From reinforced walls to sophisticated air filters, todays state-of-the-art laboratories are more secure than ever. But no lab is perfect. Even island labs have weaknesses: the isolation that makes them safer also makes them more expensive to build, maintain, and upgrade; they are subject to storms, which can damage infrastructure and prevent employees from showing up for work. In the view of Larry Barrett, the director of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, water isnt an insurmountable barrier to disease: a steady enough wind could carry an aerosolized foot-and-mouth virus across a channel.

Its tempting to see the construction of new labs as a logical response to biological threats. But a dearth of laboratories isnt necessarily the bottleneck during a crisis. We were underprepared for community transmission of the new coronavirus, a BSL-3 pathogen, in part because the C.D.C. and F.D.A. had not developed, delivered, and issued approval for public health labs to use appropriate diagnostic tests, Khan said. What were seeing is not necessarily a lack of labs, Filippa Lentzos, a senior research fellow on biological threats at Kings College London, told me. The biggest challenges posed by the novel coronavirus, she continued, had to do with contact-tracing and communicationspreparing the public, sharing accurate numbers, and battling the spread of misinformation.

Theres no question that the world needs laboratories like N.B.A.F. The question is: How many labs like N.B.A.F. does it need? If a government is worried about fires, it can build more fire stations without increasing the risk of fires breaking out. But high-containment labs are different. Even as researching pathogens reduces our collective risk, opening new labs increases it. In 2016, Lentzos and another biosecurity expert, Gregory Koblentz, of George Mason University, published a paper contending that a dramatic increase in the number of labs and scientists working on dangerous pathogens was adding to our collective risk. They identified a number of potential dangers, including accidental releases, worker infections, theft, and insider threats. (Foreign governments, they suggested, might also interpret the massive expansion in American research, much of it funded by the Department of Defense, as cover for an offensive bioweapons program, sparking a biodefense arms race.)

In their paper, Lentzos and Koblentz discuss the circumstances under which a government should consider not building a new lab. Because labs are expensive to build and maintain, they write, it may be wise to hold off if theres a chance that funding wont be sustainable. American biodefense funding is often unpredictable: while Congress has approved a coronavirus-response package of more than eight billion dollars, the White House budget for 2021, released in February, proposes cutting the C.D.C.s budget by sixteen per cent. (The reductions include a twenty-five-million-dollar cut to the Public Health Preparedness and Response program and an eighteen-million-dollar cut to a Health and Human Services initiative called the Hospital Preparedness Program, which funds regional treatment centers for Ebola and other special pathogens.)

Governance is another crucial factor: rules and enforcement mechanisms need to address dual-use research, responsible science, and transparency. Until all those bits that fall under governance are set up, its certainly not right to keep expanding the number of labs, Lentzos said. In the United States, the governance of high-containment labs is a disorganized endeavor. The National Institutes of Health and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration both exercise some oversight, and the Federal Select Agent Program inspects labs that handle pathogens on its list. Yet its easy for labs to fall through the cracks of a list-based regulatory regime. For example, in 2017, researchers in Canada reconstituted the horsepox virus, which, because it is extinct, is not a select agent. Although horsepox cant infect people, the research also demonstrated how a lab might re-create its cousin, smallpox, which can.

Since its 2007 report, the G.A.O. has released two more reports on the proliferation of high-containment labs. From a strategic perspective, there is still no overarching strategy for designating BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities, Tim Persons, the agencys current chief scientist, said. In its 2016 report, published under Persons signature, the G.A.O. wrote that existing oversight of high-containment laboratories is fragmented and relies on self-policing.

Read the rest here:
Hot zone in the heartland? - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists