Courtesy of the CDC
The September 11 attacks and five anthrax-related deaths later in the fall of 2001 made it clear that the United States was vunerable to terrorist actions. Those events also caught the nation immediately short of the high-level biocontainment lab space needed to develop antibioweapon vaccines and drug treatments.
Since then, the US Congress has approved plans for the National Institutes of Health to spend as much as $500 million on new biosafety space over the next few years,1 and other federal agencies hope to receive as much as another $1.2 billion from Congress for new space they have planned, for a total of $1.7 billion. The federal biolab build-out is massive and unprecedented. NIH plans to build 8,082 square meters of the highest-level space, 20 times as much as its 390 square meters of existing usable space. The Army, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and ...
