Controversial BU Lab is only one in New England with live Coronavirus
Original article from The Boston Globe by , 2020
Millions of people are doing everything possible to avoid the COVID-19 virus. Robert Davey couldn’t wait to get his hands on it.
When he did last Thursday, the Boston University microbiologist was wearing heavy-duty rubber gloves and an air-tight pressurized biocontainment suit tethered to a coiled red tube that made him look like a B-movie spaceman. Inside the vial that he cracked open at a university laboratory was a pink-orange freeze-dried powder containing a sample of live coronavirus. It came from a blood specimen drawn from the first patient diagnosed with the disease in Washington state in late January.
“We work with very dangerous things,” said Davey, who has studied deadlier pathogens, including those that cause Ebola, Marburg virus disease, and Lassa fever. “We’re not scared to work with this.”
The high security South End laboratory is the only one in New England with a specimen of the virus that is sweeping the globe, according to Ronald B. Corley, director of the facility. Called the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, or NEIDL, the lab won final approval in 2017 to research the world’s most lethal microbes after more than a decade of controversy and failed lawsuits by neighbors who feared an escape of dangerous germs.