From True Blue Liberal
By Sherwood Ross

Some 113 university, government, hospital and corporate laboratories engaged in research having the potential to be used for germ warfare have illegally refused to disclose their operations to the public as required by law, a nonprofit watchdog agency has charged. Despite this, the National Institutes of Health(NIH), of Bethesda , Md., the government entity tasked with oversight of these laboratories, allows them to continue to operate instead of shutting them down.

From California to New Jersey and from Boston to San Antonio, often in the heart of major centers of population, biological warfare labs lavishly financed with their share of about $20-billion by the Bush administration since 2001 are literally crawling with deadly germs from Spanish flu to plague to anthrax to tularemia to smallpox to rift valley fever. Reportedly, in many of the laboratories security is lax and safety procedures are inadequate to protect the public from exposure to deadly pathogens.

Under U.S. law, recipients of Federal funds for biotech research must comply with guidelines issued by the NIH. These include making available to the public the minutes of the labs’ Institutional Biosafety Committees(IBC)meetings, describing their operations and plans. In a number of instances, these IBC’s have never bothered to hold a meeting. In other cases, the minutes they furnish are devoid of substance.

Basically, their operations are being kept secret, according to watchdog Sunshine Project of Austin, Tex., a nonprofit that attempts to protect the public from the risks of biotechnology experiments.

As the government-funded labs engage in dual-use research, (pathogens for either offensive or defensive use), Sunshine’s Edward Hammond reports he has encountered grave problems with the system. These include risky experiments approved with dubious safety precautions and/or inadequate IBC review, dysfunctional and otherwise noncompliant committees, and other types of biosafety problems.

Francis Boyle, an international legal expert at the University of Illinois, Champaign , puts it more bluntly. He called the in-house university committees a joke and a fraud that provide no protection to anyone. Boyle, who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 enacted by Congress, states the Pentagon is now gearing up to fight and ˜win’ biological warfare pursuant to two Bush national strategy directives adopted without public knowledge and review in 2002.

Last November 7th, Hammond lodged a complaint with Dr. Amy Patterson, director of the Office of Biotechnology Activities at NIH, citing 113 institutions for non-compliance with the NIH Guidelines, specifically for refusing to honor requests for IBC meeting minutes.

Honoring these requests is not only mandatory under the NIH Guidelines that you are charged with enforcing (but) transparency is also a moral duty of institutions that conduct research, such as rDNA and select agent work that could endanger the public, Hammond added. He wrote Patterson, Failing prompt compliance by these institutions we note that your office must do its duty under NIH Guidelines and terminate funding.

Since 9/11, name pharmaceutical houses, military laboratories, and State and private universities across America , and others sited in Canada, Australia, and South Africa, have collectively lapped up record sums in Federal spending for R&D.

How big is this enterprise? At just one venue, the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research(SFBR) in San Antonio, Tex., anthrax experiments are being conducted on 6,000 caged chimpanzees, baboons, and other primates, Sunshine reports, at a cost of $6-million a year just for the upkeep. SFBR genetically engineers monkeys and harbors some of the world’s most dangerous viruses such as Ebola and Lassa.

Again, the Battelle National Biodefense Institute(BNBI) of Columbus, Ohio, has just received a $250-million, five-year award from the Department of Homeland Security to run the new biodefense analysis center under construction at Fort Detrick, Md., according to The Washington Post of December 25, 2006. Earlier, on July 30th of that year, The Post reported much of what transpires at the center may never be publicly known as the Bush administration “intends to operate the facility largely in secret.”

“Some of the resarch falls within what many arms-control experts say is a legal gray zone, skirting the edges of an international treaty outlawing the production of even small amounts of biological weapons. The administration dismisses these concerns, however, insisting that the work…is purely defensive and thus fully legal. It has rejected calls for oversight by independent observers outside the (Homeland Security) department’s network of government scientists and contractors,” the Post added.

The paper quoted Milton Leitenberg, a weapons expert at the University of Maryland stating, “If we saw others doing this kind of research, we would view it as an infringement of the bioweapons treaty. You can’t go around the world yelling about Iranian and North Korean programs —about which we know very little —when we’ve got all this going on.”

The Post reported the operation would encompass about 160,000 gross square feet of working area and accommodate a staff of about 120. The Post noted, “Fort Detrick’s history as the incubator of germ warfare research casts a long shadow over the new lab. When the fort held the Pentagon’s very highly classified and long abandoned biological warfare program, it was a magnet for antiwar protests in the Vietnam War era.”

Hammond believes there are about 400 bioweapons agents labs across the U.S., some of which encounter unexpected difficulty when they try to comply with the law. David Perlin, president of the Public Health Research Institute(PHRI) of Newark, N.J., told Sunshine the FBI requested PHRI to enter into an agreement with them to not publicly disclose which specific select agent pathogens and/or strains are stored at our facility.

Those who tend to dismiss NIH’s laxity about enforcing its own regulations have only to recall the October, 2001, anthrax attacks on Congress and the media. The deadly strain released is believed to have come from a U.S. germ warfare lab at Fort Detrick although there is no certainty as the FBI has never solved the murders. Since then, the vast proliferation of such labs has educated many new employees — in some cases undergraduate students — in germ warfare ops. Four employees at Fort Detrick are known to have died while conducting such experiments.

