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.

> 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.

Yeah, and the local High School mascot could be the 'Vector'

>> http://america.aljazeera.com/multimedia/2015/7/richland-wash...

MIT Lincoln labs shares a similar origin story.

The idea that postdoc researchers are on the whole a bunch of hipster urbanites is laughable.