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The usual objection to "jail people who fuckup" (I most usually see it applied to politicians who fail to avert war) is that if you did that, no-one would take the job at all. No competent scientist who had a chance of getting another job would go anywhere near the field of infectious disease research (not even gain of function stuff, but ANY infectious disease research).
You say this like it's a good thing that no-one would work on it, but it's not. Mad scientist research into crazy-dangerous viruses has a very positive net effect on the world. Without it, kiss goodbye to ever having a cure for ebola. Or influenza. Or the common cold. The only people that might work on such things under threat of torture are the incompetent bottom-of-the-class scientists with no chance of getting a different job, and when you have them working in your Biohazard Lv 4 facility, even with harsh deterrents for failure, they're MORE dangerous than competent scientists with no deterrent would have been, i.e. what we have now.
Sorry OP, but we already live in the best of all possible worlds in this regard. The occasional lab leak Megadeath is an inevitability even under optimal conditions. It turns out all right in the end, though; the expectation value of the research is still positive even when you factor in the megadeaths, because once you work out how to cure influenza, the billions of lives saved on the long time horizon exceed the millions of lives lost to lab accidents.
Same with Alec Baldwin movies. The lives of a few behind the scenes gophers are a small price to pay for cinematic entertainment enjoyed by millions. Hutches is the stochastic version of the child sacrifice of Omelas, and the price of her life is a bargain for the hedons generated.
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