Marc Lipsitch on Playing Pandemic Roulette in the Lab

So most things have not gone very far, but they do illustrate that infections happen, transmission can happen as it did with SARS, uh, with one of the SARS releases by mistake uh in the mid-2000s. So it it is uh it is a real risk. And now the good fight. with Yasha Monk. Around the world, there have been, and to some extent still are, a lot of labs that engage in gain-of-function research.

What that means is that they take a pathogen and they try to find other ways in which it could be more dangerous. Now, the purpose of this is to make sure that we are prepared for all kinds of possibilities where we can prevent terrible pandemics in the future. But there's also an obvious risk. What if one of these pathogens leaks from the lab? What if somebody working in those labs learns how to do them and replicates it for nefarious purposes of their own?

There's all kinds of things that could go wrong, arguably. That is what did go wrong at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. So should we ban gain of function research? Well, today I invited into my podcast somebody who has argued that we should at the very least be much, much more cautious about gain of function research than we are. And he is a very senior figure in the field of public health.

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