Forget climate change, it's the scientists we need to worry about

In the 1980s I worked in an office on the South Bank, over the road from what is now the Tate Modern. Around the corner there was a depot of the London Borough of Southwark's street maintenance team, and it seemed at the time that some of their workers used to practice road repairs outside our office building, for it was always being dug up. 

I remember well the discussions amongst us engineers, scientists and statisticians, wondering for how long the pneumatic drills were going to continue. 

'They must have a new batch of recruits', I remember a manager saying in September one year, about the time milkround recruits were joining us. 'It may seem ridiculous that workers are paid to dig holes and then fill them in, but that's how they train'.

No one was quite sure whether he was taking the mickey or had inside knowledge of Southwark council (who, at the time, were very left-wing and regularly mocked in the press), but he was making a good point. 

Workers need to train. 

There is a condition to that: they need to do so with the minimum of impact on everyone else, and it wasn't clear that that was happening outside our offices.

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The 'being paid to dig a hole and fill it in again' scenario has evolved in the twenty-first century. The US National Institutes of Health was, it has become known, funding 'gain of function' research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This may, or may not, have some connection with the pandemic that has since swept the world, but that funding seems not to be contested.

What was this funding for? As I understand it, scientists wanted to develop viruses that might be a threat to humans so that they might then develop vaccines for them. That's right, well paid work, basically digging a hole and filling it in again.

Well, you might say, scientists need to train. Of course they do, just like men - sorry, operatives - who dig up the roads. But what about doing it with the minimum of impact on anyone else?

Why were they funding this research that was taking place in an environment that was no more secure (biologically) than the average dental surgery? The laboratory the work was done in was, apparently, biosafety level (BSL) 2, although the WIV does have higher BSL facilities.

Sooner or later something was or is going to leak out.

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Irrespective of the source of the covid pandemic, if scientists are being this bloody stupid we haven't to worry about global warming. Mankind will be extinct well before that becomes a problem.

Scientists haven't always been this lax about biosecurity. When the Apollo 11 astronauts came back from the moon they were shut away for 21 days in case they had been exposed to harmful bacteria or elements. Shouldn't similar precautions have been taken with regards to the sort of experiments that the NIH was funding, and no doubt various scientists will want to continue doing in the future? Shouldn't the NIH have specified that the work should only have been done in the most bio-secure conditions?

The NIH / WIV case is far from unique. Foot and Mouth bacteria escaped down a drain in Pirbright, Surrey in 2007. Most worrying, of course, is that there is no guarantee that scientists in other fields - those using nuclear materials, perhaps - aren't as casual as bioscientists in the way they handle dangerous matter.

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COP26 is all very well, but governments - possibly through the UN - need to get a grip with scientists. Urgently. And while they're doing that, they might like to consider how objective the advice is that scientists are giving governments; how much arse-covering is going on? How many jobs-for-the-boys are at risk if science's mistakes become public knowledge?