Bioterror Labs and Biotech Undergrads

In Boston, political wrangling continues over plans for a Level-4 bioterrorism laboratory Boston University plans to construct in the city's South End. A group of legislators are moving to require additional safety measures and state-level oversight of the lab, which is earmarked to receive $128 million in federal funding. The proposed lab is near where, on March 26, at the PerkinElmer building at 575 Albany St, firefighters were exposed to radioactive materials in fighting a two-alarm fire. Since then, Boston has considered an ordinance requiring increased inspections of the estimated 5,000 labs in the city, and requiring that the fire department have at its disposal information on what chemical materials might be present in a lab.

MIT has a website with a number of maps that document the demographics in the area surrounding the proposed laboratory, which is to be located in the 600 block area of Albany St.

UCLA has been awarded more than $6 million over four years by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to support research for countering threats from bioterrorism agents and infectious diseases. UCLA will join the Pacific-Southwest Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases Research. In addition, the center will support analysis of proteins and DNA. Alan Barbour, professor of medicine and microbiology at Cal-Irvine will serve as director of the new center. Barbour is the co-discoverer of the bacterium that causes Lyme disease; he also identified the protein that became an approved vaccine against the disease. Jeff Miller, professor and chair of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics at UCLA, will be the center's associate director for basic research.

Elsewhere in the state, California State University, San Marcos, will begin offering a new undergraduate degree in biotechnology this fall in a program developed by Albert Kern, a Michigan State PhD, who formerly was an executive with Mycogen, an agricultural biotechnology company that was acquired by Dow in 1998. Students will study cellular and molecular biology as well as business and finance, according to an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper.