Back in May, the White House issued an executive order to strengthen biological research safety and quickly drew the attention of scientists and the biosafety community. The push was aimed at addressing past lapses in oversight. In 2015, a Department of Defense lab mistakenly shipped anthrax to facilities around the world. Four years later, the USAMRIID’s high containment lab was suspended due to failed waste decontamination and poor biosafety measures. Debate over Covid-19’s origins renewed calls for tighter oversight of high-risk research.
But past policy responses have often created more confusion than clarity, with researchers uncertain about which oversight rules apply to their work. Now, some are revisiting an old idea: centralizing the nation’s most dangerous experiments in a few federally run labs. But centralization will not solve biosafety and biosecurity challenges on its own and comes with significant downsides.
The idea of centralizing biological research isn’t new. In the early 1980s, following the growing concern about the risks of uncontrolled possession and accidental release of live smallpox virus, the World Health Organization used this model to restrict all live smallpox virus work to two sites: the CDC in the United States and State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology (VECTOR) in Russia. More than 40 years later, this centralization model for smallpox virus research continues.
Working with dangerous pathogens is essential to protecting public health. It helps scientists understand diseases, develop diagnostics, and discover treatments. Even controversial research aimed at enhancing pathogen transmissibility and virulence can yield valuable insights into how pathogens naturally evolve and how to prepare for future pandemics. Still, questions about how to balance risk and benefit, as well as what safeguards are needed, remain unanswered. That’s why we convened a national discussion at the American Enterprise Institute in October on the future of high-risk biological research, where centralization came up repeatedly.
For policymakers, centralization promises simplicity and control in a fragmented system. Fewer facilities mean cleaner audit trails, unified training programs, and a more straightforward way to demonstrate to Congress and the public that high-risk research is being conducted under the highest safety and security standards.
It also satisfies a political need for visibility into higher-risk research. A federally managed network of laboratories may be presented as a reassuring symbol of accountability in a field often perceived as secretive. Advocates frame it as a way to have a tighter handle on this research and align standards for biosafety training, emergency response, and incident reporting across federal agencies.
But that neat picture hides a messy reality. Beyond questions of feasibility, centralization could have significant unintended consequences.
Why scientists and practitioners are wary of centralization
Among scientists, biosafety professionals, and administrators, centralization raises deep concerns about its impact on scientific innovation, workforce development, research capacity, and trust.
Advances in the life sciences rely on diverse perspectives and approaches, as shown during the Covid-19 vaccine races, when broad collaboration and engagement across institutions accelerated innovation.
Funneling such work into limited facilities reduces scientific innovation in many ways: fewer grants awarded, longer wait times for facility access, reduced competition among research teams, and less intellectual diversity. Consequently, administrative simplicity might come at the cost of the scientific agility necessary to prepare for future biological crises and maintain national security.
At the same time, centralization may lead to a reduction in opportunities for scientists, technicians, and biosafety officers to gain practical experience. This not only shrinks the talent pipeline but also erodes regional capacity to respond to outbreaks. When a novel pathogen emerges, having sufficient trained personnel and equipped facilities distributed across the country is critical for rapid response. Without them, even a strong national system could find itself vulnerable when another pandemic or new biosecurity threat arises.
Centralization also faces a thorny practical challenge: how do we decide which research should be conducted in centralized labs? Defining “highest-risk” has proven contentious, with experts disagreeing on where to draw the line. Overly broad definitions could push vast amounts of legitimate research into a handful of facilities ill-equipped to handle the volume, while overly narrow definitions might miss genuinely dangerous work.
In a time of low trust and high misinformation, centralization risks widening the gap between the scientific community and the public, which may perceive it as secrecy rather than safety. When research moves behind closed doors, opportunities for public engagement, local oversight, and independent review are diminished.
Furthermore, international observers might interpret this kind of centralization suspiciously, as a move toward creating an offensive biological weapons capability. This perception could reduce trust and complicate cooperation and transparency with other countries and call into question our nation’s commitment to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. Without a strategy for communication and transparency, centralization could fuel public mistrust at home and abroad.
The middle ground: strengthening safety without sacrificing capacity
The real question is: How can we achieve the benefits that centralization promises, such as consistency, accountability, and high standards, without undermining the distributed capacity that makes the system resilient?
Targeted centralization may be a sensible approach in certain cases. The smallpox model worked because the pathogen had been eradicated in nature, the limited applications of smallpox research, and global support for restriction. A similar logic may be applied to other diseases: for instance in the United States, all work with live foot and mouth disease virus has been confined to a single high-containment facility: the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, now transitioning to the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Kansas. In addition, back in the early 2000s, academic scholars from the University of Maryland created a prototype framework for evaluating high-risk research and determining which should be centralized and subject to international oversight. Instead of starting from scratch, this model could be revisited for today.
Such examples demonstrate that narrowly focused centralization — call it the Goldilocks approach — can balance safety and scientific needs when a pathogen’s risks are well-defined and the research scope is limited. Defining that boundary and deciding who draws it will be necessary for any centralization effort.
The core objective should be strengthening biosafety and biosecurity across the entire research enterprise through sustained investment and clear standards. Rather than focusing attention on centralization, the nation should invest in a distributed network that modernizes and connects existing facilities and ensures stringent oversight measures. Regional and National Biocontainment Laboratories, along with university-based high-containment laboratories, need stable maintenance funding, standardized training resources, and shared quality benchmarks.
Policymakers should develop a tiered, transparent, risk-based framework to determine which experiments are unacceptable and which are safe to proceed.
To make it effective, scientists must also take an active role in building trust and demonstrating responsibility to the public. They must clearly describe the potential benefits and risks when proposing projects and communicating results throughout the research life cycle. Ongoing risk assessments should then feed back into this process to ensure that research remains aligned with national safety and security goals.
Institutions could be evaluated through an accreditation system that assesses expertise, safety culture, and performance. Nonpunitive incident reporting is essential. A system modeled after the National Transportation Safety Board could be used to share lessons learned from laboratory incidents without assigning blame, helping the entire field improve.
Finally, the field needs workforce development. Biosafety officers, technicians, and specialized researchers need career pathways, professional recognition, and ongoing training opportunities in biosafety and biosecurity. Safety depends on skilled people, not just secure buildings.
Stronger oversight is necessary and overdue. But consolidating all risky pathogen research into a handful of federal laboratories is not the path to achieving it. The better approach is investing in the distributed infrastructure that already exists and upgrading facilities, standardizing training, establishing clear guidelines, and creating accountability systems that promote learning rather than punishment.
A resilient biosafety system depends on distributed expertise, not centralized control. The question facing policymakers is whether to build on and strengthen the current foundation or replace it with something tenuous. The former requires sustained commitment and resources; the latter offers only the illusion of security. Public safety demands we choose the harder but more resilient path.
David Gillum is associate vice president of compliance and research administration and adjunct faculty in the School of Public Health at the University of Nevada, Reno. Anemone Franz is a visiting research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. An Tran is a Ph.D. student in the Environmental Science and Health Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. Kathleen M. Vogel is a professor at the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University.
Correction: An earlier version of this essay misstated the name of the Agro-Defense Facility in Kansas.
