How do you research Solanum?(the zombie plague)

[FaxModem1]

What if there really was a zombie plague, and it started infecting people like it does in Max Brook's books with the virus Solanum. How would you find a cure, vaccine, or some form of treatment for a 100% contagious virus?

Let's assume you have the resources of the CDC.

[SAMAS]

Carefully, in workrooms that are sunk at least twenty feet into the floor with elevator access (no stairs), and shotguns and saferooms stashed liberally throughout the complex.

[Werrf]

Carefully, in workrooms that are sunk at least twenty feet into the floor with elevator access (no stairs), and shotguns and saferooms stashed liberally throughout the complex.

And napalm containers in every room.

If you meant more how do you research a virus that kills anyone it infects, to be honest you do it the same way you research any other virus. Virus research doesn't take place by deliberately infecting people and watching the course of the disease or anything, it's done on cell cultures, in computer models, etc. You don't go out and inject someone with Ebola just to test an ebola vaccine, after all...

[Uraniun235]

Additionally, we already have labs designed for extremely deadly diseases; they incorporate negative pressure systems, multiple airlocks, UV decontamination systems, and self-contained hazmat suits.

[RowanE]

Yeah, I think you'd just use the same kind of labs they use now. Just with additional precautions because the virus, when it does infect people, creates a macrobiological threat - the zombie - instead of just killing you if you breathe it in.
So i'd expect a large number of small laboratories, with guard towers providing coverage over all sides of every lab at all times, packing a range of weapons from tranquiliser darts to heavy machineguns. Inside the lab, the scientists are all operating with hazmat suits over padded armour (which is enough to deal with a bite) except for those where it would be obstructive enough to slow work. Anyone who does something dumb enough that they might get infected would then be put on a stretcher designed to make them harmless if they're zombified, and then taken to a smaller cell for observation. This smaller cell would be even more out-in-the-open, just a cage placed directly in the firing lines of a few guard towers, fenced off for a 2-metre radius around it unless really risky work needs to be done on the subject.
Well, that's one possibility, anyway.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

I'd see the inside of the labs being much the same as any lab that works with dangerous, contagious diseases. The only real difference would be outside that another ring of security that functions more like a prison or wild animal enclosure in the event of an outbreak inside the lab.

[Sarevok]

Remote gun turrets would be handy incase the shit hits the fan.

[Gil Hamilton]

The first thing you have to do is legally establish that the individuals in question are considered dead. If they are considered alive, then you can't do research on them, because they aren't capable of giving informed consent. I imagine their families or whomever has power of attorney must then donate them for research.

Once it is legal to do research on them (actually legal, not Umbrella Corp "secret lab" legal), then I suppose you invest in alot of six point restraint beds and mouth gags. You don't need elaborate set ups to hold them, after all, they probably can't work a door knob even if they got loose from their restraints, but steel doors should be more than enough to stop them. Strict levels of keeping doors locks and keypads to keep people from accidentatlly wandering into the facility. In other words, simply treat them like we already treat severe biological hazards. I think people have watched too many zombie movies, because most major universities already have MOST of the infrastructure in place already to keep secure and do research on severe biological hazards like zombies. You don't need automatic flamethrowers and zombie pits. Hell, if they are legally dead, you can keep them frozen in a morgue set up until you are actually using them, make sure they are secure before they thaw, and then use heat guns to thaw out bits of them if you need to extract fluids.

Next, start shelling out grant money and stipends galore to get the best medical doctors, post-docs, and others on board who are trained and certified to work in Class Four Biohazard labs. In a normal biological hazard set up, those zombies aren't going anywhere anyway. That's what made 28 Days Later so mysterious how they got into the lab and how the Rage Zombies got out afterwards, given there MUST have been interlocks if they were doing research on shit they knew was that dangerous.

Done. Solanum research set up.

I doubt you are going to make a vaccine though, for what amounts to a supernatural magical virus. You might get some interesting information on their behavior and their version of biology though.

[Eviscerator]

The first thing you have to do is legally establish that the individuals in question are considered dead. If they are considered alive, then you can't do research on them, because they aren't capable of giving informed consent. I imagine their families or whomever has power of attorney must then donate them for research.

*scratches head - is there any legal precedent for "corpse dead 2 weeks resuming both brain and heart activity" ?

if this was an lab-only discovery (not an global outbreak), one can see the usual circus hoo-ha starting up again. Religion, law, etc etc...

