Biological Warfare

Fog of War Ramon Flick, director of the Biosafety Level 4 lab at the University of Texas Medical Branch, suits up for a date with Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever. Brent Humphreys

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Before entering his lab, Ramon Flick puts on a 10-pound plastic space suit with a bubble helmet, a double pair of rubber gloves sealed to the suit at the wrists, and boots. The 35-year-old director of the Biosafety Level 4 lab at the University of Texas Medical Branch
at Galveston walks past a chemical
shower and into the lab space, a 2,000-square-foot sterilized white room. An airtight door slams shut behind him.


Underneath the floor of this room, in contrast to the stillness of the lab above, is a mosaic of pipes that noisily suck out air through doubled-up HEPA filters engineered to trap microorganisms as small as any yet discovered. Next to the pipes are a series of drains that monitor and sterilize each drop of wastewater leaving the lab before channeling it to sewers. The lab is negatively pressurized; even if there was a leak in the door seal when contamination occurred inside the room, air would rush into the room, not out from polluted areas.


Flick attaches an air tube to his suit. It blows up and stabilizes at about 70