MANHATTAN — National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility researcher Lisa Hensley’s career took her from laboratory to laboratory and country to country to study the alphabet soup of ghastly pathogens such as SARs, mpox, MERs and Marburg.
But she said an Ebola outbreak in the West Africa country of Liberia brought home what it meant to be in a country with a health-care system overwhelmed by a disease carrying a high mortality rate, without readily available treatment and vaccination options, and complicated by distorted public attitudes about the threat.
“Their reactions were across the board,” Hensley said. “There were a lot of people who just didn’t even believe in Ebola. Thought it was something the government was doing. When I went to set up the lab, I remember the people didn’t ever want to take anything from my hands. There was this fear.”
She said the lone treatment facility in Liberia’s capitol couldn’t keep pace with the sick and dying. People driving the ill to a hospital or burying the dead became targets of infection. In other parts of the nation, treatment centers were attacked by skeptics who didn’t believe the virus was naturally occurring.
“Being in there and being a scientist … my heart ached for the people there because there was so much fear and trauma and they didn’t understand how it was being spread,” she said.
Those field experiences and jobs with the National Institutes of Health’s Integrated Research Facility and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, both in Maryland, put her on a path to the newly constructed NBAF complex in Manhattan. She is research leader for the NBAF’s Zoonotic and Emerging Disease Research Unit and responsible for developing and managing a portfolio concentrated on infectious diseases in large animals such as cattle, sheep and hogs.
Local, state and national officials celebrated completion of the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, a $1.25 billion investment in fighting diseases capable of jumping from animals to humans with potential to smother lives and wreck the economy. (NBAF submitted photo)
Local, state and national officials celebrated completion of the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility in Manhattan, a $1.25 billion investment in fighting diseases capable of jumping from animals to humans with potential to smother lives and wreck the farm economy. (NBAF submitted photo)
Ripping Band-Aid off
On Wednesday, federal and local officials celebrated completion of the research facility constructed to replace a laboratory built nearly 70 years ago in Plum Island, N.Y. While the process of constructing the facility has been finished, full transfer of the science mission from the BSL-3 Plum Island station to NBAF in Manhattan could take a couple years. Research activity at NBAF is expected to gradually expand.
At NBAF, about 400 personnel will eventually make the $1.25 billion laboratory their scientific home. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security presided over construction, but NBAF will be owned and operated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
A core scientific mandate at NBAF will be development of countermeasures for known foreign diseases capable of entering the United States and exploration of emerging diseases so new they have yet to be well understood.
Hensley, for example, will operate in a state-of-the-art biosafety level-4 laboratory at NBAF — the highest level of U.S. research biocontainment. Those spaces require scientists to wear protective suits with respirators, enter laboratory spaces through air-locked rooms and undergo a series of showers when exiting areas exposed to contaminants.
Hensley said the COVID-19 pandemic gave people a taste of what could transpire if there was the type of disease outbreak that undermined the crop or animal agricultural industries and derailed the domestic food supply.
“I love teaching. I love educating. I love the opportunity to explain to the public the great potential we have to have positive impact,” Hensley said in an interview. “There’s just growing recognition of how vulnerable we are on the ag side. What excites me, what brings me joy, is making a difference.”
