The Sunshine Project
Biosafety Bites (v.2) #16 (15 August 2006)

 

Dukes of Hazards: Georgia's Rebel Yell Against Biosafety
Now Wants to Operate the NBAF BSL-4

The ongoing failure of the University of Georgia's Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) to comply with federal safety rules should bring criticism to the University and to the ineffective federal overseers of the IBC system.

Almost three years ago, in October 2003, the Sunshine Project first called attention to biosafety lapses at the University of Georgia (UGA). In that year, the Project condemned the UGA's IBC for failing to review experiments to create flu strains with 1918 "Spanish" influenza genes. To be clear: UGA went ahead with genetic engineering experiments to recreate one of the deadliest pathogens in human history, an otherwise extinct virus that easily spreads from person to person, without its IBC even bothering to discuss the project.

In 2006, the Sunshine Project asked for UGA's IBC minutes again. The school could only produce minutes of a single meeting. The committee didn't meet voluntarily - the get together took place a week after the Sunshine Project asked for meeting minutes. Even then, 20% of the members skipped the committee's first meeting in recorded history.

The first order of business? Committee members and safety staff got acquainted with one another. Then they discussed what an IBC is and its responsibilities, clearly betraying the work of historical fiction that has been UGA's committee. UGA's IBC has been derelict so long that there's no significant institutional memory of why the committee exists and how it should function.

UGA's continuing noncompliance amounts to rebellion. The school's scorn for National Institutes of Health rules is reminiscent of that of their fellow (fictional) Georgians, the TV rednecks of the late 1970s who flouted their disregard for sheriff's authority with a "rebel yell" ("The Dukes of Hazard"). Except this sheriff, the National Institutes of Health Office of Biotechnology Activities, doesn't even bother to turn on his siren and try to catch UGA to put it in the biosafety jail that it so richly deserves.

There's no question that it is rebellion. The University of Georgia is obligated to follow federal biosafety guidelines by both federal regulation (via USDA rDNA funding) and contract obligation (including NIH rDNA funding). The UGA IBC is supposed to oversee genetic engineering and select agent (bioweapons agent) work, including anything happening in University's BSL-3 labs, which include BSL-3AG containment (one step below the BSL-4 maximum). But it doesn't even meet. Instead, it has been a mill for approval signatures on grant applications.

What kinds of research has gone unsupervised by the UGA IBC? In addition to the 1918 flu work, recent UGA research involves H5N1 "bird flu", the bioweapons agents anthrax and botulinum toxin, and other infectious diseases including genetically-engineered rabies, HIV, Ehrlichia, enteric diseases, and others. UGA also works with animal pathogens such as vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), Newcastle Disease, antibiotic-resistant bacterial diseases of poultry, and a variety of genetically-engineered crops requiring biosafety oversight.

What has the federal government done in response to Georgia and other US labs flouting the rules? The US government's biosecurity team, based in the Department of Energy, recently issued a report criticizing laboratories abroad. The US Department of Homeland Security recently named UGA a finalist to receive a contract to construct a massive new BSL-4 laboratory, the National Bio- and Agro-Defense Facility (NBAF), a grant with an initial value estimated at up to 500 million dollars.

A more perverse safety incentive could scarcely be imagined than to entrust a habitually noncompliant school with operating such a facility. UGA remains a leading exhibit of how little the US government cares about its domestic rules governing oversight of pathogen research.