Happy Nice Mall

is this world better With or without high-containment biolabs? It’s an unsolvable question. Work in progress in them involves a non-trivial degree of risk; therefore, with its vaults, barricades and trenches – including its operational protocols – the NEIDL resembles a modern fortress. Still, no amount of engineering, infrastructure, or people can reduce the chances of bad things coming out of biolabs to zero. On the other hand, without them, we would be without any cure for diseases like Covid-19 and Ebola. For now, the world seems to agree that we need these facilities.

Next summer, CDC will lay the groundwork for a new high-impact laboratory complex at its Atlanta campus. One of the goals is to support an aging biolab lab with a five-story, state-of-the-art facility that includes two Level 3 suites and six Level 4 suites. These will be largely devoted to examining viruses with more dire mortality: Ebola, Nipah, Marburg, Chapare. Construction will take approximately three years, followed by a two-year commissioning process to ensure safety expectations are met. The cost was reported to be at least $350 million – a significant jump from the $280 million (adjusted for inflation) that built the NEIDL facilities. Melissa Pearce, who will oversee the new lab, said she and her CDC colleagues have toured North American facilities in recent years to research current best practices and design ideas.

ideas that are more new will not necessarily be accepted. “When designing a Biosafety Level 4, the thought of using new technology tends to give you pause,” Pearce said. “It’s like the first year of a brand new car model – you don’t want to buy it because there are probably some bugs that need to be worked on.” Therefore, most of the improvements in Atlanta are likely to be gradual. Some of the researchers in the planning team, for example, believe that the spaces in the existing Level 4 labs are too tight, so the new suites will have more room for workers to move around freely. A new chemical shower in the hallway will allow staff to sterilize equipment more efficiently.

Talking to the people at the CDC will stunned the research done on exotic viruses under control how close they think we might be to the next pandemic – and how important it is should a little-known infectious agent erupt again in the general population. there and elsewhere will refer us to therapies or a cure. This is also the expectation at NEIDL, where Mühlberger recently worked with the Lloviu virus, a relative of Ebola, which was detected in bats in Eastern Europe 10 years ago. In rural Hungary, a group is searching for Lloviu by collecting small amounts of blood from local bat colonies. If the virus is present, the group sequences it and sends the genetic information to it. It then compares its viral properties with other pathogens to better understand the potential hazards. “We don’t know yet if it causes disease in humans,” he said. “But if it does cause disease, about 200 million people live in the area where these bats roam.”

When I asked Joel Montgomery, head of the viral specialty pathogens division at the CDC, whether our awareness of new pathogens is the result of improved surveillance or increased opportunities for more viruses to jump to humans, he seemed to think both factors were responsible. . Thanks to its nucleic acid sequencing capabilities, the ability to test for new viruses is much better than it was 10 or 20 years ago. “But I think we’re interacting with our environment much more now than before, and it’s just that the number of people on the planet has increased,” he said, which also affects population densities. “And so we will see epidemics – epidemics, pandemics – happen more often. It will definitely happen.”

What’s more, our highly contained facilities may have to deal with threats from nature as well as threats from the lab. Take, for example, the diseases of smallpox. CDC’s campus in Atlanta is home to one of the two remaining Level 4 labs in the world that house the live variola virus that causes smallpox and was declared eradicated worldwide in 1980. (Other cache is in Russia.) Victoria Olson, director of laboratory science and safety at the MP CDC, says studies using a live virus can help scientists develop a diagnosis, treatment, and vaccine should smallpox reappear or a similar smallpox outbreak. He said the lab was holding samples for him. Monkey pox, which has recently caused epidemics in Africa with a mortality rate of 10 percent, is already a serious concern; Alaskan pox was just described in 2015. Perhaps more worrying is that someone outside of the known biolab world could make a version of a smallpox virus using genetic engineering tools. Smallpox had an average case fatality rate of about 30 percent; Americans have not been vaccinated against it since 1972. A synthetic smallpox—even a synthetic superpox that can be deadlier than the original—is not an intellectual leap.

This is of course a scary idea. But one premise behind biolabs is to be ready—ready to test new vaccines and therapeutics, ready to apply insights from old pathogens to new ones. And even in an age of enormous computing power, neither Corley at NEIDL nor those I spoke to at the CDC believe that scientists have come across the 4th . This seems like reason enough to continue working to quantify the risks and improve the safety of the work being done there: It might be best if our containment research cannot be replaced by digital simulations, and if our pathogenic enemies are real and growing in number. Keep them close whenever possible – to keep them out, that is, to keep them in.

Jon Gertner has been writing about science and technology for the magazine since 2003. His latest article looked at how CO2 can be incorporated into products to make an impact on climate change.