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March 2007

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U.S. Biochemical Research

By Carolina Cositore
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March 2007
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F or most nonscientists, the word biochemical causes our brains to shut down and skip over whatever scientific “gobbledygook” follows. Combined, however, with “good enough for government work,” a catch-phrase for sloppy bureaucracy that can be shrugged off in most areas, it becomes perilous because today’s biochemical research is perilous indeed. 

The Good 

A side from the real concern of clinical trials on sentient beings without their full and informed consent—be they animals, prisoners, soldiers, residents of domestic and foreign ghettos, or undergraduates—humans live longer and better today due to advances from medical research, which has given us such benefits as antibiotics, AIDS medications, and vaccines for polio, measles, and smallpox. 

Because such research entails working with dangerous diseases, we have supervisory bodies to oversee and control safety. In the United States this is handled by the National Institute of Health (NIH), part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. One of NIH’s four stated goals is to exemplify and promote the highest level of scientific integrity, public accountability, and social responsibility in the conduct of science. The NIH issues guidelines for labs operating with federal funds, including making public their plans and operations and publishing minutes of laboratory safety committee meetings, as required by U.S. law. The NIH has the power to shut them down if they do not comply. All good. 

The Bad 

T hree examples (of many) of what can happen without careful supervision: the anthrax attacks in October 2001, believed to have come accidentally or on purpose from a Ft. Detrick laboratory; the Meridian Biosciences Inc. scare in 2005 that sent 3,700 samples of a potentially dangerous flu to labs around the world; and a near miss by the University of Texas in April 2006 that could have released a mix of common human influenza genes with those of bird. 

Is the supervision adequate? The Sunshine Project, an NGO watchdog group in Germany and the United States, is now conducting a second survey of nearly 400 U.S. institutional biosafety committees (IBC). These committees, maintained at labs conducting federally-funded biotechnology research, have been established to protect people and the environment from risks of biotechnology experiments. In the course of conducting the IBC survey, the Sunshine Project has encountered a number of biosafety problems in research involving potential biological weapons agents. These include: physical issues at high containment laboratories, risky experiments approved with dubious safety precautions and/or inadequate IBC review, and dysfunctional and otherwise non-compliant committees. 

In the first study, it found 113 university, government, hospital, and corporate laboratories engaged in research that refused to disclose what they were doing and what safety measures they were taking as required by federal rules. 

What might they be working on? One possibility stems from the real fear of a mutation of bird flu that could be humanly contagious, which has all and sundry busily mixing and matching common influenza strains or genetically engineered strains with the deadly H5N1 bird flu. A mistake or accident could lead to an unpredictable flu strain that would cause the very human epidemic they are supposedly trying to avoid. 

Another is the questionable resurrection of the deadly 1918 influenza strain, being studied in Atlanta and at a Canadian BSL-4 in Winnipeg, but probably also in Madison, Wisconsin (Kawaoka), Seattle, Washington (Katze), Athens, Georgia (USDA flu lab), New York City (Mt. Sinai Hospital), and perhaps Washington, DC/Bethesda, Maryland (Taubenberger), and other places. 

Still another is the possible synthesis of the smallpox virus. Last year, two years after Congress banned this synthesis, a federally appointed panel recommended that the law be dropped. 

This is potentially dangerous stuff, in dire need of supervision. So why are the (at least) 113 labs not accountable? It’s not that some of these labs are hiding the minutes of their bio-safety meetings, but that the committees simply have never met or, when they have met, their minutes say nothing of consequence. Edward Hammond of the Sunshine Project questioned the NIH director in November asking for accountability. To date, he has had no response. This is bad. 

The Monstrous 

A s with much of what we’ve been living through with Bush, we have the Reagan legacy to blame as well. Secretly disregarding the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) of 1972, the Reagan administration advanced research into germ warfare and sold disease-causing microbes, including anthrax, to Saddam Hussein, which he later used in his war against Iran. 

In 1986, 14 years after signing the convention, the government gave various U.S. universities $42 million to develop infectious diseases and toxins, hoping for strains of anthrax, Rift Valley fever, Japanese encephalitis, tularemia, shigella, botulin, and Q fever. 

The U.S. has what is believed to be the world’s second largest stockpile of chemical weapons, nerve and choking agents among them, not counting run-of-the-mill crowd control chemicals such as tear gas and pepper spray. The U.S. was committed to destroying these by 2004 and one would like to believe that it did, but it has not permitted any international supervisory group to verify that they were indeed destroyed. (Russia has the most and also promised to destroy them.) 

CNN assures us that the U.S. maintains it does not have a stockpile of biological weapons, although it admits pursuing “defensive” biological research. Aside from the question of when and why biological weaponry would be used for defense, Francis Boyle, the professor who drafted the 1989 congressional Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act, states the Pentagon “is now gearing up to fight and ‘win’ biological warfare” with two national strategy directives that Bush adopted in 2002 without “public knowledge and review.” 

T he Bush administration, always going one worse than Reagan, took the teeth out of the international inspection system for biological laboratories in 2001 and, although the 1925 Geneva Convention banning biological agents still exists, Guantanamo Bay has shown us what heed the White House pays to the Geneva Conventions. Nevertheless, the 1972 BTWC is still valid and without exemption and the Pentagon knows it, so the lexicon writers who gave us “collateral damage” are simply declaring research “non-lethal,” thereby creating an imaginary grey area between what is permitted and what is not weapons research. 

In its coverage of a controversial Boston University laboratory, the Boston Globe revealed that there were 335 labs in the United States registered with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to handle deadly biological agents such as anthrax, ebola, and smallpox, as well as 75 other labs registered with the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. More than 7,200 scientists and lab workers are cleared to work in the United States with live anthrax alone; not to mention a likely U.S. Army plan for more foreign-based labs (they already exist in Egypt, Peru, Italy, Indonesia, and Germany). A current Corps of Engineers solicitation for design services suggests this, offering $3 million contracts over the 3-year life of the contract. 

Then there is the fascinating field of recombinant DNA. What scientists are doing with it, however, frightened the National Research Council’s Executive Committee enough in 2004 to strongly recommend that NIH establish a review system for these “experiments of concern.” The concerns involved experiments that would demonstrate how to: 

  • render a vaccine ineffective (such as vaccine-resistant
    smallpox) 
  • confer resistance to therapeutically useful antibiotics or antiviral agents 
  • enhance the virulence of a pathogen or render a non-pathogen virulent 
  • increase transmissibility 
  • alter host range of a pathogen 
  • evade diagnostic/detection modalities (microencapulation and/or alteration of gene sequence to avoid established molecular methods) 
  • weaponization of a biological agent or toxin, including environmental stabilization (such as synthesis of the smallpox virus) 

In probable response to this, the government is supposedly developing an “oversight” commission through the National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity. But on October 25 the NSABB working group “moved to creatively thwart its charge. Although it was formed to recommend biosecurity rules to govern the new field of synthetic biology, the working group will instead assault regulations of a wide range of biodefense and biotech risks…. The working group’s outlook is more political than technical. Its science is a veneer that disguises the maturing political muscle of a constituency of bioscientists that has become accustomed, perhaps addicted, to lavish federal biodefense funding” according to the Sunshine Project. 

In sum, in defiance of international accords and ignoring congressional and sane scientific attempts at regulation, our government is experimenting with biological and chemical weapons of unbelievable danger to humankind probably in a lab near you, including creating and testing “non-lethal” hardware that can deliver the full spectrum of such weapons. This is monstrous.   

Carolina Cositore has been a journalist and translator/rewriter in Havana, Cuba for over eight years. 
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