Lack of transparencey is cause for concern if only because of the history of CIA and Pentagon experiments in germ warfare that used the American people as guinea pigs. In Rogue State, (Common Courage Press) reporter William Blum noted those agencies over two decades conducted tests in the open air in the United States, exposing millions of Americans to large clouds of possibly dangerous bacteria and chemical particles.

Between 1949 and 1969, the Army tested the spread of dangerous chemical and bacterial organisms over 239 U.S. populated areas including San Francisco , New York and Chicago with no warnings to the public or regard for the health consequences, Blum wrote. The Pentagon even sprayed navy warships using U.S. sailors as guinea pigs.

Jackie Cabasso, executive director of Western States Legal Foundation, Oakland, Calif., warned, Last year (2001), the U.S. single-handedly blew apart an international system for inspections of these kinds of (biological) laboratories, a system that would have made great strides toward ensuring that biodefense labs aren’t abused for offensive purposes. Having thumbed our nose at the world, the US is now massively expanding its biodefense program, mostly in secretive facilities.

According to Boyle, President Bush sabotaged the Inspection Protocol for the BWC as it was on the verge of conclusion and success and the U.S. fully intended to get back into the research, development and testing of illegal and criminal offensive biowarfare programs.
Critics of the administration’s expansion program are asking If the operators of the biological laboratories on Sunshine’s list are not engaged in research that could be used for offensive germ warfare attacks, why do they insist on keeping them secret? Suspicion of wrong-doing would not be so great if the Bush administration hadn’t opposed toughening the 1975 global ban on germ weapons.

As Elisa Harris, former arms control official under President Clinton, told The New York Times in 2003 about the wisdom of the government’s plan for a mobile germ trainer, “It will raise concerns in other capitals in part because the United States has fought tooth and nail to prevent the international community from strengthening the germ treaty.”

Among pharmaceutical houses in non-compliance with NIH requirements are Abbott Laboratories of Abbott Park and Worchester, Agencourt Bioscience Corp.; Antibody Science, Inc.; BASF Plant Science, Bristol-Myers Squibb and its Pharmaceutical Research Institute of Connecticut; Centocor, Inc.; Chiron; Discovery Genomics Inc.; DuPont Central Research and Development; Embrex, Inc.; Genentech, Inc., Genzyme Corp. of Cambridge and Framingham, Mass.; GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co., Inc. and its Rahway, N.J., research site; Integral Molecular; Introgen Therapeutics; L2 Diagnostics LLC; Merck & Co. Inc., West Point; Merck Research Laboratories, Rahway, N.J.; Meridian Bioscience Inc.; Monsanto Co. Mystic, Conn., research; New Link Genetics; NovaFlora, Inc.; NovoBiotic Pharmaceuticals; OSI Pharmaceuticals; Pfizer Inc., and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals of St. Louis, Roche Bioscience, Schering-Plough Research Institute; SelectX Pharmaceuticals; Serono Research Institution; Third Wave Technologies; and Vaxin, Inc.

Federal entities involved include the Center for Disease Control, the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, VA hospitals in Stratton, Va.; the Jerry Pettis Memorial hospital and the VA Pittsburgh Healthcare System. Also, the Idaho National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Plum Island Animal Disease Center of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and Navy Medical Research Center.

Other fund recipients include AERAS Global TB Vaccine Foundation, Battelle Memorial Institute, CBR Institute for Biomedical Research, Inc.; Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, Children’s National Medical Center, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Columbus Children’s Research Institute, Hadassah Medical Organization, Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Mystic Aquarium & Institute for Exploration, and Scripps Clinic.

Among universities in non-compliance: Alabama A&M, Albany Medical College, Ball State, Brigham Young, Bucknell, Central Michigan, Drexel College of Medicine, Hackensack University Medical Center, Hunter College, Indiana State University, Purdue University, Loma Linda, Missouri State, New York Medical College, and Queens College of City University of New York.

Also, Rider, Rockefeller University, Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, South Dakota State University, St. John’s University, State University of New York at Binghamton, Brockport, and Buffalo; Towson, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School(UMDNJ), and University Medical Center of Southern Nevada.

Also, the universities of Arizona, California at San Francisco, Maryland, Massachusetts, Miami, Fla.; Mississippi; Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, Southern Mississippi, Texas at Arlington and San Antonio, Tulsa, Utah State, Wake Forest, Washington University in St. Louis, Western Kentucky and Wilkes.

Complicit foreign institutions include the University of Sydney, Australia; the University of British Columbia , and University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa . This listing covers most, but not all, of the names submitted to NIH by the Sunshine Project.

Sunshine Project’s efforts to bring about NIH compliance are only one aspect of its long-standing struggle for transparency. In March, 2002, for example, it requested copies from The National Academies of Science public library of 77 apparently chemical and biological weapons-related documents, only to have NAS put a “security hold” on the file without explaining who ordered the hold or why. Sunshine stated at the time, “Rather than assist a purge of the public record, NAS — a leading U.S. non-profit scientific body — must condemn and release the proposals for illegal weapons that it has received.”
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(Sherwood Ross is an award-winning American reporter and columnist. He has worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News and for 10 years contributed a weekly “Workplace” column to Reuters (1992-2002). Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com) (305) 205-8281)