Psst! A lab has been privatized

New Mexico Business Journal, Feb, 1997 by Larry Spohn

No, the test case is not Sandia or Los Alamos National Laboratories, those billion-dollar nuclear weapon behemoths that help keep the local economy humming. Breathe easy. Even with all that Washington chatter about abolishing DOE, it's a safe bet that Sandia and Los Alamos will be around as long as the nation's nuclear arsenal is hot.

Rather, this is a small but significant experiment at an inconspicuous laboratory known as ITRI, short for Inhalation Toxicology Research Institute. Some say I-try, some call it It-tree. Regardless, chances are you haven't heard of it or the experiment. DOE's announcement that it had agreed to privatize ITRI barely got a mention in the local press and went largely ignored by the national media last October. It is the first DOE lab to be privatized.

ITRI is not an in-your-face place. It has done its work quietly on Kirtland Air Force Base in about as remote an area as there is out there. It's past Sandia, past the Air Force Phillips Lab, past the famous wooden test trestle and the research nuclear reactor. It's beyond the Tijeras Arroyo, the Air Force horse stables and golf course, DOE's security guard training center and all the secret and semi-secret installations that house Sandia or Phillips experiments in the shadow of the Manzano mountains.

In fact, ITRI is at the end of the paved road, just this side of Isleta Pueblo. The location is understandable, considering DOE's predecessor created ITRI in 1965 to study the impact of plutonium and other radioactive elements on the respiratory system.

Unlike some other infamous experiments involving human beings, ITRI exclusively used animals, primarily beagle hounds. The animals were exposed to aerosols of radioactive materials to get the answers that were paramount in understanding the health effects of inhaling even small quantities of radiation-emitting chemicals.

Such experiments were basic to setting protective standards for human exposures. The time, you may recall, was the height of the Cold War. The United States' nuclear weapons complex was running in high gear with hundreds of workers handling rather nasty radioactive stuff, including plutonium.

To make a long - some might say distinguished, while others would say sordid - story short, ITRI established an international scientific reputation in the field on airborne radiation toxicology. Over the course of the last three decades, it used thousands of animals to establish the thresholds of radiation-induced respiratory health effects. In the process, it also established significant expertise in respiratory disease, including lung cancer.

However, with the warming of the Cold War and DOE suddenly asked to contribute to deficit reduction, ITRI's defense mission was deemed complete. Easily, it is the most expendable asset of the nuclear weapons complex. Yet its unique expertise ought not to be lost, scientists, bureaucrats and politicians agreed. Neither should the Albuquerque economy suffer the loss of its 145 jobs or its $15 million budget.

Solution: turn it into an independent nonprofit lab that could exploit its expertise in the private and government research marketplace. In a few strokes of the pen, ITRI ownership was transferred over to The Lovelace institutes, a private, nonprofit, biomedical research organization, which incidentally had operated the lab under DOE contract since its inception.

What's changed? ITRI scientists, who had long felt they could compete in the open market if it weren't for DOE's shackles, now have that opportunity. They are pursuing air toxics research contracts with the Army, the Environmental Protection Agency and unnamed corporations. Other targets include the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute.

The lab does have a cushion, but not a big one. With DOE committed to funding remaining defense-related research on a declining basis, ITRI will have to hustle. In the fifth year of that arrangement, DOE's contribution to the ITRI budget shrinks to just $4 million. ITRI Director Joe Mauderly, a veterinarian by training, says there were no other options. It was either sink as DOE funding ran out, or swim in the world of competitive research. He says the lab has unique assets and capabilities, which in one instance attracted top human lung transplant surgeons who used ITRI animal operating rooms to test and perfect their procedures in animal models.

At stake is more than local money and jobs. ITRI researchers believe they can develop technology that could help the Army detect airborne chemical or biological weapons, and may be able to help molecular biologists see the early biochemical signatures of lung cancer and perhaps one day develop drug countermeasures that attack cancer in the earliest stages.

Beyond the money needed to sustain these lofty goals, ITRI may also need public support. Already it is being challenged by local animal rights activists who want the ITRI experiment ended period. To them it's the same old ITRI, except now it is vulnerable outside DOE's protective mantle.