Front and Center: Security at Boston's Infectious Disease Research Lab

When controversy hit, Kevin Tuohey became the public face of a high-profile plan to study deadly diseases in Boston. To succeed, the security director would have to become part diplomat, part great communicator.

It's a leadership role more security executives are playing as issues of risk migrate to a central place in our politics and culture. Security leaders will find themselves in Tuohey's position, tackling outward-facing roles, meeting with key constituents, testifying in hearings and speaking to the media.

Hemanshu Nigam, for example, was named CSO at MySpace.com in April partly to assuage parents unsettled by media reports of online predators associated with the site. Nigam's background was in consumer security outreach. And during the recent controversy over a Dubai-based company taking over management of some U.S. ports, analysis that shaped public opinion came from security experts like Stephen E. Flynn, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow, Graham Kee of the Vancouver Port Authority and Dennis Treece of Massport.

At BU Medical Center, the response to the rabbit fever outbreak had the medical center leaning on Tuohey to fulfill this new kind of role. "This will be a huge blow," Tuohey remembers thinking as he anticipated the public's response to the rabbit fever cases. "It will take a lot of time and effort to explain factually. I was prepared for a lot of, See! See! We told you!"

The medical center wanted him right in front of it all. "Early on, we didn't always bring Kevin with us to meetings," says Ellen Berlin, BU Medical Center's director of corporate communications. "But we found the issues that gave people angst were Kevin's issues. And he is a natural. In many ways, Kevin is the face of the project."

The Site of a New Lab

A chain-link fence wrapped with green fabric surrounds the site on Albany Street, between Boston's South End and Roxbury neighborhoods, where the Biosafety Level 4 lab will rise. Tuohey stops at a gap in the fence and, opening his arms to the controversial plot, says, "Here it is."

His tone borders on apology, for the site on this brisk April morning is just an old vacant parking lot. It's an unremarkable urban blot, a typo in the neighborhood sentence.

But the site itself isn't the point. It's the process for picking this place to build a biolab. Biosafety Level 4s are like nuclear power plants. They are rare, most people at least can understand an argument for their existence and necessity, but no one wants them nearby because of their risks.

This site's backyard is Boston's gentrifying South End and, farther down, the Roxbury section. More than 50,000 people work and live within a few square miles, and a million people are within 10 square miles. Some residents live just yards away, across Albany Street, in rows of rejuvenated brownstones. To the site's south is a county jail and a half-built parking garage. The sprawling Boston Flower Exchange cooperative of wholesale florists borders on the east. Beyond that runs the Southeast Expressway, one of the busiest highways in the United States.