[bioundgrd] research activities

[Alan D Grossman]

Dear Members of the Biology Community,

We have all been wondering how our research activities will or should be affected by the coronavirus pandemic.  There are multiple aspects and dimensions to our research activities, including working in a lab at a bench, reading, writing, thinking, planning, and communicating.  All but the first of these can be done away from the physical location of our labs and MIT.

All of us should be shifting our focus away from working physically at MIT, at least for now.  This will best enable social distancing that will reduce the rate of spread of the coronavirus (and other communicable diseases).

For now, if people are to work in the labs, each lab must limit the number of people present at any one time.  For building 68, that is probably one person per room, or one person per bay. In addition, we need to have increased vigilance about keeping surfaces clean, especially in common areas and door knobs. That means frequent decontamination of surfaces, above and beyond what we normally do for our biological and chemical materials.  If people are working in labs, these precautions must be taken.

That said, the social interactions and numbers of people interacting extend beyond the population density in a given lab.  People still need to get to the lab and then back home.  There are multiple interactions along the way, and multiple spaces through which we all pass (hallways, stairs, elevators, restrooms), and there are staff that need to be present at some level to support our activities.

For these reasons, and primarily to reduce the rate of spread of SARS CoV-2 (the name of the coronavirus that is causing the pandemic), we should be prepared to ramp down our in-lab research activities.  I suspect that MIT will ask that we do this, analogous to what Harvard, Harvard Medical School, the Broad Institute, and others are doing.

If, when there is a ramp down of research activities, I’m virtually certain that we will still be able to maintain long term ongoing experiments and to maintain materials that are needed for our research.

Two points to emphasize:  1) the reduced social distancing is to slow the rate of spread of the coronavirus SARS CoV-2.  This slowing down of the spread will better enable the health care system to handle the number of people with acute illness. Reduced social distancing will also protect some in our community, but it is likely that many of us will eventually be infected. 2) We are not saying that the research enterprise and what we do is not ‘essential’. Collecively, our work contributes tremendously to our understanding of living systems and their components.  This has a huge impact on public health and the economy and it is this research collectively that has enabled many of the advances in medical treatments and diagnostics, among other things.  It is possible for us to shift our research activities right now, for the short term, to benefit the immediate public health concerns without compromising too much our long term contributions to the scientific enterprise.

Lastly, thanks to everyone for their understanding and contributions in the midst of these dramatic changes and disruptions.

I’m sure there will be more information coming in the not too distant future.

Sincerely,
Alan


Alan D. Grossman
Professor and Head
Department of Biology
Building 68-530
M.I.T.
Cambridge, MA   02139

(617) 253-1515
adg at mit.edu<mailto:adg at mit.edu>





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