BU Wins World’s Deadliest Pathogens

Finally! BU wins SOMETHING! As
posted
here in August, Boston
University has been hoping to construct a $1.6
billion dollar biodefense facility in a crowded low-income neighborhood
in the Boston area. Neighbors are understandably upset, as the announced
facility would contain live smallpox, Ebola and plague viruses, as well
as an additonal assortment of the deadliest pathogens known to man.

Federal health officials are expected to announce today that Boston
University Medical Center has won a hard-fought national competition
to build and run a high-security bioterror defense laboratory in the
heart of the South End, a project with the promise of generating $1.6
billion in research grants. The lab would be unlike anything Boston’s
medical community has ever seen, with extraordinary measures taken to
assure that lethal
agents cannot escape.

Jeez Louise!! They can’t even keep a 300-lb gorilla from walking
out of the Zoo, and they’re gonna keep track of a few billion microscopic,
colorless, odorless deadly pathogens? Sayonara South End, there
goes the neighborhood….

from the Boston Globe