I mean, I’m sure something more restrictive is possible.
But what? Should we insist that the entire time someone’s inside a BSL-4 lab, we have a second person who is an expert in biosafety visually monitoring them to ensure they don’t make mistakes? Or should their air supply not use filters and completely safe PAPRs, and feed them outside air though a tube that restricts their ability to move around instead? (Edit to Add: These are already both requires in BSL-4 labs. When I said I don’t know of anything more restrictive they could do, I was being essentially literal—they do everything including quite a number of unreasonable things to prevent human infection, short of just not doing the research.)
Or do you have some new idea that isn’t just a ban with more words?
“lists of restrictions” are a poor way of managing risk when the attack surface is enormous
Sure, list-based approaches are insufficient, but they have relatively little to do with biosafety levels of labs, they have to do with risk groups, which are distinct, but often conflated. (So Ebola or Smallpox isn’t a “BSL-4” pathogen, because there is no such thing. )
I just meant “gain of function” in the standard, common-use sense—e.g., that used in the 2014 ban on federal funding for such research.
That ban didn’t go far enough, since it only applied to 3 pathogen types, and wouldn’t have banned what Wuhan was doing with novel viruses, since that wasn’t working with SARS or MERS, it was working with other species of virus. So sure, we could enforce a broader version of that ban, but getting a good definition that’s both extensive enough to prevent dangerous work and that doesn’t ban obviously useful research is very hard.
But what? Should we insist that the entire time someone’s inside a BSL-4 lab, we have a second person who is an expert in biosafety visually monitoring them to ensure they don’t make mistakes? Or should their air supply not use filters and completely safe PAPRs, and feed them outside air though a tube that restricts their ability to move around instead? (Edit to Add: These are already both requires in BSL-4 labs. When I said I don’t know of anything more restrictive they could do, I was being essentially literal—they do everything including quite a number of unreasonable things to prevent human infection, short of just not doing the research.)
Or do you have some new idea that isn’t just a ban with more words?
Sure, list-based approaches are insufficient, but they have relatively little to do with biosafety levels of labs, they have to do with risk groups, which are distinct, but often conflated. (So Ebola or Smallpox isn’t a “BSL-4” pathogen, because there is no such thing. )
That ban didn’t go far enough, since it only applied to 3 pathogen types, and wouldn’t have banned what Wuhan was doing with novel viruses, since that wasn’t working with SARS or MERS, it was working with other species of virus. So sure, we could enforce a broader version of that ban, but getting a good definition that’s both extensive enough to prevent dangerous work and that doesn’t ban obviously useful research is very hard.