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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

The layout of the lab? That seems like something that could be public

Really? Care to tell everyone the layout of your home? How many feet in your room is your bed? How much storage do you have in your dresser? If someone wanted in and out as quick as possible, what's the best route?

Labs have sensitive areas too. Knowing the layout of them helps not just in-and-out operations but can also guide other kinds of educated guesses. Do lab staff in their offices have direct views of the lab equipment or are they separate? etc

The analogy is a bit silly. The layout of my home is on file at the county records office, and accessible online.

The real issue at hand is that he is suspected of something worse than merely copying a lab layout. Is a laboratory setup even protected? In many cases an experiment will elude replication because the lab setup was not properly documented.

Thinking that the quality of science is related to the layout of a lab is like thinking the creativity and beautiful of a piece of art is related to the location and color of the bin the artist stores their tools in.

That information may be used to assist in the theft of research down the line by someone else. Someone else could know exactly where someone's office is and what to grab out of there. Or what labs to try to get jobs/internships/etc in to be closer to a lab they want access to that they likely wouldn't get a job in.

That is.... a stretch.

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