50 miles away from Washington, DC. If you said "We're only going to do BSL-4 work at Enewetak," then a lot of work simply wouldn't get done, either because of logistical challenges or because no one wants to relocate there.
And on a personal note, as someone who's lived < 5 miles away from a BSL-4 lab, I slept like a baby. I knew that if the worst happened, from the environment outside the lab or the lab itself, the nearest ICU and associated institutions were staffed by some of the best infectious disease experts on the planet.
Not 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.
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.