There is a reason we didn’t do that. It’s the same reason we funded research that was little more than torture on dogs in Tunisia. The US public actually has really high standards and expectations for their scientists. Labs have to follow OSHA and EPA regulations. All proposed experiments at universities have to go through committees…
There is a reason we didn’t do that. It’s the same reason we funded research that was little more than torture on dogs in Tunisia. The US public actually has really high standards and expectations for their scientists. Labs have to follow OSHA and EPA regulations. All proposed experiments at universities have to go through committees to receive permission and funding and they take such things as public health and needless suffering seriously. There are very few labs in the US that are rated to handle many of these pathogens (like Anthrax) and we aren’t particularly interested in creating more. So what do we do? We outsource our more questionable science to other countries that have lower standards for safety and suffering. Sometimes we just fund the science but other times we provide pretty much everything, it’s simply on foreign soil. A terrible accident on the Ukrainian/Russian border is much more manageable from a PR standpoint than the same terrible accident if it happens at UCLA. Certainly there is foreign collaborative research that doesn’t fall into this category, but it would be best to look skeptically at any science that America is involved in that takes place outside America. The only thing I’m not sure about is if leaving those labs completely unprotected was a blunder on par with arming the Taliban with our Afghanistan withdrawal or if it was purposeful. Frankly I’m not sure which reason is more concerning.
There is a reason we didn’t do that. It’s the same reason we funded research that was little more than torture on dogs in Tunisia. The US public actually has really high standards and expectations for their scientists. Labs have to follow OSHA and EPA regulations. All proposed experiments at universities have to go through committees to receive permission and funding and they take such things as public health and needless suffering seriously. There are very few labs in the US that are rated to handle many of these pathogens (like Anthrax) and we aren’t particularly interested in creating more. So what do we do? We outsource our more questionable science to other countries that have lower standards for safety and suffering. Sometimes we just fund the science but other times we provide pretty much everything, it’s simply on foreign soil. A terrible accident on the Ukrainian/Russian border is much more manageable from a PR standpoint than the same terrible accident if it happens at UCLA. Certainly there is foreign collaborative research that doesn’t fall into this category, but it would be best to look skeptically at any science that America is involved in that takes place outside America. The only thing I’m not sure about is if leaving those labs completely unprotected was a blunder on par with arming the Taliban with our Afghanistan withdrawal or if it was purposeful. Frankly I’m not sure which reason is more concerning.