In all the mess surrounding the infection of a laboratory worker with Escherichia coli O157:H7 at a USDA laboratory,[1,2] I am saddened to see the level of oversight of these dangerous experiments at federal institutions. I work at a university, where all experiments involving potential human or animal pathogens must be approved by the institutional biosafety committee, which is true of any institutions that receive National Institutes of Health or National Science Foundation support. I am sure that the experiment in question never would have been approved in my own university, where I have been the interim chair of the institutional biosafety committee for the past two years.