A bored military policeman built the first maximum-containment lab cabinet
Labs that handle dangerous microbes are graded from biosafety level 1, where handwashing may suffice, to level 4, with sealed suits and airlocks. The first maximum-containment cabinet was built in 1943 by a US Army soldier who had grown tired of guard duty and transferred to the sheet-metal shop.
A biosafety level is a package of precautions for keeping hazardous biological agents inside a laboratory. American rules for the four tiers come from the CDC, set out in a manual called Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories; the European Union defines the same levels in a directive, Canada calls them Containment Levels, and labs are often labelled P1 to P4, as in a P3 laboratory. At the bottom, hygiene and basic protective gear are enough. At the top come controlled airflow, multiple containment rooms, sealed containers, positive-pressure suits, strict procedures, heavy training and tight security. The stakes are real: Health Canada reported more than 5,000 recorded accidental laboratory infections worldwide up to 1999, and 190 deaths.
The field grew out of military research. The soldier, Hubert Kaempf Jr., built the Class III cabinet at Camp Detrick in Maryland under Arnold G. Wedum, who ran industrial health and safety at the US Army's biological warfare laboratories from 1944 to 1969. On 18 April 1955, fourteen representatives met at Detrick to share safety experience across the Army's three main biological warfare labs, in sessions limited to top security clearance.
Openness came gradually. Unclassified sessions were added from 1957, and in 1964 the conference met for the first time at a government site unconnected to biological weapons. Other federal agencies joined, then universities, hospitals and industry from 1966, and in 1984 the American Biological Safety Association was formally founded; by 2008 it had some 1,600 members.
Other countries built their own systems. In 1977 the Australian Academy of Science asked the CSIRO's Australian Animal Health Laboratory to review American and British containment rules. Its engineers drafted standards for each level, which became the basis of Australian legislation. The laboratory itself, judged substantially beyond P4, opened in 1985 at a cost of 185 million Australian dollars.
Source: Biosafety level