Med stuff and legality (not to say morality) historically dont get along too well.... take vaccination as an example.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_controversy
for example, in a 1772 sermon entitled "The Dangerous and Sinful Practice of Inoculation" the English theologian Rev. Edmund Massey argued that diseases are sent by God to punish sin and that any attempt to prevent smallpox via inoculation is a "diabolical operation

Damn, i just did an Dangerous And Sinful thing by going to the doctor and trying to protect myself against an disease "Sent By God".

[Gil Hamilton]

*scratches head - is there any legal precedent for "corpse dead 2 weeks resuming both brain and heart activity" ?

if this was an lab-only discovery (not an global outbreak), one can see the usual circus hoo-ha starting up again. Religion, law, etc etc...

Med stuff and legality (not to say morality) historically dont get along too well.... take vaccination as an example.

This is a medical ethics thing involving human experimentation. You can be sure they are going to dot their i's and cross their t's before any zombie faces formal study.

This is a hard question I've been batting around recently, actually. They may not have heart activity and I don't know if they've got brain activity, though a certain level of brain activity would be expected in a Max Brook's zombie makes sense, since that's what's "alive". Most of the United States considers "brain death" to be legally dead, which is the complete disruption of all activity in the brain such that there is no detectable activity for a certain length of time. This may not be true of a Max Brooks zombie, hence the ethical delimma. They may well qualify as "alive", but absurdly ill. In order to consider zombies to be, in fact, dead, what is legally dead might have to be changed.

Here is the problem. You aren't allowed to experiment on even a seriously ill human being unless they, or whomever is legally empowered to do so, gives informed consent. There are very strict rules involved, to the point that people who give psychological surveys have to explain what they are going to ask and what they are going to do with the information. If we assume that law and order still exist here and this is most Western countries, this is an issue that must be addressed.

[Xenophon13]

Read Demon in the freezer, take some of their facilities, and add guns. One problem is that somewhere in the zombie survival guide it says something about solanum just killing non humans, so you might need human patients. Also fire seems to be one of the few ways to kill zombies, so various torches may be in order.

[The Vortex Empire]

Read Demon in the freezer, take some of their facilities, and add guns. One problem is that somewhere in the zombie survival guide it says something about solanum just killing non humans, so you might need human patients. Also fire seems to be one of the few ways to kill zombies, so various torches may be in order.

Fire? Just shoot it in the head and it dies. These aren't magic zombies (aside from not needing food), they die as easily as anything else when riddled with bullets.

[Gil Hamilton]

Fire? Just shoot it in the head and it dies. These aren't magic zombies (aside from not needing food), they die as easily as anything else when riddled with bullets.

Actually, Max Brooks zombies are vastly more resistant to brute damage or anything else for that matter. You've got to destroy their brain, or they are improbably resistant to anything else.

A character in World War Z who has been tasked with tracking the movements of underseas zombies comments that there is no damn good reason why seawater, being viciously corrosive, shouldn't have destroyed all the Zack that ended up in the ocean. However, they survived on the ocean floor for decades.

Another commented that Zack reanimate completely fresh after being frozen, a process that should by all means destroy them since uncontrolled freezing will destroy cells as the water inside it expands and bursts the cell walls. It's a complete mystery how these zombies do it.

So, yeah, they are magic zombies that are improbably resistant to damage. What makes Brooks somewhat better than others is that he gives the zombies those attributes but isn't under the illusion that his zombies are anything but supernatural horrors.

[Vendetta]

Really, you can take a lot of this from the way Kellis-Amberley zombies are dealt with in Feed (ie. competently).

At first, standard biohazard controls will be sufficient, there's no need to research active Solanum subjects at first, samples of the virus itself will be sufficient, as the first priority is to devise a reliable test to detect the virus during it's incubation period so that carriers can be isolated and dealt with.

Once this is done, blood testing can be instituted as standard policy, test in, test out, no-one enters or leaves without a clean blood test, as this prevents not only contamination spreading from the lab, but also an outbreak inside the lab from a researcher infected elsewhere undergoing viral acceleration on the inside.

Once this is done, the next step is to research decontamination procedures, find a way to kill Solanum so that the sites of outbreaks, which are likely to leave infectious fluids in soil etc. can be decontaminated and rendered safer to enter.

Live subject testing can come last, once there are efficient biocontrols to prevent infection you can study the progress of the virus itself, time from infection to acceleration, factos that can vary it, whether the virus can be combated in a host before acceleration, etc.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Level 4 Biosafety will do the trick. Maybe rig the place to blow if there's a breach, otherwise that should be it.

