zlacker

>>BellLa+(OP)
Check out this prescient article from 2017, when the ban was lifted:

Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic...

Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist who directs the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard School of Public Health, called review panels “a small step forward.”

Recent disease-enhancing experiments, he said, “have given us some modest scientific knowledge and done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics, and yet risked creating an accidental pandemic.”

Therefore, he said, he hoped the panels would turn down such work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih...

>>missin+H81
I don't want to diminish the work of "epidemiologist"'s but they aren't virologists. They're ultimately specialised statisticians and shouldn't have any say in how or what research is carried out.

>>teh_kl+wi1
What? I’m no virologist or epidemiologist and yet I definitely want to have a say. And when physicists start creating black holes, and AI researchers start creating thinking killer robots, and generals go to war, etc.

I value expert opinions but oversight is necessary.