Biolab Risk and Development: Who’s Accountable? | Berkeley Neighborhoods Council

August 3, 2024

Biolab Risk and Development: Who’s Accountable?

Jeremy Gruber, JD

Director, Alliance for Humane Biotechnology and cofounder of the Biolab Watch Network.

UC Berkeley will be building biolabs in downtown Berkeley. We know very little beyond this because UC has revealed little more than its intention to lease lab space to venture capital startups who will use UC's patents in genetic engineering, "to deepen the university’s foothold on innovation and entrepreneurship and turn research discoveries into real businesses." The rest can only be gleaned from the University's Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR). Biolab Watch, a network of citizens and civil society groups concerned by the enormous boom of commercial biolab construction in the Bay Area, submitted questions to UC as part of its FEIR process. Responses to those questions are not reassuring.

First the University claimed, "It is unlikely that an escape event of genetically engineered microorganisms would have significant environmental implications; a sick person in the shedding phase of their illness who is walking down the street poses a larger public risk." Yet in response to a question asking if the labs would use "natural or select agents," UC replied, "It is likely that the proposed laboratories" would do so. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states that natural and select agents "pose a severe threat to public health and safety." The Ebola virus is just one example of a select agent. The University seems unable to keep its story straight.

UC also states that it might undertake "gain of function research." Gain of function research involves making an infectious organism more infectious and/or more lethal. The idea is that by doing so researchers might be better prepared if such changes occur naturally. Such research is inherently risky.

For example, the politically charged controversy over the origins of the Covid epidemic revolves around gain-of-function research in China on bat coronaviruses. The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a major center of such research, entered a collaborative effort with New York’s EcoHealth Alliance to engineer a virus with characteristics that closely matched those of the virus that caused the world-wide Covid epidemic. Disclosed private exchanges among participating US researchers make it clear that one of the motivations for choosing the WIV for this research was the less stringent containment requirements in China.

In one of those exchanges a prominent virologist at a major American university explained that the less stringent containment "makes our system highly cost effective." He also noted that if researchers in the US find out about the safety level of the research in China, they "will likely freak out."

In his recent testimony before a Senate committee, Dr. Anthony Fauci, former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, claimed “Any qualified evolutionary virologist would confirm" that it was "molecularly impossible” for the taxpayer-funded experiments in Wuhan to have produced the pandemic-causing virus.

None of the four-expert witnesses at another Senate hearing later the same month made such a claim, however. The two witnesses brought in by the Democrats said the evidence pointed to naturally occurring transmission from animals. The two witnesses brought in by the Republicans said the virus mostly likely came from the lab. None of them said anything resembling Fauci's claim that a laboratory origin of the virus is molecularly impossible. On the contrary, like most supporters of the animal transmission hypothesis, one of the witnesses brought in by the Democrats noted that "a laboratory or research-related origin cannot be ruled out."

The important lesson here is that institutions, be they governments, corporations, or universities, will reflexively try to shield themselves from accountability for their mistakes or malfeasance. With governments the issue is most often politics. With corporations it is almost always financial gain. Financial gain can also be the central issue for universities, including the University of California. The University has made that very clear. The whole point of building the labs is to turn its research discoveries into "real businesses."

Yet UC claims that ordinary citizens cannot hold them accountable because, "As a constitutionally created State entity, UC is not subject to the regulations of local agencies, such as those [of] the City of Berkeley... whenever using property owned or controlled by UC in furtherance of UC’s educational purposes." It is not at all clear that going into business for itself furthers UC's educational purposes. Moreover, profit maximizing firms tend to put financial rewards ahead of safety. That's why we have so many regulatory agencies whose function is to limit their behavior.

The entanglements of institutional privilege, personal ambition, and money (including university professors who will become principals of UC-associated private enterprises) raise substantial concerns about the safety of the research that will be carried out at UC's labs in downtown Berkeley. Yet the University says oversight of the research will be carried out by the University's own Institutional Biosafety Committee. Such an arrangement would violate a cardinal rule of safety oversight: It must never be done under the direction of an organization which has a financial interest in the research it oversees. UC also stated that if it decides to create "heritable alterations to the human germline (i.e., to embryos, ova, or sperm)" such activity would be done under the same oversight process as its other research.

UC seems to have adopted the guiding principle of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: "Move fast and break things." It should be that of the medical profession: "First, do no harm."

Jeremy Gruber, JD

Director, Alliance for Humane Biotechnology and cofounder of the BiolabWatch Network.

Christopher Kroll

Executive Committee member, Berkeley Neighborhoods Council.

BNC facilitates communication and organizes problem-solving between neighborhoods to protect and improve the City's livability

SOURCES:

‘Innovation Zone’ is Coming to Downtown Berkeley

https://bakarlabs.berkeley.edu/innovation-zone-is-coming-to-downtown-berkeley/

Final Environmental Impact Report for the UC Berkeley Innovation Zone

https://berkeley.app.box.com/s/91edhligtp7zpbujy9522rst8hr7l1kx

BiolabWatch:

http://www.humanebiotech.org/biolab-watch