Some 100 campus faculty members gathered in the Silo’s Cabernet Room Monday, offering a two-hour collegial debate over the National Biocontainment Laboratory proposed for campus.
More than 20 faculty members came forward to speak during the town hall meeting — some with prepared comments, but many with spontaneous remarks. Speakers at times turned emotional, but remained reserved and respectful.
Approximately half of those who talked supported the lab; half were against. A few speakers said they are torn on the issue.
The campus submitted a proposal on Feb. 10 to the National Institutes of Health for funding to build the laboratory on a 31-acre parcel on the south end of the health sciences district, on land currently occupied by the UC Davis Equestrian Center. Campus and Davis community meetings about the lab have been ongoing since January.
On Monday, advocates of the proposed lab cited the recent outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, as an example of an emerging infectious disease like those which the lab might some day help eradicate.
Veterinary medicine professor Fred Murphy noted that, for instance, in only the few weeks since its emergence, some 2,600 cases of SARS have been reported worldwide — more than 30 of those cases in California.
Siting the lab and the UC mission
A number of those speaking against the lab, including professors Rob Feenstra, of economics, and Ben Orlove, of environmental science and policy, said they would support it if the project were moved off campus and away from the I-80 and Highway 113 interchange.
Associate professor of history Louis Warren noted the project as proposed would threaten the campus’s relationship with the city. “The opposition is only going to get more militant,” he said.
The confluence of disciplines on the Davis campus makes it a unique setting, proponents argued. The close proximity of researchers working in veterinary medicine, the School of Medicine and the primate center; the ready availability of environmental health and safety expertise; and a solid transportation infrastructure make the campus an ideal location, said Tom Nyland, veterinary medicine professor of surgical and radiological science. “We need this multidisciplinary approach,” he said, adding: “This is a public health lab. In my view, the primary risk to the community is in doing nothing.”
Warren and Colin Carter, professor of agricultural and resource economics, argued the three-story, 300,000-square-foot secured facility would create an ominous front door to the campus that could deter prospective students. Others, including Satya Dandekar, professor and chair of microbiology and immunology, countered that the new facility — especially as the only facility of its kind in the west — would attract the brightest and the best to UC Davis as it helped fulfill the campus’s missions of public service and education.
Microbiology professor John Roth disagreed.
“We can better serve our nation by doing what we as a university do best,” Roth said. “We have many well-identified health problems that pose more immediate threats and are thus more deserving of funding,” he said. He supported more basic research and said he would rather see resources go toward a new research center for Study of Plant and Animal Pathogens.
School of Medicine professor Richard Pollard said basic science must work in tandem with applied science to realize the university’s mission. “It’s a very important opportunity,” he said.
Questions of control and openness
Opponents, including history professor Don Price and professor of human and community development Miriam Wells, said they were concerned UC Davis would not maintain enough control over what type of research would take place at the facility. They noted concern that classified work might be performed.
Roth suggested the university was brought in by the NIH on the lab project to lend it respectability. And Wells voiced concern that the U.S. departments of Defense, Health and Human Services or Homeland Security could, if national security is in question, ultimately call the shots on what research is and isn’t conducted at the lab.
Advocates noted that research at the lab would be peer-reviewed, and Dandekar reiterated the open nature of peer-reviewed work.
Researchers also have a vested interest in keeping their work at the lab unclassified, said Steve Barthold, director of comparative medicine. “If we don’t publish, we perish,” he said.
Some opponents said they believe the campus might end up playing an offensive “biodefense” role — that the government might sponsor weapons research.
Veterinary medicine professor and director of the veterinary genetics lab Niels Pedersen, said that the term “biodefense” in the official title of the lab — the Western National Center for Biodefense and Emerging Diseases — has been misconstrued. The lab will not be used to create new diseases, but to defend against existing or naturally emerging disease-causing agents, he argued. These agents could be criminally introduced, but the greater threat comes from diseases that are already naturally occurring.
The costs of building, not building
Graduate School of Management professor of management and accounting Michael Maher said he had performed a detailed analysis of cost-to-benefits for the $200 million project and that it did not make good fiscal sense.
He said the facility might not make sense dollar wise, that the campus’s $25 million investment could be more wisely spent and that there is no guarantee the campus could secure the grants needed to offset operation costs. Maher added that the lab project would drain existing resources, that overruns in construction costs were likely, and that the state’s pledge to match $25 million in funding — despite a formal letter of intent — could fall through.
Proponents said that the university may not for many decades get another opportunity like the $150 million offer the NIH has promised to contribute to the project. School of Veterinary Medicine faculty members Brad Smith and Tilahun Yilma argued that the lab would allow the campus to compete for millions of dollars in new research money it currently cannot pursue. “This should be a money-making machine,” Yilma said, noting indirect costs from research funding could benefit other campus programs.
Smith, associate dean and director of veterinary clinical programs, and Yilma, a veterinary virologist who engineered a vaccine for Africa’s deadly viral cattle disease rinderpest, cited the billions of dollars an uncontrolled outbreak would cost. In 1980, rinderpest killed an estimated $400 million worth of cattle and sapped more than $2 billion in related losses out of Africa’s economy.
Preserving the campus’s character
Smith and Pedersen said the facility answers a long-recognized need to safely study and diagnose emerging diseases, including hantavirus, Lyme disease, West Nile virus, plague, anthrax, foot and mouth disease and, more recently, SARS. Last year, for instance, West Nile virus affected some 14,000 horses and killed 5,000, said veterinary school dean Bennie Osburn.
“We need to think about the broader good of California and the nation,” said Pedersen. If the campus loses the offer based on local fears of becoming a terrorist target or concern over property values, he said: “Then what does this say about our character?”
Anthropology professor Bill Skinner argued the lab might mar the character of the campus by introducing profiling — a violation of the campus’s Principles of Community — if researchers from nations considered a high risk to the United States were not allowed access to the facility.
Others said, that while they believe the facility would emphasize safety, it is difficult to anticipate a technological- or human-error failure along the order of a Three Mile Island, Exxon Valdez or space shuttle Columbia disaster.
Murphy and Smith said there has never been a leak at a BSL3 or 4 facility. Osburn noted that tight protocols and the small quantities of infectious agents to be handled at the lab further reduce operational risks.
Monday’s meeting was one of five events focused on the proposed lab this week. For details, see http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/biosafetylab.