This is kind of creepy

[Guest guest]

The rest is at the site:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?

f=/c/a/2008/02/02/BA81UQIOK.DTL

Top-secret Livermore anti-germ lab opens

Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor

Saturday, February 2, 2008

A high-security laboratory where deadly microbes are being grown by

scientists seeking defenses against terrorist attacks began operating

in Livermore last week without public announcement, and opponents

said Friday that they will go to federal court in an effort to close

the facility down.

Built inside the closed campus of the Lawrence Livermore National

Laboratory, the facility has been controversial ever since it was

first proposed by homeland security officials more than five years

ago. Tri-Valley CARES, the East Bay watchdog group that has long

fought nuclear weapons research there, has led the fight against it

with protests and legal actions.

The facility is known as a Biosafety-level 3 laboratory where highly

trained workers, high-tech airlocks and extremely rigorous safety

measures are required by federal rules in order to contain any of

more than 40 potentially lethal disease-causing bacteria, viruses and

fungi stored inside.

The National Nuclear Security Administration, an agency of the Energy

Department, which oversees the Livermore site, announced Monday only

that it had " granted approval " for Livermore to begin operating its

new biosafety laboratory.

But the announcement did not disclose that the facility had already

opened and that its scientists had begun working there the previous

Friday - a fact that immediately outraged the lab's opponents.

Schwartz, the staff attorney for Tri-Valley CARES, said he

will file suit in federal District Court next week to shut down the

facility on the grounds that the final environmental impact statement

published by the lab's oversight agency was inadequate and that

another supporting document was released without public hearings in

violation of the Energy Department's own rules.

In October, the Ninth District Court of Appeals in San Francisco had

overruled an earlier federal court decision in support of the

operation of the Livermore facility. The appeals court required

officials to prepare a new environmental statement, including an

assessment of the possibility that a suicide attack by terrorists

could breach the facility's walls and allow killer germs to spread

beyond the lab.

In response, the security agency filed a document that said such an

attack would be " highly unlikely, " and that it " found no significant

impact " on the public or the environment from operations at the germ

research facility.

A spokesman for the Energy Department's nuclear security agency at

Livermore told The Chronicle that its office manager approved the

final revised environmental documents on Jan. 25, and that scientists

began work at the lab the same day.

Asked why the press release on Monday did not disclose that the

facility was already operating, the spokesman said " because we needed

the time to physically copy the documents and place them in the

public reading rooms as well as post them on the Web. "

Gard, director of the new facility, said Friday his staff is now

growing live cultures of many disease-causing organisms that could be

used by terrorists in enemy biological warfare attacks and for which

laboratory scientists will seek to develop countermeasures.

Understanding the phenomenon of resistance to antibiotics is a high

priority, he said.

Among the microbes held in the laboratory are bacteria that cause

such highly dangerous and often deadly diseases as bubonic plague,

anthrax, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Q fever, tularemia and

brucellosis or undulant fever, Gard said.

But scientists in his lab will also be researching other microbes

unlikely to be used in terror attacks and that pose such major public

health problems as tuberculosis, flu, and SARS, the severe acute

respiratory syndrome that proved so deadly among elderly people in

China, he said.

E-mail Perlman at dperlman@....

This article appeared on page B - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle