Biosafety lab in South End gets final OK
Boston Globe
February 3, 2006
The federal government gave final approval yesterday to Boston University’s plan to build a high-security research laboratory in the South End, where scientists hunting for vaccines and drugs will work with some of the world’s deadliest viruses and bacteria, such as Ebola, anthrax, and plague.
The long-expected decision from the National Institutes of Health assures that BU Medical Center will receive $128 million in federal money to help pay for the Biosafety Level 4 lab, which will be built on Albany Street.
Medical center executives said they expect construction to begin as early as this month. The building that will house the high-security lab, as well as other research facilities, is scheduled to open in summer 2008.
The Level 4 lab is a cornerstone in the Bush administration’s campaign to prepare for potential acts of bioterrorism, and the decision yesterday marked a milestone in BU’s quest to solidify its reputation as a major research center. The proposal has now cleared all significant federal and city regulatory agencies.
The lab would be unlike anything Boston has ever seen, with extraordinary measures taken to ensure that lethal agents cannot escape. Armed guards will monitor checkpoints, labyrinths of hallways will make quick escape impossible, and scientists will wear protective suits, as they manipulate mechanical hands to work with deadly compounds.
Yesterday, the NIH both approved release of the grant money and ruled that the project presented no significant environmental threat.
”This lab will be as safe as it is humanly possible to make a facility,” said Rona Hirschberg, an NIH official involved in the development of high-security labs. ”There are endless layers of redundant systems to assure safety and security.”
Despite the promised safety measures, the lab has drawn opposition from a fervent contingent of scientists, environmentalists, and community activists. They advance worst-case scenarios in which, through accident or terrorism, an agent such as plague would be unleashed, causing an epidemic of respiratory failure, shock, and sudden death.
Adversaries said that BU’s pledges of safety were compromised by the disclosure a year ago that three researchers working in a lower-security lab to develop a vaccine were infected with the bacterium that causes tularemia.
”What happens if a worker in the Level 4 lab were to become infected, not know about or not tell anyone about it, and then leave the lab and get on an MBTA car?” said Carrie Russell, staff attorney for the Conservation Law Foundation, a leading environmental group. ”We’re talking about very dangerous diseases.”
Federal records show that in more than three decades, there is no evidence that any viruses or bacteria have escaped from a Level 4 lab. The greatest risk resides with the researchers who toil inside the labs; there have been episodes when a wayward needle or a snapping animal potentially exposed scientists, although none of those incidents resulted in illness, records show.
In the three years since BU’s intention to pursue the lab emerged, opponents have marched in protest, lambasted the proposal in public hearings, and filed legal actions, some of which are still pending, according to Klare Allen, community organizer for Safety Net, an activist group that opposes the lab.
But one foe acknowledged that opponents had largely exhausted their options for blocking the facility.
”I don’t know how far we can go with this,” said Sujatha Byravan, president of the Council for Responsible Genetics, a Cambridge-based group that studies the social and ethical consequences of biotechnology. ”I don’t know how we can realistically oppose this if we don’t have good political support.”
The lab has been championed by Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston, as well as Governor Mitt Romney and US Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.
In a statement yesterday, the mayor described the lab, which is expected to produce 1,300 construction jobs and 660 permanent positions, as ”a critical component of Boston’s life sciences infrastructure” and promised that the city’s health board will ”ensure that the new lab adheres to the strictest safety regulations in the country.”
Partly in response to the tularemia infections and partly because of the proposed high-security lab, the Boston Public Health Commission has drafted sweeping rules that if approved would require regular inspections and safety permits for more than 1,000 research facilities.
Councilor Chuck Turner of Roxbury said yesterday he remains unpersuaded that the lab can operate securely, and he questioned the decision to place it in a heavily populated area.
”The risks and dangers are certainly there, and the results in this neighborhood of an accident could be catastrophic,” he said.
State Representative Gloria L. Fox, a Roxbury Democrat whose district is adjacent to the lab, said she will continue to push legislation she has drafted that would add state oversight of the BU facility.
In a region where big investments in biomedical research are common, few recent initiatives can match the potential of the bioterror research facility.
”This laboratory is going to develop diagnostic tests, drugs, and treatments for some of the most important public-health emerging diseases,” said Dr. Mark Klempner, director of the BU lab.
The 195,000-square-foot building, which would also include lower-security facilities, is expected to generate more than $1 billion in research grants over the next two decades. In addition to the federal grant, BU will contribute $50 million toward construction of the project, known officially as the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories.
By comparison, a genetics and pathology research building unveiled by Harvard Medical School in 2003, the largest in the university’s history, is more than twice as large and cost $260 million to build.
The seven-story BU lab building would be the only such research site in the Northeast and would draw scientists across New England to search for cures and shots against deadly microbes. Federal officials who decided to put the lab in Boston said the region’s concentration of top-notch researchers was a major lure.
Scientists nationwide have long complained of a lack of high-security labs, with only four sites in the country capable of studying what are called Category A agents, viruses and bacteria that cause diseases such as botulism, smallpox, and hemorrhagic fevers. New Level 4 labs planned for Boston and elsewhere will incorporate technology not available at older facilities, including machines to scan the bodies of living animals, rather than autopsied ones.
Jean Patterson, who presided over the construction of one of those labs six years ago in San Antonio, said yesterday that building a Level 4 lab requires painstaking exactitude. For instance, it took six months after construction was finished at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research for the lab to pass the tests needed to assure that nothing could get out or get in.
”You can’t say anything’s 100 percent,” Patterson said, ”but these things have an incredible track record.”
By Stephen Smith, Globe Staff, Boston Globe
Stephen Smith can be reached at stsmith@globe.com.
© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company