Team:CCA SanDiego/Safety

Safety in iGEM

We took safety to heart when working on our project. We purposefully designed our experiment computationally so that it would not only be low budget and effective, but also safe and eco-conscious. Using VMD and NAMD, we are able to simulate the entirety of our lab work before entering a true wet lab, eliminating our contact with hazardous biochemicals and materials.

In present day, when we are able to sample deadly viruses and keep them in a refrigerator, a great need for structure and organization has risen within the scientific community, and this has been met. Labs are assigned biosafety levels (BSL’s) based on a set of factors such as the probability of harm occurring in the lab, the extent possible damage would be, what biohazards are present, etc. For each BSL up the lab is assigned further constraints and procedures to follow. Labs that run little to no risk of harm to their members are considered to be BSL1; one that works with potentially dangerous chemicals or viruses and pose a moderate threat to their workers and environment (e.g. a lab that performs routine/clinical work with HIV) are assigned a BSL2, and so on. Labs running the greatest risk of creating biological warfare in the general population -- NIH laboratories working with the most dangerous viruses such as ebola and Lassa -- are given a BSL4 ranking and are riddled with a set of rules to follow so constricting, all in the attempt to prevent potential acts of bioterrorism. However, this severe structure is not always enough to shelter the world from biological warfare.

While the present population seems to be largely concerned with bioterrorists releasing a new wave of small pox upon them, it is not uncommon for severe biohazards to occur in a safe laboratory following the proper protocol. In March of 2013, the maximum security Galveston National Laboratory reported that a vial of a potential bioterror agent had simply gone missing from the high security freezer it had been kept in. The lab’s director followed protocol to the tee and called in the CDC (Center for Disease Control) to further inspect the matter. When the team was flown into the Texas lab, they agreed that it was unlikely the agent had been stolen, rather, simply misplaced. Similarly, in April of 2014, a major biomedical research lab in France, the Pasteur Institute, misplaced 2,300 samples of the deadly SARS virus. Once again, there was not believed to be an underlying bioterrorist threat, rather the Institute’s director reported that the most likely cause was human error.

When dealing with highly dangerous materials, there is simply no guarantee that following standard protocol will protect the lab members from the harms. Implementing a structure also does not mean every lab member will follow verbatim the code. While throwing biohazardous material down the drain instead of properly disposing of it in a designated bin does not have the same implications as misplacing a deadly virus, it can have a negative impact on the environment. When these chemicals are disposed of down the drain, they often end up in local bodies of water, and can have devastating effects on the ecosystem. Not only that, certain chemicals can corrode the piping within the building and release toxic fumes. In this way, even the smallest errors have large implications on the safety of the lab workers.