by Prasannan Parthasarathi & Vicky Steinitz

For Klare Allen, the campaign against a proposed bioweapons research laboratory in Boston began four years ago with an anonymous phone call. It was March 2002 and the caller suggested she might be interested in attending a community meeting in the South End called by Boston University. As a community organizer for Safety Net, a group of residents in the housing developments in that area, she took the call seriously.

At that meeting she and Safety Net members learned that BU planned to build a biological research laboratory in their community. They were assured that there were many labs like it in the state, that there had never been an accident in them, and that there was nothing to worry about.

Their worries began a month later, when the anonymous caller alerted Klare to another meeting, this time with scientists at BU. There, she and Safety Net members were told that the laboratory was to be a special, high containment research facility (Biosafety Level 4 or BSL4) that was designed to study highly contagious diseases such as Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers that had no known cures.
Klare recalls asking “Are you planning to bring those diseases here to our neighborhood?” She was ignored and BU's head of the project added: “If you can get some competent residents here, we will talk with you.” Safety Net members left the meeting, gathered together in a circle, and pledged to do all in their power to stop the lab.

Boston is feeling the weight of US militarism. The Boston University lab is part of a massive US push to develop biological weapons. When George W. Bush came to office, 5% of the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) infectious disease budget went to biodefense. Today that figure is nearly 30%–a staggering sum of money. Correcting for inflation, biodefense research is receiving more funds every year than the Manhattan Project which produced the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Bush administration is selling its biological weapons program as purely defensive. The line between defense and offense is permeable when it comes to weapons, however, especially biological ones. For example, if the US develops a secret vaccine for Ebola, it would then be able to immunize its troops and then release the pathogen on a battlefield or against insurgents in Iraq.
Residents of Boston and surrounding towns have mounted fierce opposition to the Boston University lab, but the forces arrayed against them are formidable, including Boston's mayor, Tom Menino, Rep. Capuano, in whose Congressional district the lab falls, as well as Senators Kennedy and Kerry. They and other local politicians see the lab as a source of federal dollars, an amount that they claim will range from $1.5 to $2 billion over the next 20 years.

Nevertheless, five years after the anonymous phone calls, under the leadership of Safety Net, the Coalition to Stop the BU Bioterror Lab, has grown into a large and diverse opposition with representatives from most Boston neighborhoods as well as many cities and towns in the metropolitan area. The coalition includes community leaders, neighborhood associations, scientists, environmentalists, peace and justice activists, unions, churches, and national organizations that represent residents of color such as the NAACP and the League of United Latin American Citizens.
Coalition partners have joined for a variety of reasons:

The battle to stop the lab is being waged in many arenas. The Boston City Council is considering a ban on BSL4 labs and a bill has been introduced into the Massachusetts legislature that would open this and other labs in the state to regulation, thereby making secret research more difficult to conduct. The courts have considered law suits brought by community residents who oppose the placement of another high-risk facility in a neighborhood that is dotted with environmentally hazardous sites.
Biological researchers and public health experts have been active critics of the proposed laboratory and they have spoken out at public hearings and enumerated in writing the many inadequacies and omissions in the NIH and BU plans. Nurses, emergency medical technicians and fire-fighters have identified many weaknesses in the city's emergency preparation in case of an accident or a terrorist attack on the laboratory. Peace and justice activists from surrounding communities have succeeded in passing resolutions opposing the lab in their towns and cities.

In an important victory, a state judge ruled last summer that the environmental impact reviews that BU and NIH conducted were inadequate since they did not fully consider alternative sites or the dangers of the research and ordered additional reviews. A federal judge concurred with this ruling. While awaiting BU's and NIH's new environmental impact reviews, the Coalition is making its case against the lab to a brand new state administration headed by Deval Patrick, the first Democratic governor in 16 years and the first African-American governor in Massachusetts history.

If the BU biological weapons lab is built next to Roxbury, a largely minority and low-income neighborhood, it will be another case of environmental racism and injustice. It will also be another instance in which those without economic clout and with the wrong skin color pay the heaviest price for the US military machine. We are determined not to let that happen.

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Prasannan Parthasarathi and Vicky Steinitz are co-coordinators of the Bio-safety Legislative Committee of the Coalition to Stop the BU Bioterror Lab. Prasannan is on the Steering Committee of Newton Dialogues and a member of the board of Boston Mobilization. Vicky is one of the coordinators of Cambridge United for Justice with Peace. For more information, contact www.stopthebiolab.org.