[PaperJack]

Let's see what mr.T has to say:
Spoiler

I couldn't resist posting this

[Gil Hamilton]

That cartoon is all wrong. Mr. T would never use his advanced knowledge of biochemistry to spread intolerance. He only pities fools.

Level 4 Biosafety will do the trick. Maybe rig the place to blow if there's a breach, otherwise that should be it.

That's the highest alright. You don't necessarily need the explosive. Class Four set ups tend to involve steel doors which can't both be open at the same time. No way a zombie is getting through the interlock. Even if live zombies were in there and they got out of their restraints, that's the end of it. Which could be nasty for the researchers who are in the same room, but that can't be helped. Those set ups don't fool around with security. If you put a few freezers in there capable of storing a whole person, you could keep the zombies on cryogenic lock down when you weren't using them too. No reason the virus ever needs to get out of the interlock.

[Night_stalker]

Personally, I would have the labs be stocked with remote-controlled turrets, and if a Zeke gets loose, he gets a 7.62mm headache, followed up by cremation. Level 4 has great precautions, but sometimes you want to use the lab after a zombie gets free inside it, and the system has it locked down so it can't be accessed.

I would also make the lab based out of a old bunker, and equipped to repel anyone trying to enter who doesn't pass a blood test, which is required to get in and get out, following a strip search to prevent any weapons or viral containers from being smuggled out. Last thing I need is some doomsday group getting their hands on the virus.

[Teleros]

XKCD dealt with this a while back... Spoiler

Let's get dinner after we promptly destroy all the X-7 we've manufactured.

Back in the real world, just go with Chewie's suggestion.

[Oni Koneko Damien]

At first, standard biohazard controls will be sufficient, there's no need to research active Solanum subjects at first, samples of the virus itself will be sufficient, as the first priority is to devise a reliable test to detect the virus during it's incubation period so that carriers can be isolated and dealt with.

That's already happened in WWZ. It's discovered early on that most animals tend to view the infected as bad meat, and dogs in particular can smell Solanum a mile away. By the end dogs are being specially trained to detect infected, root out zombies and generally aid the military.

[Stark]

The idea that researching this is hard is as misguided as the idea researching aliens or flood is hard. You just have to be competent.

[loomer]

You could add another level of security by researching it somewhere nice and isolated, like parts of Nevada (hey, you could even use the old nuke testing sites or Groom Lake! If it escapes from there, the aliens will deal with it for you!) or Siberia. It's really the most basic precaution possible - if it can't get to people at maximum speed for days, then you have days to contain it, and with all the other precautions mentioned it'd be extremely unlikely to even get that far.

[adam_grif]

The idea that researching this is hard is as misguided as the idea researching aliens or flood is hard. You just have to be competent.

At least Aliens have the magical eat-anything acid

I'm a bit sick of this "THEY TRIED TO STUDY IT BUT THEY SHOULDN'T HAVE MEDDLED WITH THINGS SO DANGEROUS" meme. There's a whole bunch of people over on the Bioware boards that insist the collector base must be blown up at the end of ME2, because "it's reaper tech and reaper tech is too dangerous to study". When quizzed as to why, exactly that is, they claim that there's no way to safely study them, just because. Wank wank wank.

Which reminds me of how stupid it was that nobody was using telepresense, hard-suits or even hearing protection when studying the 99%-functional Reaper.

[Xenophon13]

Read Demon in the freezer, take some of their facilities, and add guns. One problem is that somewhere in the zombie survival guide it says something about solanum just killing non humans, so you might need human patients. Also fire seems to be one of the few ways to kill zombies, so various torches may be in order.

Fire? Just shoot it in the head and it dies. These aren't magic zombies (aside from not needing food), they die as easily as anything else when riddled with bullets.

I worded this wrong. Fire is the best way to destroy solanum, not zombies. Otherwise zombie guts would be a big problem.

[hongi]

That's what made 28 Days Later so mysterious how they got into the lab and how the Rage Zombies got out afterwards, given there MUST have been interlocks if they were doing research on shit they knew was that dangerous.

There's a comic about 28DL, and apparently (if I'm reading the synopsis right), the programme is run by 2 people, yes you heard me right, two. It sounds like an illegal scheme to boot, and it takes one person to genetically modify the Ebola virus to create Rage. I don't think people realise just how much effort goes into genetic engineering and biological research, it sounds like the comic writers thought that two shmucks in a lab funded by some mysterious benefactor could cook up the apocalypse in a couple of weeks.