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.

Twenty-five years after taking a job at BU during college, he's still there. Behind his desk hangs ink sketches of pretty campus buildings. On the wall hangs a blueprint, the "Institutional Master Plan" for BioSquare, including the new lab site. On his desk one day last May sat a large jar of ibuprofen.

A couple of blocks from Tuohey's office, on Washington Street, Ken Olken and his wife will be able to watch construction of the Biosafety Level 4 lab from their sixth-floor apartment's window. Olken is a retired textiles worker. His daughter's family lives a block away. "In textiles, we handled powdered dyes," he says. "In many ways you control them the way you control airborne biologics, using negative air pressure."

Olken attended dozens of Tuohey's community meetings. Olken says he went originally out of curiosity, but kept attending to help himself form a decision on whether to support the biolab. He had two main questions: "First, what would be taking place there? I had heard a lot about weaponizing biologics. Then I wanted to know the mechanics of the systems that would be used to prevent this stuff from getting out."

Recalling the sessions, Olken says, "The medical staff that does the work is at the highest risk. [Who] they contact&mdash:their families, friends and neighbors, regardless of distance from the facility&mdash:are at the second highest risk. Then the neighborhood."

Olken sounds remarkably similar to Tuohey when, sitting at his desk with the ibuprofen, he laid out the risks the lab presented to various constituents. It was as if Olken had internalized what Tuohey had told him. "I found Kevin to be a very good communicator," Olken says. "He listened, and answered all my questions." Ultimately, Olken decided to support the lab.

Tuohey's meetings were so effective the concept was expanded. The medical center team set up a Biosafety Lab Advisory Group, comprising 20 neighborhood people, both supporters and opponents. He also held "office hours" to answer questions, and he says he continues to meet with 22 interested citizens groups in the South End. All told, he has held more than 250 meetings with more than 5,000 attendees.

Risk Plays Out in Public

Not everyone agreed with Olken. Many others who attended Tuohey's meetings remained steadfast opponents of the new lab. A Roxbury group called Safety Net was one of several community groups that had mobilized to stop the lab, which by April 2004 was called the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory, or NEIDL, unfortunately pronounced "needle." Another group, called Alternatives for Community & Environment (ACE), used aggressive political tactics. "The strategy was to raise as much doubt at [NIAID] that this [lab] would be a hard facility to get built in Boston, because of the opposition," Penn Loh, ACE's executive director, told The Boston Globe Magazine. The group focused on what it suggested was an air of secrecy around the project. For example, the original proposal for the project was slow to be made public, and when it was, the RFP made available in April 2004 was redacted to block descriptions of research at the lab. ACE seized on this, writing on its website, "There will be secret research performed at the [NEIDL]." BU flatly denies this. Tuohey says it's "completely untrue" and that all research done there will go through public review. But in a sense it doesn't matter who's right. ACE made the suggestion, and rumors of secret research coming to the NEIDL persist to this day, which Tuohey still must defend against in presentations and community meetings.