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Comment by bulla | Hacker News Reader

What precedents?

Lots. I think one of the only arguments that needs to be made against things like gain-of-function research is this. [1] That's an incomprehensive list various announced biosecurity incidents.

Just since 2000 we've had lab incidents, including leaks, with: anthrax, west nile virus, SARS, COVID (not implying China - there was a confirmed COVID leak in Taiwan), ebola, tuberculosis, dengue, smallpox, zika, polio, and more. And they're happening all throughout the world. That includes the US, China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Australia, UK, South Korea, Hungary, France, Taiwan, Netherlands, and more. Incidents specified as coming from BSL-4 labs include ebola and SARS, though the BSL level is not specified at all for most incidents.

And I would take that is an extremely incomprehensive list given that many incidents are likely going to be tucked away or classified. There's playing with fire, and then there's this... which increasingly more feels like standing around a fire and seeing what happens if you start dumping kerosene into it, all in the name of firefighting - of course.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...

I don't think it was a modern BSL-4 standard lab, but smallpox escaped and killed someone in the UK. Now (at least in theory) only the US and Russia have samples in special government BSL-4 labs. Other countries could make it from sequence though.

Edit: I can't reply, so I'll say that an extinct horsepox virus was recreated from sequence, the same procedure in theory should work on smallpox

Smallpox is 186 kilobases in size. It's pretty hard to synthesize from scratch.

Not impossible, but hard.

Then you'll still need to assemble the viable viral particles. This will probably require the creation of artificial chromosomes needed for the viral replication, and then innoculating human cell culture with them, alongside with the synthetic viral DNA.

This is a level that requires years of work from a major biolab.

I dunno, these guys just ordered fragments from GeneArt: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/jo...

The did have a BSL2 lab, and they did quite a bit of work. But yeah, the state of the art has advanced since I worked in molecular biology.

Always harder than you think of course - but the thing about molecular biology is unlike nuclear physics, most of the equipment you need is relatively cheap and readily available.

So the tools are there.

However on the other hand - making something the right mix of lethal, but still able to spread I suspect is incredibly hard - if it was easy we'd all be dead already ( from viruses etc naturally evolving ).

Russia definitely doesn't have BSL-4 labs (because BSL-4 refers to an US-specific system).

Sorry for being pedantic.

>I don't think it was a modern BSL-4 standard lab, but smallpox escaped and killed someone in the UK.

That was in 1978! I believe we didn't have biosafety levels back then in the UK.

Edit: at least the BSL levels came 6 years later, but the UK has different names for those

>Over the next two decades, growing CDC, NIH, and OSHA participation in ABSA annual meetings further solidified biosafety guidelines, culminating in the 1984 publication of the first edition of the text, Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories (BMBL). The BMBL guidelines laid out four levels of increasingly intensive safety practices, equipment, facilities, and engineering controls to be employed in the safe handling of microbial agents: Biosafety Levels 1, 2, 3, and 4 (BSL-1, -2, -3, and -4),

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7099915/

You can acquire viable smallpox samples from graves in permafrost regions. It would not surprise me if the UK incident was an archeologist.

This is a good list on BSL incidents:

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

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