Boston University Angers Neighbors With Ebola, SARS Germ Lab

Boston University Angers Neighbors With Ebola, SARS Germ Lab
Bloomberg
By Brian K. Sullivan

June 5 (Bloomberg) -- At the corner of Albany and East Dedham, tradesmen are putting the final touches on a $198 million glass and steel building for Boston University. The neighbors are upset about what the school plans to keep inside.

Organisms that cause Ebola, SARS, and plague are among microbes that scientists may stockpile at a biosafety lab rated level 4, the most secure category used by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The building in the university's medical center has provoked court challenges from South End and Roxbury residents, who say airborne germs may escape the lab and cause illness or death.

Boston University says the lab will be safe, yield lifesaving research, and help the school, city and region by adding jobs and an estimated $72 million a year in research contracts. Critics say the area's poor won't benefit. The school is likely to prevail because of the lab's potential benefits to society, said Arthur Caplan, an ethicist who follows health- policy clashes.

``It could easily bring in grants in the tens of millions of dollars,'' Caplan, 58, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said in a June 2 telephone interview. ``It is not fair to say that it is money versus ethics, but that at the end of the day the benefits overwhelm the concerns about the risk.''

The U.S. has six such labs, none in Massachusetts. Long overshadowed by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in nearby Cambridge, Boston University, known as BU, aims to leapfrog past those schools as places where infectious germs and vaccines can be studied.

`Densest Population'

Neighborhood foes often emerge to oppose buildings where biological technology is involved. In December, New York City approved a plan for Columbia University to expand into a Harlem neighborhood. The endorsement came after opponents of the $6 billion expansion questioned whether a level-3 biolab that is part of the project would expose residents to typhoid fever.

``This is the densest population around such a lab in the country,'' said Eloise Lawrence, 34, staff attorney for the Conservation Law Foundation in Boston. ``This is also one of the hardest and difficult to navigate cities in the country. How would one get out in an emergency?''

Until the last few years, nobody had to worry about the prospect of a biohazard lab in Boston. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and the anthrax scare that followed, the U.S. decided it needed more level-4 labs to study exotic diseases that could be turned into terror weapons, said Gigi Kwik Gronvall, senior associate at the government's Center for Biosecurity, a Baltimore facility run by the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, in a telephone interview June 2.

Delayed by Lawsuits

In 2003, the Bethesda, Maryland-based National Institutes of Health chose the BU Medical Center and the University of Texas as the sites of two new level-4 labs. The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston is expected to open a new level-4 biosafety facility in November, school spokeswoman Marsha Canright said May 14 in a telephone interview. Texas already operates a smaller level-4 lab in Galveston.

BU's lab, originally scheduled to open this year, is being delayed until at least next year by two lawsuits backed by residents of Boston's South End and Roxbury neighborhoods.

The South End had a population of about 28,160 and a poverty rate of 23.9 percent, according to a 2000 Boston Redevelopment Authority report. The Roxbury section had a population of 55,663 and poverty of 27.1 percent.

`Last Breath'

``We will fight this lab to our last breath,'' Roxbury resident Klare Allen, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuits, said at a public hearing at the Massachusetts State House in Boston on May 16.

To meet the demands of judges in the court cases, the NIH in March appointed a 16-member panel headed by Adel Mahmoud, a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University in New Jersey. The panel said in a May 16 statement that the lab's approval process needs more transparency. It also said a risk assessment report should include details of the infectious agents being studied that may pose a health threat, and gauge the possibility of terrorist action against the lab.

The group plans to provide NIH Director Elias Zerhouni with a work plan on June 6. The panel will decide how the health effects should be studied, seek public comment, and issue a final report by July 2009. State and federal courts are awaiting that assessment before deciding on the lawsuits, according to the NIH.

$1.7 Billion

A BU estimate about four years ago showed the lab could bring in about $72 million a year, said BU Medical Center spokeswoman Ellen Berlin in a telephone interview on June 2. The lab will employ 660 people, including 150 Ph.D.-level researchers, Berlin said on May 13.

The neighborhoods will benefit because workers will go into the community to eat, have their dry cleaning done and shop, Berlin said.

The Brookline-based Massachusetts Association of Nonprofit Schools and Colleges, with 90 members including Wellesley College, predicted the lab could yield $1.7 billion in federal research and spending during the next 20 years, according to a May 14 letter.

``I think this is very important to the city, for the jobs it will create to the research that will be done there,'' Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said in an interview May 22.

The court cases are Allen et. al. v. NIH, et. al. 1:06-CV- 10877-PBS, Federal District Court Boston and 10 residents of Boston v. the Boston Redevelopment Authority SJC-09960, Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian K. Sullivan in Boston at bsullivan10@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: June 5, 2008 00:01 EDT