Personally, I kind of like the idea that we could know in advance if a tiny mutation could turn a known disease into something that wipes us all out.

Only inside level four labs, of course. But early warning (and this work on mitigation) seems important.

Maybe in BSL-5 labs?

Must be in rural isolation, NOT a city.

The administrators and janitors and everyone has to sleep inside the fence.

Getting out requires spending 40 days in a quarantine hotel in a different nearby fenced area.

Armed guards patrol the fence.

(EDIT: To be clear. BSL-5 doesn't exist yet... but it should.)

I agree. We should treat this as the existential threat that it is.

Maybe a fully underground, enclosed facility where scientists work and live. Oh, wait...

The lock down in the first Resident Evil movie seemed quite effective, until the response team reset the security system to get out.

Only to be defeated by a rubber gasket eating mutation.

Anyway Murphy's law is always applicable and we need the capability to fight fires even more.

> It is also much easier to stop bad software than bad biology. Software is much simpler than the human body.

As an RE geek, and a biologist, the Movies were so f'ing awful... I'm playing the new reboot of the Outbreak series, my favorite of all, RE: Resistance and its pretty awesome and still does way more with genre of survival horror in what was simply an add-on DLC cash-in to sell an updated RE3 then all the horrible movies combined. Online play was always more fun, but now that you're the villainous 'master mind' behind the plot kill the subjects for your own gain is absolutely brilliant, something sorely lacking the same Raccoon City Outbreak universe.

They simply did what Hollywood always does: make shit up and refused to speak about the Cyberpunk-esque undertones of Umbrella and the T virus in any adequate way. This works for comic book stuff because it's audience is so self-serving, but it's also why it's so boring and suffers from the repeated one dimensional story telling.

Instead of following the manga-style adaptions they have in Japanese cinema Hollywood made a series of mindless 2 hour brain drains of of zombie shooting banality, and then made up characters the main character (Jovovich) doesn't even exist in the lore, they deviated so far from the plot that they even managed to get Jill's character so bad I literately pissed of my date when we went I was nerd-raging so hard about how bad it was and how much a missed opportunity it was to inspire more like me to enter into biology--we were both freshman in University and I was at my peak of biopunk naivety and advocacy.

The animated series were way better, as is the case with Batman stuff and shows how gritty and dire these subjects are when properly told from the right platform and setting.

As for COVID, I witnessed how resurgance of the yellow movement in HK was being quelled by the CCP and PLA since that Summer, and I personally feel the theory that an accidental leaked gain of function virus makes sense but that nothing 'damning' will ever be uncovered as the floods that impacted Wuhan provided perfect cover to do any successful form of epidemiology, the wet markets are no longer a source of valid data and it was clear how the WHO who were refused at first from entering) is not to be trusted given their alliances to the CCP and refusal to acknowledge the efforts Taiwan had during this pandemic.

Sadly, political theater will always undo anything Science can prove (or not prove) even when it results in the death of 2+ million people. Let it not be forgotten the CCP was jailing, disspeaing and going fafter people on Social media for talking about the deadliness and serious nature of what was happening. Mainland Citizen-journalists who exposed the dire situation and the pathetic state of these make shift hospitals over run by are still not accounted for and are presumed to be either dissapeared in a black-site re-education camp, or simply murdered at this point.

That's why the CCP is such a threat, and its reliance needs to be broken from and decoupled: cheap labour and trinkets aren't worth having them be the vanguard for Human or even environmental health and denying and hiding, getting rid of any and all evidence when it suits them--which includes but is not limited to disspearing people and committing war crimes and acts of genocide while Xi speaks at DAVOS about creating a more 'diverse' system as it extinguishes ethnic groups it see's as threat to it's divisive death cult (CCP).

I may be wrong, but I think that by saying rubber gasket the parent commenter had "Andromeda strain" in mind.

I meant RE though

You’re not going to get any good researchers to live in a quarantine bubble for their whole lives.

Yes, just like no researcher will travel to Mars. /s

The point isn’t to live there their whole lives, but periods where they can get a lot of work done safely.

Then don't do it.

Do the good researchers themselves need to be near the viruses? Debt they just need some people to handle the work?

I'm definitely no expert but it seems to me that the sheer number of biological variables means that even if you know something could potentially get bad it wouldn't really give you much of a head start as any vaccine you might develop is not so likely to be viable. Testing the impact on living organisms would also have so many ethical issues as to be pretty much a non starter.

I'd genuinely like to know what we would get out of it that would warrant such risk taking?

There was some considerable progress recently using AI to predict possible mutations. I wish I could find the link. That seems like a better way to go.

Suppose you find that hypothetical mutation. What next? What would you do to prevent the current situation?

Start working on a vaccine.

It took two days to create a vaccine for COVID-19. How much more lead time do we need?

Ok, start clinical trial immediately after vaccine creation. At least until the point where it's safe for humans to use the new vaccine.

You can’t do a trial when there is no outbreak.

You can if you want to show really great efficacy results to the regulators, just omit that pesky control group. Buy my tiger repelling rock, prevents 100% of tiger attacks.

Has this ever been done in response to gain of function research?

Similarly smallpox has been completely eradicated, but USA and Russia like to keep around a few live samples, "for research". Whatever will wipe us all out in the end, we probably had it coming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debat...

It’s substantially more complicated than that smallpox samples keep turning up in the US [1][2]. Who knows how many samples were lost in the chaos of the fall of the Soviet Union. Smallpox was in every country on earth until relatively recently simply destroying samples isn’t enough. Hanging onto them in case we need a new vaccine is absolutely prudent.

https://www.wired.com/2014/07/cdc-found-pox/ https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/blog/scab-story

If there is an actual outbreak that we need a vaccine for, we can just get new samples from the infected, right?

Not if your point is to understand what can go wrong when viruses mutate.

That certainly doesn't preclude research that's useful (and essential) to developing new pathogens; all of these things are by nature dual-use technologies.