San Antonio’s Planet of the Apes

They finally found Bigfoot. Formerly the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research (SFBR), the Texas Biomedical Research Institute (TBRI) is a strange and secretive primate-focused maximum containment lab on San Antonio’s west side.

The Texas Biomedical Research Institute (TBRI) is a strange and secretive institution whose large, roughly triangular facility sits at a major intersection on San Antonio’s I-410 highway loop. The folks buttering their cornbread and sipping sweet tea across the road at Cracker Barrel probably have little idea what happens there, and that’s a good thing for appetites.

The fences that ring TBRI are unlike those at San Antonio’s many military installations. Rather than keeping intruders out, the ring around TBRI is primarily to keep the inhabitants in. Specifically, about 2500 primates, including more than 50 chimpanzees and the world’s largest colony of captive baboons, who are probably pretty pissed off about what is done to them in TBRI’s labs, which include one of the nation’s maximium containment biosafety level four (BSL-4) facilities.

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Doing it Wrongly: The University of Tennessee

The University of Tennessee Health Science Center in Memphis doesn’t want you to be able to read its laboratory safety records.

Some universities try to use state laws to prevent release of records under the federal NIH Guidelines. This problem most frequently occurs in states with lousy open records rules. The worse the state law, the more likely the university will try to use it against requests for IBC records.

But state laws have nothing to do with the NIH Guidelines and cannot be used to undermine the Public Access Provisions. That doesn’t stop the universities from trying, however, and they are effectively encouraged to do so because of the NIH Office of Science Policy’s (OSP) extreme reluctance to enforce its own rules.

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