There was a new wrinkle recently in the debate about whether Covid-19 might have “leaked” from the high security lab in Wuhan, China. Danielle Anderson, an Australian virologist – the last and only foreigner who was working in the Wuhan Biosafety Level 4 lab until November 2019 (just before the pandemic started), was interviewed about the lab. ทดลองเล่นสล็อต
What was the big bombshell? Something that anyone who has worked in a lab already knows – working in a lab is, well, not that exciting. That’s right. Work in a lab can be mundane. People put in long hours doing routine procedures over and over, frequently without excitement or the “aha” moment you might expect to see in a show like “CSI.” Thomas Edison’s statement that “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” easily applies to laboratory work.
This is not to say that the work can’t be exciting or hazardous. It is very exciting, intellectually, to discover new things and to push the scientific envelope. When someone discovers the next revolutionary drug for cancer or lifesaving vaccine it is exhilarating, but it is only after a long journey that takes years, if not decades, of painstaking research.
But the routineness of the work, even with dangerous pathogens, can also lead to risks and potential for errors — like when you drive for hours on the highway and eventually start getting sleepy. You need to recognize when it’s time to pull over.
When I was a senior leader for the United States’ largest containment laboratory, we had many days that were fairly quiet and routine, but these were punctuated with the occasional moments of panic. In his book, “Virus Hunter,” my containment lab colleague C.J. Peters described those events as “pucker factor” moments. One occurred for me in the very early days of the 2001 anthrax attacks, when none of us knew yet that an attack had occurred. My boss informed my colleague that “only three people in the building knows this,” and he proceeded to describe the first case of anthrax infection that occurred in Florida. Another time was when an agitated Ebola researcher rushed into our clinic one afternoon to warn us that one of our scientists in the lab had stuck herself with a needle contaminated with Ebola virus. At the time, an exposure like that was akin to a death sentence. Fortunately, the scientist did not become infected, but it was a very close call.
I have previously discussed the four ways a pathogen can escape a lab. Far and away the most common cause is from human error – when a lab worker makes a mistake. Sometimes it happens when a procedure changed, the individual was distracted, or they were in a rush. Other times, it is just bad luck. If you have ever visited a construction site, you might have seen a sign outside that shows the number of accident-free days. There is a reason for that – on-the-job accidents happen frequently. Laboratories are no different, despite the extensive training that workers undergo before they can work independently. If someone can trip while walking down the street, prick themselves with a needle in an operating room, or splash soap in their eye while scrubbing the floor, the same types of errors can occur in a lab.