Science reports on a recent Congressional hearing concerning the “proliferation” of biocontainment labs in the six years since the anthrax letters. While BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs have sprung up in response to newly perceived biological threats, the GAO argues that these labs are themselves a source of threat. Reflexive modernity in action: “in a harsh critique, a government auditor told Congress today that the uncontrolled expansion of new biocontainment facilities has itself made the country more vulnerable to accidents and bioterrorism. Federal officials agreed that they need to take steps to improve safety.”
COLLABORATORY: VITAL SYSTEMS SECURITY
The Vital Systems Security collaboration examines how, today, security is being constituted as an object of knowledge, intervention, and political reflection. It proposes that the security of vital systems such as energy, transportation, communication and health is one norm in relationship to which security is being reproblematized. A central goal of the collaboration is to examine these issues through collective, conceptually driven inquiry that addresses rapidly developing contemporary problems.
It is quite stunning that these biodefense labs have problems implementing the most basic biosafety safeguards. Has the concern with biosecurity displaced the idea of biosafety?
I would add that biocontainment labs have not only sprung up because of the massive expansion of biodefense research but also because the classification of pathogenic agents was changed by the federal government in recent years as a result of a shifting risk assessment. So if you would like to work now with an H2N2 influenza virus you are required to work in a BSL-3 lab. That was not the case from 1957 to 2004. How has this virus become, or rather, how has it been made ‘more dangerous’?