Next week the FBI will provide my fingerprints to the Department of Justice and begin a background check to review my life activities. All my laboratory personnel will also be checked out. We do not work with anthrax, small pox, botulism or ricin. We are not palling around with terrorists.
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Tomorrow's Table for Nature by Pamela Ronald
On this web log I explore topics related to genetics, food and farming
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I am not palling around with terrorists
- Date:
- Wednesday, 17 Dec ember 2008 - 22:49 UTC
We work with a pathogen of rice called Xanthomonas oryze pv. oryzae that is newly listed as a select agent. It has been designated as a pathogen that can be turned into a bioweapon, despite broad scientific consensus that any plant-pathogenic bacterium realistically falls into this category.
Xoo is harmless to humans. So harmless in fact, that components of Xoo are regularly consumed by humans in chewing gum and ice cream. There is no evidence that it can be made into bio weapon to create a disease epidemic on our farmer’s fields. If such an epidemic was a serious possibility, it would already have occurred. This is clear because contaminated rice seed has been imported into California for the last 250 years and there has not been a single incidence of pathogen infection. Virtually all experts in the field believe that this pathogen, which is prevalent in humid regions of Asia, cannot survive in our hot, dry climate.
Xoo research, supported by the NIH, NSF and the USDA and published in leading journals, is directed at protecting the nation’s rice crop from disease. All available scientific evidence indicates that the current quarantine restrictions are adequate to prevent an outbreak. The scientific evidence is backed by the perfect safety record from over 20 years of research. Yet this research is now crippled, preventing the very service we seek to provide.
Not a single scientist has come forward to suggest that this pathogen poses a threat to US rice production. Why then has this pathogen suddenly been listed as a select agent, a potential bioweapon?
No one knows – not the USDA regulators themselves, not leading plant pathologists in the nation (who provided science-based information to the USDA last year indicating that the current strict quarantine conditions were adequate), not the university of officials who are tasked with ramping up security.
Our research has suddenly become much, much more expensive. The university must pay 5-6 personnel to monitor our lab. The federal government is paying another 5-6 people to carry out inspections. The local government must carry out fingerprinting. The FBI must carry out weeks of background checks. My research staff and myself must spend hours devising procedures to prevent terrorists from stealing our cultures. Tempers are short because there is uncertainty about which seemingly arbitrary guidelines is needed. If we overlook 20 years of research will be destroyed. Some of us may go to prison.
This is an example of how taxpayers are spending millions dollars to strengthen to prevent bioterrorists from accessing laboratory material that is benign.
We urge the Obama administration and our new secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack, to return to a science-based decision-making process and delist this pathogen.
Last updated: Wednesday, 17 Dec 2008 - 22:49 UTC
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Comments
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What? This is so absurd. I’m sorry you have to go through all that. You’d probably have had an easier time as a chemist, working with actual dangerous materials.
Thanks Eva. I may need to change professions soon, so appreciate the suggestion! Maybe I can support myself as a blogger…
Your fingerprints will join mine and countless million others who have entered the USA as non-citizens in recent years. At least I get in on visa waiver. My Chinese and other non-favoured nation nationality students sometimes cannot get in to report their research on dangerous subjects such as inkjet printing and the mechanics of materials.
Nice to know that I am in good company!
Background checks and fingerprints are also required for those who need access to a GammaCell irradiator with a cesium 137 source (perhaps with more justification than for the other examples given, especially the potential inkjet WMD).
yes that sounds like it could actually be weaponized…
Pamela, this is awful, I am so sorry. The completely helpless feeling of your livelihood being threatened by something you have absolutely no influence on! And how scary that nobody even seems to know why your organism got listed in the first place!!
Brian, you may know this 2002 article in Nature – amazing how long the issues with travel/academic exchange have been around already.
I seriously hope reason will return to all this soon. Pamela, I hope you won’t have to consider leaving home if you don’t want to, but I’m sure there would be opportunities in other countries?
My useless sympathy is yours, Pamela! I know what it is to butt heads against arbitrary-seeming administrative rules drawn haphazardly from applying laws that are not actually really applicable to your research. But I am now particularly thankful that things are not at the point they are with your group.
This idea of running as hard as you can (and paying for it, to boot!) on a treadmill just to stay where you were to begin with, or get swept off the machine altogether, is not foreign to many of us. But this is particularly egregious.
Mind you the Department of Homeland Security (or whatever it is called – I find homeland a disturbingly terminology redolent of fascist symbolism such as fatherland) may be on to something re WMD. If the pen is mightier than the sword, inkjet must be somewhat further up the scale.
Thanks for your empathetic comments. I feel better already.
A good friend and colleague who grew up on China and is now a professor here in the US, had this to say
“I fully agree with your reasonable complains. It reminds us what the Chinese communist government did to the universities and their professors during the Culture Revolution in 1960s. But this has happened in a free and democratic country. We need a scientific explanation and reexamination for the listing from the new USDA adminitration to be headed by the former governor of Iowa”.
We recently all had to be “background checked” at Nature Publishing Group, owing to change in legislation with which the company has to comply. This involved some of us who have been here for 24 years (me) or 21 years (Henry) having to have our passports photocopied to prove our right to work here. Our experience is certainly not as bad as yours, Pamela, and I very much sympathise with you. However, it certainly leaves a nasty taste in the mouth – for questionable end-result, if security and safety is the goal of the exercise.