This morning, the NewYorker.com published my story “The Risks of Building Too Many Bio Labs.” Naturally, I’m pretty excited about finally getting into print with a diaeresis—the thing that looks like an umlaut—on the word “coördinator.”
Seriously, though, this is an important story about biosecurity that I hope you’ll read and share. When I started working on it more than two years ago, I had no idea we’d be publishing during a global pandemic, but here we are.
The number of high-containment labs in the United States has grown without central planning or oversight since 9/11. We need them to research pathogens like Ebola, Zika, and the new coronavirus. But each one also poses some risk, as a history of lab breaches demonstrates. Hopefully as we react to the current biosecurity crisis, we can learn some lessons from the past.
This piece is a co-production by The New Yorker and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Full story here.
Elisabeth Eaves
While travel writing was my first literary love, I’m also a journalist, essayist, science writer, editor, and fiction writer. I was born and raised in Vancouver, lived in Cairo, London, and Paris, spent 10 years in New York City, and now reside in Seattle.