ARGUMENT: SAFER VIROLOGICAL RESEARCHWe Could Easily Make Risky Virological Research Safer
Lab Accidents happen, and they aren’t especially rare. A new book — appropriately titled Pandora’s Gamble — offers a shocking accounting of the problem, identifying more than a thousand accidents reported to federal regulators from 2008 to 2012. David Wallace-Wells, referring to the recommendations from the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity on how to minimize the risks from research biolabs, writes: “These suggestions would not eliminate the risk of lab accidents, but they would reduce the risk — and fairly simply.”
The 2007: a faulty drainage pipe at a research facility causes an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain. 2015: DOD discovered that a germ-warfare program in Utah had mistakenly mailed almost 200 samples of live anthrax over twelve years. 2018: a broken pipe released as many as 3,000 gallons of wastewater from labs working with Ebola and anthrax at Fort Detrick in Maryland onto a grassy area a few feet from an open storm drain.
David Wallace-Wells write in the New York Times that
Lab accidents happen, and they aren’t especially rare. A 2014 USA Today investigation by Alison Young, whose book Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World At Risk is a shocking accounting of the problem, identified more than a thousand accidents reported to federal regulators from 2008 to 2012. Some were not especially dangerous. But if you’ve read accounts of them at any point over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic as debate continued over its origins, chances are they’ve shaken you a bit. Many of the touchstone examples have been tied to quotidian causes — sloppy procedures and lax oversight. But lately debate has focused on the dangerousness of the experiments themselves, in part because knowing what is risky suggests what extra precautions might be taken and in part because it raises a more bracing fundamental question: What kind of work is worth this risk?
In January the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity issued a series of draft recommendations for tightening regulation and oversight. The proposed framework would expand the list of pathogens that would require rigorous review and close some loopholes that allowed some researchers to avoid that oversight. But for the moment, the recommendations sit in a kind of regulatory limbo, awaiting a green light from the White House and implementation at the National Institutes of Health.
Wallace-Wells refers to the recommendations from the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity on how to minimize the risks from research biolabs, noting: “These suggestions would not eliminate the risk of lab accidents, but they would reduce the risk — and fairly simply.”
“Setting scientific norms has to be a positive thing,” Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch rold Wallace-Wells, “even if it’s not a perfectly effective thing.”
