BU biolab researchers on Albany Street create Frankencovid in bid to see why omicron might be causing less severe cases

Every research institution is regulated by research oversight boards which in turn have to follow various federal ethical and legal guidelines. Since this is a study in mice it would fall under an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee as opposed to an Institutional Review Board. The IACUC and IRB review all research that is occurring at an institution for things like safety, ethics, risk to human participants, risk to human investigators, risk to animal subjects, animal welfare, credentials of the lab staff, whether the project will actually learn anything scientifically, whether the possible outcomes are worth the suffering of the animal subjects ethically, how exactly samples are handled, stored, discarded, etc.

This adds extra protection because 1) the oversight board also serves to protect the institution. If they approve something sloppy and a new COVID strain entered the wild as result, there's an immediate liability there and it's very easy to identify that it was negligent to let the study happen, because all the records rules involving research. 2) These boards are made up of other researchers - it's a big boost professionally to serve and if your board was the one that released COVID Strain-X you've seriously, seriously fucked yourself as a single professional. 3) If you're the kind of scientist who's profit driven and sloppy and unethical, it's much much easier to go work for a private org than a university in terms of the oversight you're held to. BU doing this is different than, say, one of the dozens of fly-by-night bioscience start ups.

I do believe a paper trail was dropped here and that needs to be addressed but someone just strolling out of the place wearing their lab jacket is just not happening. I could see a concern with researchers themselves getting infected unknowingly somehow because weird stuff can happen but even if the lab was out in the boonies of Maine, if that person lives in a populated area it will spread.

A greater concern for medical transfer of germs are these medical people who wear scrubs into and out of work. I thought the entire point of scrubs was to have clean surfaces , if you wear your scrubs when you run across the street to the hot dog hut and then walk back into the hospital you are dragging stuff out of the building and into it.

These biolabs though, they have all sorts of extra protections. I am more concerned than most of the posters here but my concern is not that some researcher is going to walk out the door with a petri dish stuck to their shoe.

Please only comment on subjects you are better informed on. This random movie plot you've envisioned cannot happen. The "idiots" you envision are in the comment section of Uhub, not working at a lab where they've already designed around this situation and prevented it before the lab was even built. Stop projecting your irrational fears onto the world, there's enough to be afraid of, but this isn't it

Hi there! I actually do personally work in this high containment facility, specifically in the highest containment level, and if you're interested in learning about what safety measures we have in place to prevent exactly the sort of problem you're thinking of, I'd love to suggest some resources with verified information that can help alleviate these sorts of concerns. I agree that the scenario you're imagining sounds horrific, and we think so too, which is why we have a lot - and I mean a whole fucking lot - of layers of physical containment, protective equipment, overlapping policies, and regulation in place very specifically to ensure that cannot happen. And we've got a lot of information available online so that the safety measures don't have to be a mystery; these are just a few of them:

First off, we've got a cool video episode feature in a podcast called TWiV (this week in virology) that details the layers of containment we use to prevent any accidental release of the pathogens we handle. This actually shows what the inside of our containment facilities look like, as well as the type of personal protective equipment we wear to handle them (no spoilers, but it's a lot more than just a lab coat - more like a space suit that gets car-wash-style hosed down with powerful disinfectant after every single lab entry).

Another place you can find information on our safety and security policies is right on our website, where you can see our safety plans and the material covered by every institutional biosafety committee meeting.

Also, if you're interested in learning more about what research we actually do in our big, weird, admittedly intimidating-looking building, you can read more about it here. We work really hard on the research we do here, and most of us (grad students like myself, at least) don't get paid very well for it, so we're really just busting our asses in the lab because we love the science and we really genuinely care about understanding infectious diseases to hopefully save some lives in the future.

As a parting note on this topic, I will honestly say that I don't think we as a facility do as much as we probably should to better educate and clarify to the surrounding community how our containment systems and safety measures work, nor the nature of our research, and although community outreach and similar programs are way above my pay grade and not really within my power to influence or improve, I do really hope that the reaction to this story helps prompt the powers higher up to devote more of our resources to those things. I firmly believe that everyone living near a lab like ours should have the resources made readily available to them to understand what we do and how we ensure that it's safe, and if you have feedback on how we can better communicate that information to the public, please let our public relations people know - there's contact information on our website!