Following up, part 3

To ring out 2004, The Scientist revisited 2004's best-read stories. For more updates, click here and here.

Biolab fights continue

In May, The Scientistreported that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had committed $500 million to build 20 times as much of the Biosafety Level Four (BSL-4) space as it already had, without bothering to conduct a needs assessment first. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US Army, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were all hoping to build to build their own high-containment labs too, at an additional price up to $1.2 billion.

Since then, Congress has appropriated $140 million of that billion plus toward a new DHS BSL-4 lab. As our May article was going to press, DHS announced it would build a new biocontainment facility at Fort Detrick, Md., detailed plans for which were then discovered in a PowerPoint ...