Galveston National Laboratory: “The Best Little Bug House in Texas”?

Construction is underway for the six-story, 63,000 square-feet “Galveston National Laboratory” (GNL) at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, according to a well-written and thoughtful January 12, 2006 “New England Journal of Medicine” penned by Robert Steinbrook, M.D., and titled “Research in the Hot Zone”. (1) Established in 1891, The UTMB at Galveston consists of a complex of six hospitals, four academic schools, numerous research centers and institutes, and one of the largest medical libraries in the Southwest. (2)

The completed GNL will be a biosafety level 4 facility, which is the highest biosafety rating for laboratories dealing with highly-contagious organisms. The laboratory will be located near the center of the medical school campus, a short distance from the emergency department and the children’s hospital. The UTMB at Galveston faces the Texas coast mainland on the north side of the flat and hurricane-prone Galveston barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico. The UTMB Magazine writers call the new GNL facility “The Best Little Bug House in Texas.” (3)

The new GNL laboratory has many safety features and will be “surrounded by a 200-foot security perimeter from which private vehicles will be excluded,” writes Steinbrook who also notes that “[i]n general, the Galveston project [the Galveston National Laboratory] has had the support of the community [of 60,000 people], largely because of the extensive groundwork that had been laid during the planning and construction of the current laboratory”. The current laboratory to which Steinbrook refers is the much smaller 2,000 square-foot biosafety level 4 facility named after virologist Robert E. Shope, M.D. who died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 2004. (4) A virtual tour of a typical biosafety level 4 laboratory is available from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (See note 5 below for web address.)

Researchers attached to the GNL, which is projected for completion in mid-2008, hope to develop countermeasures to diagnose, prevent, and effectively treat infectious diseases caused by anthrax, bubonic plague, hemorrhagic fevers (e.g., Ebola), typhus, West Nile virus, influenza, and drug-resistant tuberculosis, among others, says a fact sheet prepared by the Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases at UTMB. (6) An example of the work currently underway in the smaller Robert E. Shope Laboratory, operational since 2004 according to Steinbrook, is combining H5N1 (the avian flu virus strain) with other influenza strains that infect humans. (p. 110)

Biosafety level 4 laboratories are rare. Currently four exist in the United States: Hamilton, Montana; San Antonio, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; Frederick, Maryland; and Galveston, Texas. A fifth one remains in the planning stages for Boston, Massachusetts whose local community has voiced opposition.

Taxpayers via the National Institutes of Health ($110 million federal money), local sources ($40 million to be covered via state revenue bonds), and private philanthropy ($17 million) are funding construction of the Galveston National Laboratory. The UTMB will own and operate the GNL and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease/National Institutes of Health, whose current head is Anthony Fauci, M.D., will oversee the research projects inside of it. (6)

The principal investigator for the GNL project is Stanley M. Lemon, M.D., a hepatitis virologist trained at Cornell University and employed for years at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill before moving to sunny Galveston in 1997 to become dean of the UTMB School of Medicine. Two years earlier, in 1995, Robert Shope had moved to Galveston from Yale University where he had been employed for his entire adult life. He carried with him to Galveston “one of the most extensive collections of virus cultures in the world”, which he and another colleague assembled. The collection of some 5,000 samples is also known as the “World Reference Center for Emerging Viruses and Arboviruses.” (7) Like Lemon, Shope was a virologist, but he favored arboviruses (e.g., yellow fever, dengue, Ebola). Shope’s father, Richard, was also a virologist who discovered papovavirus, the causative agent of skin and genital warts.

The UTMB School of Medicine is also the long-time professional home of David H. Walker, M.D., head of pathology and executive director of the Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases at The UTMB. Dean Lemon said of Walker, “He has attracted some of the world’s top scientists in tropical diseases and has put UTMB on the map as one of the best research centers for emerging infectious diseases in the world.” (8)

David Walker is well known to some people for another reason, which helps to explain his intense interest and participation in realizing a level 4 laboratory at The UTMB. In early 1992, Harvard geneticist Matthew Meselson, Ph.D., a longtime crusader against bioweapons, contacted Walker in Galveston to invite him on a fact-finding mission to Sverdlovsk, Russia. (9) Meselson had been working with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on the 1979 disastrous Sverdlovsk human anthrax epidemic, as discussed in two books on the topic and recorded in documents stored in the National Security Archives at George Washington University. (10-12). Walker joined Meselson’s team, which traveled to Sverdlovsk on June 2, 1992, to examine the remains of the 42 victims autopsied in the wake of the 1979 anthrax epidemic. This trip became possible only because the Soviet Union dissolved and Boris Yeltsin, who hailed from Sverdlovsk, gave his Communist blessing to the trip.

Following the trip, Walker hosted as a visiting scientist at The UTMB in Galveston Russian pathologist Dr. Lev Grinberg who, with lead Russian pathologist Dr. Faina Abramova, performed the 42 anthrax victim autopsies in 1979 and aided the Meselson team in its fact-finding mission in 1992.

Sources:

1. Robert Steinbrook: “Research in the Hot Zone” in The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 354, No. 2, January 12, 2006, pp. 109-112.
2. “About UTMB” at: http://www.utmbhealthcare.org/AboutUTMB/; accessed January 20, 2006.
3. “The Best Little Bug House in Texas”, UTMB, Spring 2005, available at: http://www.utmb.edu/utmbmagazine/archive/05_Spring/parting_shot/default.htm.
http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/page1/98/08/08/research_2-0.html; accessed January 20, 2006.
4. David H. Walker: “Robert Ellis Shope: 1929-2004. (In Memoriam)(Obituary)” in Emerging Infectious Diseases; 4/1/2004; available at:
http://www.highbeam.com/library/docfree.asp?DOCID=1G1:115694349&ctrlInfo=Round18%3A
Mode18c%3ADocG%3AResult&ao=.
5. “NIAID Biodefense Research” available at: http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/Biodefense/Public/blt.htm; accessed January 20, 2006.
6. “Galveston National Laboratory” fact sheet; available at: http://www.som.utmb.edu/som/Research/NBL%20fact%20sheet.pdf#search='galveston%
20National%20Laboratory'; accessed January 20, 2006.
7. Kevin Moran: “Virus research lab to be sited in Galveston”, Houston Chronicle, August 7, 1998, available at: http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/page1/98/08/08/reserach_2.0.html; accessed January 20, 2006.
8. Center for Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases at The UTMB: Faculty. Available at: http://www.utmb.edu/CBEID/administration/team.htm; accessed January 20, 2006.
9. Jim Kelly: “Death in the Wind” in UTMB Quarterly, Summer 2002, pp. 3-11. Available online at:
http://www.utmb.edu/utmbmagazine/archive/sum02/UTMB_Quarterly_Summer_2002.pdf#
search='Death%20in%20the%20Wind%20UTMB'; accessed January 20, 2006.
10. National Security Archive: “Anthrax at Sverdlovsk”; available at: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB61/; accessed January 20, 2006.
11. Jeanne Guillemin: “Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak”, University of California Press, 1999.
12. Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, William Broad: “Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War” Simon and Schuster, 2001.