Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrubs | Hacker News Reader

Plain Jane American here: my gut sense is something is off : you do not give funding to the Chinese (that's government to government) for research in this area. Something does not sit right. In the recent 25 years the US outsourced too much ... There's no implied or explicit coequal on this kind of R&D.

View on HN

Why wouldn't you? All the research is (supposed to be) shared with the world anyway. If you're interested in a topic, and some other country is also interested, and they have a lab ready to go - why not throw some money at them to study your thing? Cheaper than building your own lab - especially when the phenomenon is regional.

How could you ever expect the CCP to be even remotely honest in any “share this with the world” R/D scenario?

At the height of the Cold War, when the U.S. and Soviet Union governments were sworn enemies and on the verge of shooting nuclear weapons at each other, U.S. and Soviet scientists collaborated openly and productively on a wide variety of subjects. Even with government funding.

It’s not unusual to expect scientists to collaborate openly across national borders despite political winds, and in fact it is desirable.

Also funding the research is one way to ensure the results are shared.

Because they are competing on a vaguely equal footing with all the other researchers around the world. Funders want published results in return for funding, and will typically give funding to the researchers that have the perceived highest chance of publishing results if given the money. This incentivises researchers to publish anything they can. It means that money gets sent to China if it looks like the Chinese researchers are likely to make good use of it and return results. That's how academia works.

Because we're talking about research of biological weapons of mass destruction.

No, we're not. That wasn't the stated purpose of the research, and is deeply unlikely to have been a covert purpose either. What is the use of a "weapon" you can't aim?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com