The Sunshine Project
News Release
25 April 2007Biosafety Archive for Biodefense Public Accountability
Joins funding mashup in shining light on biotechnology research
25 April 2007 - To promote transparency and public accountability of biodefense research, the Sunshine Project has opened an online archive of US Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) meeting minutes. The unique internet document collection will be of interest to grassroots organizations, safety and security NGOs, and other policy researchers. It will also enable the federal government to systematically evaluate many individual biosafety committees and the overall performance of the system for the first time ever.
"Greater public accountability of biodefense and related research will lead to safer communities and more sound policies," says Sunshine Project Director Edward Hammond, "We aim to build an applied kind of transparency, one that extends into the heart and the frontiers of scientific research and that transcends often empty political and scientific rhetoric about openness."
Hammond says that transparency is more than publishing articles. "Talented and well run research labs should always produce publications, but scientific articles often don't tell the whole story. By definition, they are a partial and self-selected record. We aim for more thorough disclosure including records that objectively detail labs and their oversight and which are more readily useful to the public interested in lab operations." Such records include committee minutes, safety reviews, accident reports, and funding proposals.
The freely available website contains minutes from 210 companies, public, private, and nonprofit institutions. The majority conduct research at biosafety level three (BSL-3) or higher. Nearly a gigabyte of records are available now and cover three years of IBC meetings at each institution, generally from mid-2003 through mid-2006, or whatever portion thereof the lab was able or willing to muster in response to requests under the NIH Guidelines for Research Involving Recombinant DNA Molecules. The archive presently contains the equivalent of paper files stacked over seven feet tall, and it will be expanded to cover more institutions in the near future.
Importantly, the archive is accompanied by suggestions about how to analyze and compare different labs. Its URL is:
http://www.sunshine-project.org/ibc/archive.html
The IBC archive joins the Sunshine Project's CRISP-ER web mashup, released in 2005. CRISP-ER provides enhanced National Institutes of Health grant data by pairing NIH grant summaries with financial and biosafety information. The mashup affords better access to information than NIH itself gives to the public. CRISP-ER is online at:
http://www.sunshine-project.org/crisper
The minutes can be dry; but with close examination, the archive provides an unprecedented window into review - and failure to review - contemporary biotechnology and biodefense research.
In fact, even though the IBCs operate under federal rules, because the government itself has never systematically collected or reviewed these materials, or enforced those rules, placing the minutes in the archive will enable NIH and other branches of government to assess the effectiveness of many committees for the first time ever.