Quote:
Originally Posted by Excargodog
IF YOU ARE GOING TO DO IT - I can certainly see the advantages (Hell, the NECESSITY) of such precautions. I still haven't understood the putative advantages of doing it at all though, unless you are searching for a biowarfare capability. Which I sort of thought we renounced with the Biological Weapons Convention.
https://www.state.gov/biological-weapons-convention/
In theory, the *potential* benefit is to make it easy to observe the behavior of the pathogen, and develop medical interventions. Amplification of signal basically.
I don't have any sense of how much benefit vs. the risk, ie does it just make the research easier (cheaper & faster), or are there some things which simply cannot be observed at normal levels of function?
Faster research results *might* be a good excuse for GoF, if you're in a situation where you're trying to get ahead of something which just reared it's ugly head in the wet markets.