When the foot-and-mouth virus, apparently leaked from the Pirbright animal health research laboratory in Surrey, was detected at a nearby farm last summer, a 3km exclusion zone was set up around the site. Imagine a similar containment strategy being used for a lethal human virus leaked from a lab near King's Cross station. As a recent letter to Nature pointed out, the zone "would reach 10 Downing Street and quarantine most of the UK government's decision-makers."
There is no such lab. But there could be soon. The Medical Research Council has decided to move its National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR)—which studies infectious diseases such as bird flu—from Mill Hill in outer north London to King's Cross. It will be linked to UCL in an effort to give the lab a more clinically aware culture and help it keep pace with cutting-edge research. The plan has been bitterly contested. NIMR staff are said to be unhappy at the prospect of being uprooted from a 47-acre site and squeezed into overcrowded central London. An independent review by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2004 concluded that the move would not be cost-effective and that its rationale was unclear.
But there are also concerns about what the move will mean for the containment facilities used to study emerging infections. As Pirbright has shown, leaks do not exist only in the lurid imagination of thriller-writers. The NIMR move will look a lot more attractive, however, if a bid by a consortium of medical research bodies to set up a huge new site in the Euston area succeeds. The MRC, UCL, Cancer Research UK and the Wellcome Trust are bidding for a 3.5-acre site being sold by the government near the British Library, in order to set up the British Library International Science Site, (Bliss). If they get it, the new NIMR would find itself in a science super-hub.
All the same, worries over biosecurity will remain. The US is fretting about this issue, largely because of the massive expansion in research centres studying pathogens following the anthrax attacks in late 2001. Those incidents flooded the biosecurity industry with research funds: $41m from the US National Institutes of Health in 2001, $1.6bn last year. As a result, there are now more than 400 labs working with the deadliest organisms and poisons, some apparently without sufficient experience or training.
This frenzy of research, stimulated by incidents that killed precisely five people, is a little bizarre. Not only does it create "soft" targets for terrorists, who could never hope to get close to fortress-like military research sites, but it also multiplies the chances of accidents. One such mishap, by a group at Texas A&M University working on bioweapon agents, led to a worker contracting the bacterial disease brucellosis in 2006.
In early October, members of congress asked whether this expansion of biosecurity labs was making life less rather than more safe for US citizens. The Associated Press has identified over 100 biosecurity lapses since 2003, and the Government Accountability Office found that there was poor monitoring of labs handling dangerous organisms and poisons. Part of the problem seems to be that it is hard even to find out what the regulations are—like most national security issues, the area is shrouded in a culture of secrecy.
Innovation starts with the kids
Surveys of British scientific innovation usually begin with the lament that the country has an outstanding research record but fails dismally to convert it to commercial products. Not any more, says David Sainsbury, former science minister, in "The Race to the Top," a new independent review of the government's science and innovation policies. "We are beginning to see the growth of exciting high-technology clusters around many of our world-class research universities," he says. It's true that British universities can no longer be called ivory towers.
Sainsbury's argument is sound: faced with cheap labour costs in developing countries (where about a third of manufacturing exports originate), it makes sense to focus instead on high-value goods and industries. Among Sainsbury's key recommendations are that the government's technology strategy board (TSB) take a leading role in supporting innovation, as well as targeted support for nascent high-tech companies and increased international collaboration. Gordon Brown has already responded by promising £1bn to the TSB. But talk of "knowledge transfer" means little if you're not producing the knowledge in the first place, which is why some people have put particular emphasis upon Sainsbury's call for a campaign to revitalise science, technology, engineering and maths teaching in schools. Selling science to kids: that's a tough one.
Titan: like Cumbria in November
New images of the methane lakes of Saturn's moon Titan from Nasa's Cassini mission are a further stunning glimpse of this world. It's been claimed that lake-dappled Titan looks a little like northern Minnesota, but the perpetual low cloud and drizzle make it sound increasingly like Cumbria in November—except about 200 degrees colder and with rain made of liquefied natural gas.
