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Apparently, a lab in china has created a virus with a 100% kill rate in humanized mice. Combined with the fact that there's a decent chance that COVID was a lab leak, this sort of thing is extremely dangerous to be doing.
I'm not sure how best to make it so that people are not incentivized to do things like this, but ceasing to fund this variety of research (it looks like the US ended one program that was pushing this sort of thing last year), and instating some sort of legal liability on those who do this, and especially if they dispose of it badly, probably seem like good decisions.
Extremely dangerous diseases are among the top few things in being both disastrous to humanity (unlike climate change) and also relatively likely (unlike a massive asteroid hitting earth). Development of them is also something that is not excessively difficult to do. This is probably the closest thing we have so far to Bostrom's black ball metaphor. People joke about Yudkowskian airstrikes on data centers; would airstrikes on labs be similarly warranted? More seriously, though, there should be far more effort put into preventing this sort of thing than there currently is.
Bostrom's concerns should probably be something more important to be aware of. The ideal is just to not develop technology in specific fields to the point that killing millions is a cheap and easy thing to do. Of course, the tradeoff is totalitarianism, a terror of its own.
EDIT: Some of the comments have argued, relatively convincingly, that this particular news story was overblown and misleading.
This stuff seems indefensible.
Even if you only assume a 1% chance that COVID was a lab leak that is around 10 thousand people dead from that type of research.
It would probably only take one big country to take a hard-line stance on this to end it, since hardly anyone other than virology researchers actually benefit from the research. Even a middle weight economy country like UK could probably say "we are going to have trade sanctions against anyone that conducts this research" and that might be enough.
It would take far less effort than something like the Kyoto agreement.
I have a fear that it's now impossible to ban Gain of Function. If it's banned, then that tacitly admits that it was the cause of COVID. China doesn't want to lose face and nor does America. In China, the party line is that it came from somewhere else, possibly America, Wuhan wasn't the origin.
You can sort of see a similar tendency in how US media tends to portray it, it's primarily the fault of lax Chinese biosafety, possibly bioweapons research. And they can summon up a host of bioresearch scientists who don't want to be reviled for the rest of their lives. They can enthusiastically promulgate sophistry about how there really was some Laotian bat-pangolin-human farce in a wet market that coincidentally replicated the results of grant proposals sent by EcoHealth and researchers in Wuhan.
The blame falls on a perfect combination of Chinese and American scientists and policymakers, neither of the superpowers wants the truth to emerge.
I contend that the biggest problem right now is simply that concern about GOF research has become right-coded.
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These are good reasons why the US and China might not ban it. But an uninvolved third country could still have leverage. The US and China wouldn't have to lose face, they'd just say "oh well, this crazy third country really thinks this stuff is dangerous, we don't, but trade is more important to us, so we'll cave to their demands."
Certain GMO crops have been effectively banned because Europe doesn't like them. And that seems like a much bigger political lift than banning GOF research.
There are lots of semi-existing levers that nation states or medical orgs could use. They could just dumbly pretend that any city with a bio lab is the equivalent of a place with an active prion disease. They could just maintain COVID era quarantine policies for anyone visiting countries/cities with a bio lab. Those cities would become no-go zones for tourists, food exports, and casual business travel. That would at least force these labs out of big cities and into rural areas with no agriculture.
I think it would be relatively easy for any European country to single-handedly ban GOF research worldwide. They just have to:
These are all countries I think might be able to do it alone, but if any two or three of them teamed up it would definitely happen: UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, South Africa, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, India, Singapore, Egypt or Panama. I keep thinking of more that might have just enough political capital to pull it off. They really don't need much, the interest group that cares about keeping these labs open is tiny and not very powerful. They've just lucked into a situation where the host country can't be the first one to ban them without losing a lot of face. But I doubt leaders in the US or China like having their reputation held hostage by a bunch of virologists, so they are only allies of convenience.
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I also think it’s impossible to ban gain of functional research. The people capable of banning gain of function research would be people like Peter Daszak(and fauci) who maybe helped fund COVID development and whatever those guys are doing and getting money from the government are going to tell Congress that what they are doing is definitely not gain of function research.
Which makes me feel like the only choice is a complete ban on virus research (has its own issues) or GOF research is going to happen.
I always liked the Harrison Ford movie Clear and Present danger and in the movie Ford goes before congress (Ford is the boyscout) and tells congress non of the money is going towards troops to battle Narcos. Of course a different government official redirected the money to troops.
This is just a massive who watches the Watchman problem.
Are polygraphs good enough that if you just polygraph every bat lady once every three months that you would catch them?
An effective way would be to classify ANY bio research on viruses/bacteria that involves breeding them as requiring a certain level of bio-hazard-safety lab. Then after that ban the construction and existence of such high level labs.
The only problem with this strategy is the people who would have the power to do this don't have the incentive.
That seems super restrictive. What are you defining as breeding? That would seem like any cell culture to me.
But yes agree the people with the power don’t have the incentive. Anyone who can tell a congressmen we shouldn’t do x,y,z and is capable of doing lab checks for x,y,z is probably too deep in to be incentivized to do it.
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