Related Resources:
Biosafety Bites #1 - #10
Reply Data on Biosafety Committee SurveyThe Sunshine Project
News Release
23 August 2004
Research Transparency:
Federal Complaint Against "Bottom of the Barrel" Biosafety Committees(Austin - 23 August 2004) - Today, the Sunshine Project has filed a complaint with the National Institutes of Health against four US universities that have the worst biosafety transparency out of more than 225 institutions nationwide that have replied to a Sunshine Project survey of Institutional Biosafety Committees. The complaint names Princeton University (Princeton, NJ), the University of Texas Southwestern (Dallas, TX), the University of Vermont (Burlington, VT), and the University of Delaware (Newark, DE).
"It was difficult selecting only four institutions to label as the worst", says Sunshine Project Director Edward Hammond, "hundreds of labs have lousy biosafety recordkeeping or haven't replied to the Sunshine Project's requests at all." However, Hammond says "These four schools fall into a special category of rotten." Their biosafety committees function, but "these universities' biosafety committees have nothing but contempt for public disclosure. They black out their meeting minutes or write down virtually nothing, so as to frustrate public access."
The Sunshine Project's complaint was filed with the National Institutes of Health Office of Biotechnology Activities, which oversees the NIH Guidelines on Research Involving Recombinant DNA Molecules. It is under these federal guidelines that the Sunshine Project is conducting its survey of biosafety committees. According to the Guidelines, minutes of biosafety committee meetings "shall be made available to the public upon request".
Briefly, on each institutional biosafety committee (IBC):
- Princeton University provides useless documents to the public because it records nothing of substance about safety review of its biological research in its IBC minutes. Says Hammond, "Princeton might have impressed the editors of US News," who this week named it a top US university, "but its biosafety committee's sense of public responsibility is bottom of the barrel."
- Like Princeton, the University of Vermont records virtually nothing of substance when its IBC reviews project safety. Vermont took six months to reply to a request for its IBC minutes, and then provided no useful information.
- The University of Delaware takes a different approach. It replied quickly to the Sunshine Project's request; but not before applying a fat magic marker to its IBC minutes, blacking out page upon page about biosafety at the university, and rendering its minutes completely useless.
- In Dallas, UT-Southwestern takes a novel approach to evading public accountability: It puts all the substance of its IBC meeting in an "annex", which it does not release to the public. Then, in its sparse committee minutes, it records that the annexes are approved "without additional comment".
The Sunshine Project's complaint asks NIH to terminate biotechnology research funding to the four institutions until they comply with the federal research guidelines.
Minutes of one biosafety committee meeting of each university are available online:
Princeton University:
http://www.sunshine-project.org/biodefense/IBC/pu.pdfUniversity of Vermont:
http://www.sunshine-project.org/biodefense/IBC/uvm.pdfUniversity of Delaware:
http://www.sunshine-project.org/biodefense/IBC/udel.pdfUniversity of Texas Southwestern:
http://www.sunshine-project.org/biodefense/IBC/utswmed.pdf