After a Decade of Squabbles, BU’s Biolab is in Business
Original article from Boston Globe by Felice J. Freyer August 20, 2018
The package that Elke Mühlberger had been waiting a decade to receive — a gray hard-plastic case a little bigger than a microwave oven — arrived in Boston earlier this month, after traveling nearly 2,000 miles from Montana. The cargo was so prized it required two carefully vetted drivers and GPS tracking on both the truck and the box.
Dressed in spacesuit-like protective garb in her laboratory, Mühlberger, a microbiologist, dug through several layers of packing materials and dry ice until she found a small, shatterproof plastic box, in which several tiny tubes nestled among paper towels.
Those tubes contained frozen samples of the deadly Ebola virus and its cousin, Marburg virus. And their arrival launched, at long last, the research program within the Biosafety Level 4 laboratory at Boston University. Level 4 labs are authorized to do research on disease-causing microbes for which there is no treatment or vaccine.
“It was a great day for us,” Mühlberger said. “It sounds weird — it’s a package full of deadly viruses — but it was like Christmas.”