It’s the federal case that prompted NIH to expand its assessment of the biolab’s potential safety risk. At this point, though, the two cases converged. The plan, initially, was to provide the NIH’s new findings to both the state (in response to Gants’s ruling) and to Saris. But following the NRC’s November 2007 evisceration of the NIH’s draft report, that plan was scrapped.
A month after the NRC weighed in, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld Gants’s decision on appeal. A month after that, in January 2008, the NIH announced that its latest review — the “blue-ribbon panel” effort announced in the wake of the NRC’s condemnation — might not be completed until August 2009, two years after the facility was originally supposed to be completed. What happens then depends on whether the NIH finally gets it right; in the interim, the only work going on at the biolab will be the construction of the building itself.
HOT ZONE: Just 15 percent of the biolab’s space will be devoted to BSL-4 research, but that’s the sexiest — and most controversial — part of this billion-dollar project. |
Kept under wraps
Taken collectively, these weren’t just legal defeats for biolab backers. They were diplomatic losses, too, since they called past assurances about the biolab’s safety into question, and bolstered critics who’d occasionally been dismissed as ignorant scaremongers.
The tularemia debacle had much the same effect. In May 2004, two BU researchers became ill with what was apparently tularemia, a BSL-3 bacterial illness also known as rabbit fever. Another researcher was infected that September. But the outbreaks weren’t reported to the city, the state, and the feds until that November. And they weren’t disclosed to the general public until the press got wind of the story in January 2005 — after the city and state had already given the biolab their official stamps of approval.
At the time, a spokesman for Mayor Menino assured the Globe that, if the outbreak had represented a public-health risk, the public would have been informed at once. (Tularemia is transmitted from animals to humans, but not between humans.) Still, for biolab opponents, the outbreak served as a cautionary tale. Lesson One: the powers-that-be can’t be trusted to inform the public. Lesson Two: research on pathogens is inherently risky.
To make matters even worse — at least for biolab backers — a subsequent Boston Public Health Commission investigation of the tularemia affair cited “routine failure to comply with safety protocols” at the BU laboratory in question (also situated on Albany Street), called the failure to identify work-related sickness in the infected researchers “a major concern,” and chided BU for failing to report the first outbreak in a timely manner.
Thus far, the biolab’s legal and diplomatic mishaps haven’t quite been replicated in the political realm. As of this writing, none of the project’s early proponents has renounced his support. What has changed, though, is that Governor Romney has been replaced by Governor Deval Patrick. And it was the Patrick administration this past fall that commissioned the NRC to kick the tires of the most recent NIH study.
