As the infrastructure of the government’s national-security programs has grown, in fact, institutions like Harvard and MIT have begun new research partnerships with governmental organizations.
“There’s a greater sense now of what some of the channels of priorities will be for new research,” Casey says.
The newly formed Department of Homeland Security wields a hefty budget of $850 million, and has begun put this funding behind various projects.
President Bush additionally proposed in his Jan. 28 State of the Union Address a program titled “Project BioShield” that would appropriate almost $6 billion not only to purchase ample countermeasures for major hazardous agents, but to fund research on biological agents through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a governmental organization devoted to biomedical innovation.
In addition to funding research on its own campus in Maryland, the NIH provides grants for “extramural” research at a number of other facilities, and HMS is one of the greatest recipients of NIH grants.
Last year, NIH hosted the first global biosecurity conference in Las Vegas, bringing together researchers, physicians, and biohazard “first responders,” and this October, HMS and the School of Public Health will collaborate for a second Bio-Security conference in Washington, D.C.
BioShield—and the influx of money it has brought to higher education—has also been a boon and enticement for several local universities.
Boston University Chancellor and acting President John Silber announced early last month that B.U. had submitted a proposal to build a new research facility with BioShield funding.
The proposed research site would be of the BSL-4-class containment—the highest degree of security available, reserved for work with the most hazardous of pathogens. B.U.’s proposed facility would be the only BSL-4 site in the Boston area.
B.U. will learn in the fall whether it receives grant funding for the project—and if approved the facility could be ready for use by 2008. But a “good number” of other local institutions have already submitted adjunct proposals expressing their plans to use the facility, according to the university’s Director of Corporate Communications Ellen Berlin.
HMS was among these institutions: a BSL-4 facility would allow HMS researchers to extend their present work on components of anthrax—a promising effort to derive an effective post-infection therapy—to work with the entire virus, according to HMS Associate Dean for Public Affairs Don Gibbons.
HMS researchers have also submitted proposals for BioShield funding for a BSL-3 laboratory—a slightly lower-security facility that would allow researchers to work with the tuberculosis and HIV viruses. Unlike the BSL-4 facility, this proposed facility would not be unique to the area, and a few already exist in the Longwood area.
Such recent relationship-building between the government and the nation’s universities represents the result of ongoing discussions about U.S. security since Sept. 11—discussions that emphasize universities’ opportunity to contribute to national security as educators and innovators.
“At some point we have to stop talking and actually do something,” Marburger told researchers who attended the conference. “We have an untapped reservoir of intellectual power in this country that needs to be tapped.”
—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu.