Scientists Are Concerned About the Safety of 'Garage Experiments'

Over the past few years, advancements in the field of genetics offered countless scientists, who would have otherwise had no funds for their work, the possibility of experimenting with increasingly cheaper materials, in the comfort of their own home, or garage. Now, the academic community is worried that so much freedom of experimentation could lead to catastrophic results, if the wrong substances got into the wrong hands.

The main goal of genetics – since its beginnings – has been to enhance various properties of certain organisms, in order to make them perform a specific task, like to cure a disease, or to carry a vaccine. But fiddling with DNA in the lab, where the basic strands of life are built and encoded from scratch, can yield devastating consequences if containment is breached, and the bacteria is released into the general population.

In such a scenario, it could be days before authorities could come up to speed with the properties of the newly-released organism, and by that time, a potential infection could have already spread on a considerable area. Oftentimes, containment procedures in these improvised labs only consist of the walls of the room or garage, which are by no means effective enough to stop microscopic organisms from getting out.

There are those who say that scientific progress should be for everyone – and everyone agrees with this. But there also have to be strict measures in place, designed to ensure that the people around the workplace are not affected by whatever experiments are going on inside. In special labs, there are numerous shields and decontamination rooms involved in the scientific process, which are set in place with the sole purpose of ensuring that whatever lethal organism is inside stays inside.

There is another point of view to the situation – that of people who say that it is the large drug corporations that spread this fear, reasoning that if one of the independent researches yielded a breakthrough drug or cure, then they would not have a copyright on the formula. Therefore, they are trying to discourage any such research, and also turn the public opinion against it.

The debate on the matter still rages on, and it will probably continue to do so for a while. Opinions are split, and proponents or critics to every single one of these standpoints number in the thousands.