When I returned to Galveston after Hurricane Ike, one of my first stops was the new Galveston National Laboratory.
It was an amazing sight on an island that had just been mauled by a terribly destructive hurricane. The state-of-the-art lab building looked untouched.
When I talked with the crew who rode out the storm inside GNL, I learned the building had done more than just survive unscathed.
Its freezers had preserved samples from other UTMB laboratories that might otherwise have been lost in Ike’s aftermath. And its large emergency generators were supplying power to nearby labs whose backup power sources had unexpectedly failed.
Two months before its formal dedication, Galveston National Laboratory was already at work, and it was performing phenomenally.
Now, with Ike’s immediate trials behind us, we’re eager to get started using this extraordinary laboratory for its true purpose — meeting the challenges posed to our nation by emerging infectious diseases and the threat of bioterrorism.
With its help, we hope to come to a deeper understanding of how viruses and bacteria cause infection and disease. We want to gain insight into the critical pathways that lead to sickness and death. And we want to learn to diagnose illness sooner and block its spread — or prevent it from ever taking hold to begin with.
This effort will create the foundation for the development of new vaccines, drugs and diagnostic tests that we hope will significantly contribute to the formation of a dynamic and vibrant biotech industry in Galveston and in the greater Houston area.
To accomplish this, we will make full use of GNL’s new containment facilities, which enable us to safely and securely investigate the most challenging pathogens.
We will couple this discovery research with work supported by contracts with the pharmaceutical industry, biotech start-ups and others to test their products and those we develop ourselves on live, virulent organisms.
To succeed, we will need the best and brightest researchers from across the nation and around the world. Some of them are already on the UTMB campus — they’re the reason this facility was built here. We will also be collaborating with partners of other academic centers and industry, drawn by the promise of GNL and the chance to be part of one of the greatest infectious-disease research centers in the world.
To ensure that our staff and collaborating scientists are fully trained to work under our strict containment conditions, we are establishing a national biocontainment laboratory training center at UTMB.
We anticipate the center becoming a global resource for training of the next generation of high-containment-laboratory workers.
With the help of our many partners in government and industry, and the strong commitment of the UTMB community, we believe we can bring Galveston National Laboratory to its full potential and make it a tremendous asset for the future of Galveston.
James LeDuc is deputy director of Galveston National Laboratory, director of UTMB’s program on global health and also Robert E. Shope chair in global health.
