Key US figure boosts BU biolab plan
Boston Globe
February 24, 2004
The federal government’s chief of infectious disease research declared his unwavering support yesterday for Boston University’s plan to build a laboratory equipped to study the deadliest biological agents in the world.
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci said in an interview that the project should move forward even in the light of disclosures that three BU researchers in a less-secure lab had fallen ill with tularemia while working with the bacterium that causes the potentially fatal disease. University authorities have conceded that the researchers failed to fully follow safety precautions, a factor that may have contributed to their infections last year.
“Although as an infectious disease person I take anything like that seriously — I don’t take it lightly — I don’t think it impacts on the confidence we have in BU as an organization,” said Fauci, who was in Boston to address a major conference of AIDS researchers. “This is an individual event that in my mind does not relate to what will be the superb training and physical capability” at the planned high-security lab.
The endorsement by Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is the surest sign yet that the Bush administration remains committed to opening a lab in Boston where scientists could work with ebola, plague, and other lethal pathogens.
Fauci’s agency is the only government body that still has to approve the facility, known as a Biosafety Level-4 lab, though state environmental regulators have said that they are considering reopening their review of the project.
But US approval has long appeared to be a certainty, because it was the federal infectious disease agency that in September 2003 declared BU one of the winners in a hard-fought competition to build two new high-security labs. The other lab will be built on the University of Texas campus in Galveston.
The facilities are cornerstones of the Bush administration’s campaign to prepare for potential attacks by bioterrorists. BU, though, has insisted that most of the research conducted in the lab will be aimed at developing vaccines and drugs against emerging infectious diseases, such as SARS, rather than countering terrorist assaults.
The tularemia exposures happened last May and September in a Biosafety Level-2 lab, which has considerably less-stringent security rules. Three workers became ill, and one required a weeklong hospital stay. All three recovered.
“Things like that happen when people are not trained well,” Fauci said.
But the infectious-disease chief said he does not believe that the episode of sloppiness reflects on the university’s ability to run a more sophisticated lab, commonly referred to as BSL-4.
Fauci said that “it would be almost inconceivable that something like this would happen” in the high-security lab and responded to BU critics who have contended that the tularemia cases expose the university’s inability to work with even more dangerous agents.
“I think that they’re being unfair by saying ‘they’ can’t handle this at BU,” Fauci said. ” ‘They’ in this case is an investigator who did not follow protocol, who did not go under the training, who was not working in a BSL-4.”
Fauci said he became aware of the tularemia exposures only after news reports about the cases in January. The university, as well as city and state health agencies, had not made the cases public, saying that there was no threat to the public’s well-being.
Fauci said he had no comment on whether the public should have been alerted, saying that was a decision best left to local authorities.
The BU researchers were attempting to develop a more effective vaccine against tularemia and believed that they were working with a genetically weakened form of the bacterium that does not cause illness. Instead, the material they were working with had been tainted with the highly infectious form of the germ.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as city and state public health agencies, are continuing their investigation of the contamination.
The BU infectious disease specialist who is presiding over the development of the high-security lab, Dr. Mark S. Klempner, said he welcomed Fauci’s endorsement. Klempner pledged that the facility, expected to generate at least $1.6 billion in research and construction grants over the next two decades, will follow rigorous safety procedures.
“These are the safest kind of research laboratories for infectious diseases in the history of this country,” Klempner said. “The issue is whether it’s safe, and this lab will be safe.”
By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff, Boston Globe
Stephen Smith can be reached at stsmith@globe.com.