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What horrors must you be hiding to require an entirely secret laboratory? I have a few pretty good answers to that question. In governments, hidden laboratories are used to protect technologies a government might not want in another country's hands. That obviously sounds nefarious, but it's not necessarily in war-time scenarios when research must be hidden. There are some special sciences the world simply can't understand, and all science research intends to do is broaden that understanding. Especially in secret laboratories where that knowledge could be dangerous.

Some things never change. There is only technology that adapts to it. Since the radio wave is unchanged since before history, it will not be changed until long after. Only our adaptations to it through technology will change. The danger is found when creating technology to harness it without destroying anything.

Let's say you want to flavor a candy with a sour taste. First, you must find a sour taste to replicate, then, you may extract the taste from the thing. Citrus fruits contain citric acid, and it's a simple process to extract it. But say you were not able to research the chemical processes to concentrate citric acid. The government doesn't allow that kind of research. It would be laboriously slow to develop via public scientific methodologies. Instead, you grow lemons solely for their sour juices, in your convoluted plan to make sour candy. If you're from a farming civilization, you might create strains of more and more sour fruit to suit your needs. You could isolate lemons genetically, accidentally exposing the species to parasites. There, you've gotten yourself into trouble. This new lemon might be the only lemon in existence, having been found most useful, and vulnerable to this parasite, they could all be dead within a few years. The lemons could survive if the research of chemistry required to extract citrus flavorings from lemons had been accelerated.

But what does this have to do with your secret-agent briefing on the secret laboratory you now work for? Imagine, for a second, an inverse scenario to the lemons. Imagine you must eradicate sour flavoring from the planet earth. Not just lemons, but all sour flavors. It is a ridiculous analogy, since sour is so harmless in reality, but say, we discovered that sour taste was keeping us from living our full human lifespans of eight-to-nine-hundred years. It must be very important then to rid earth of sour, since humans have an average lifespan of less than seventy-two across the world.

Would a secret laboratory be necessary then? Of course. The world would become quite defensive of sour flavoring, and the world would align against scientists. The research would be stopped at every obstacle to create a kind of bitter to cancel out sour. Yet, the research must go on, in the name of humanity. Thanks to the hidden lab, it will.

There is also a need for secret laboratories when rival scientists plan to out-do you. In one second, an entire database can be incinerated by a spy, allowing the opposing country to release their own results first, and be given the grants and funding required to fuel scientific research.

For products, secret laboratories are necessary for development. The stakes are even higher for corporations in a capitalist market to protect their data. The unending tide of innovative ideas would not be renewable if the data were open-source for their products. Not to mention marketing. If an single envelope made of manila hemp contained a company's entire marketing research data, the data could very easily be read by competing corporations and analyzed. The marketing plan would be subverted, and all those man-hours wasted.