Texas A&M University in College Station Texas,1 has been conducting research into so-called “select agents,” i.e. biological agents that the government thinks can be turned into biological weapons. The university’s efforts are part of an $18 billion federal program to develop vaccines.
On April 20, 2007 the Centers for Disease Control — the CDC — issued a cease-and-desist order for Texas A&M’s work with the Brucella bacterium.2 On June 30, the order was expanded to include all work with select agents and toxins.3 The CDC then conducted a five-day comprehensive inspection of the A&M labs and issued a report4 on August 31 listing numerous flaws in oversight, working conditions, and security, including missing vials of select agents, unauthorized research with recombinant DNA, access to the lab by unauthorized personnel, and exposures of lab workers to bacteria that cause brucellosis and Q fever that went unreported to the CDC.
Based on the comprehensive inspection, the CDC has extended the suspension of all select agent and toxin work at A&M until all the issues identified in its 21-page report are addressed.
On September 6, Texas A&M’s interim president, Eddie Davis, held a press conference to address the report.5 As to how the universities “select agent” program got into trouble, he said:
“I would tell you that it is our assessment that it we have not had the level of expertise in terms of plants and the complex processes required to run such a select agent program and we’re putting that in place with new personnel.”
On the eve of the press conference, the Sunshine Project, a small non-profit organization based in Austin, Texas, that is dedicated to biological weapons control, released documents it had just obtained through a Texas Public Records Act request.6 The documents indicated that a flood had occurred in one of the labs on campus.
In a phone interview, Edward Hammond, Director of the Sunshine Project, described what he knows so far about the incident:
“It was obviously a serious flood that happened. Unfortunately, we don’t have a lot of information. But what we know was that on the twenty-second of February, a biosafety level [BSL] 3 lab that was handling biological weapons agents flooded at the university. It flooded so badly — the water came from above — that the integrity of the lab was clearly compromised. A number of seals were broken. Water infiltrated into the lab from outside.
What’s really perplexing about this is that although the flood occurred on the twenty-second of February, there’s no record of any safety inspection of the lab until seven weeks later, the 16th of April, which probably not co-incidentally was the same day that federal agents arrived on the Texas A&M campus to probe their research program. So we have this nearly two-month delay between a flood that compromised the integrity of a laboratory handling biological weapons agents and any apparent action to assess the damage and get about the business of fixing it.”
University President Davis indicated at the press conference that he was hearing about the flood for the first time then and there.
Davis’ ignorance was no surprise to Marylia Kelley, Executive Director of Trivalley CAREs7 in Livermore, California, whose organization has sued to keep the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from opening its own BSL-3 facility.
“This is both a national problem and a specific problem at Livermore Lab,” she said in a telephone interview.
“Historically, the manager for Livermore Labs has been the University of California and historically, the University of California has known very little about what actually goes on at the laboratory. I would not be surprised at all to find out in the future that the [new] UC-Bechtel management is in the same position vis-a vis the Livermore biofacility that the Texas A&M President was in respect to the Texas A&M lab, which is they don’t know.”
Representatives of the CDC declined to be interviewed for this story. But in email to this writer, CDC spokesman Von Roebuck wrote that “[a]s part of the select agent rules, labs or entities that are certified are required to immediately report any potential lab exposures, releases or loss of a select agent. Historically, the entities in the program have alerted the CDC to these.”
The Texas A&M situation points out what can happen if the entity inadvertently or intentionally fails to report, and its managing institution –often a university is kept in the dark about what is going on at the lab.
Edward Hammond’s research has turned up similar problems at other labs. He cited a number of exposures to agents including anthrax, plague, and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, at the University of New Mexico, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at Berkeley.
At the press conference, Texas A&M President Davis said, “I think it’s fair to say that the review that was done at Texas A&M in July was very intense, very thorough and very deep. My expectation is that other institutions, under that same level of review, would probably have findings that could be reportable to the CDC.”
Marylia Kelley questions the need for all the high-containment biolabs that are sprouting up across the country, and says money is behind the building boom:
“This country is building way too much biowarfare agent research capacity at other sites in addition to Livermore Lab. Tri-Valley CAREs believes that what is needed is an overarching national assessment of our biodefense capabilities, to look at whether, in fact, we have any deficiencies in our capabilities. The Bush Administration has thrown about $36 Billion on the table and initiated what is in fact a multiagency feeding frenzy to get part of this $36 Billion to build all these facilities willy-nilly across the country.”
Texas A&M hopes to have its labs reopened by the end of 2007.
Sources
2A copy of the order is in the Texas A&M files of the Sunshine-Project at http://sunshine-project.org/
3Ibid.
4A copy of the report is in the Texas A&M files of the Sunshine-Project
5This writer attended by telephone and recorded the event.
6The documents are posted on the website of the Sunshine Project
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