That’s the main finding of a new Global Biolabs report, due to be published next month, based on a global database of highest-security labs, known as BSL-4, published for the first time in 2021. At that time, Lentzos said, “there were a lot of open questions,” and she and Koblentz were inundated with questions from journalists and policymakers: “So how many rooms are there? experiment? Where do I get the list? And of course, there is no list. There is no official international list of these laboratories. There is no international watchdog.” They find themselves referring journalists to Wikipedia, which they agree is “pathetic”.
When they first compiled their database, in May 2021 there were 59 BSL-4 labs in operation or under construction around the world. In an update to be published next month, less than a year later, that number will increase to 69, largely thanks to the announcement of new labs planned. The number only surpassed 10 just before the turn of the millennium; it has more than doubled since 2010.
As pointed out by Koblentz and Lentzos, not all of these laboratories are particularly concerned with the safety aspect, nor the fact that more and more laboratories are being built. Many are quite small and perform diagnostic work relatively by heart at a hospital or university. Size and safety aren’t necessarily indicative of risk either, they say: There’s nothing to worry about about a BSL-4 treatment blood test for Ebola and you could be doing potentially dangerous work. found in the BSL-3 and BSL-2 lab, and if you’re working with relatively benign pathogens that can grow more contagious or deadly in the lab.
Given the value of their new knowledge of the virus, Koblentz and Lentzos are careful to describe them as being not unscientific but supportive of research, and even advocating some potentially risky research, assuming surveillance. appropriate and cost-benefit calculations are appropriate. carefully executed. “But there are very clear risks that arise from these labs, and we’re building more globally and in places where there’s not as much oversight as in the places where the labs are not,” says Lentzos. This was built according to tradition. “The more research you do on the pandemic,” adds Koblentz, “it is likely to lead to more accident risks.”
How can we limit that potential? For starters, a single coherent national framework in which all such studies would be registered and subject to scrutiny and approval based on careful assessments of risks and benefit. Ideally, we could also have global governance on the same model; automated investigation of new outbreaks, with the expectation of international cooperation, as Kane has called for; clearer guidelines for the “middle” lab categories sometimes referred to as “BSL-3+”; The new safety standards for research in this area, Koblentz said, are now “almost completely unregulated”; and a new culture of research practice, Lentzos suggests, emphasizing safety and transparency over risk taking in the laboratory.
