Boston University’s Biohazard lab is a classic white elephant. Should it stay that way?
By Adrian Walker Globe Columnist July 28, 2014
4-5 minutes

Boston University’s $200 million biohazard lab in the South End is like no other building in the city.

The lab is visible from Albany Street but its entrance isn’t, which is part of the security plan for a place where scientists could eventually perform research on some of the most hazardous materials on earth. Walls and floors are roughly twice the thickness of a normal building.

It is built to withstand hurricanes, and its director brags that it will be the safest building in town if another earthquake ever strikes.

It is a lab, tucked in a densely populated neighborhood, that would operate with the most sensitive of designations, BSL-4. That denotes a lab that does research on deadly substances, ones with no vaccines or treatment. The pathogens, if mishandled, would almost certainly prove lethal.

BU biolab gets CDC green light for Level 4 research, but still needs city approval
By Evan Allen and Felicia Gans Globe Staff and Globe Correspondent December 24, 2016
6-8 minutes

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has approved a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory to operate on Boston University’s medical campus in the South End, according to the Boston Public Health Commission.

Scientists in the National Emerging Infectious Diseases lab would have clearance to study the world’s deadliest pathogens, such as Ebola. The biolab still needs to win approval from the city’s health commission before that research can begin.

Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski (February 27, 1877 – August 28, 1944) was a Polish Jew and wartime businessman appointed by Nazi Germany as the head of the Council of Elders in the Łódź Ghetto during the occupation of Poland in World War II.[1] He accrued exponentially more power by transforming the Ghetto into an industrial base manufacturing war supplies for the Wehrmacht army in the mistaken belief that productivity was the key to Jewish survival beyond the Holocaust. The Germans liquidated the ghetto in 1944. All remaining prisoners were sent to death camps in the wake of military defeats on the Eastern Front of World War II.[1]

Rumkowski is remembered for his speech Give Me Your Children, delivered at a time when the Germans demanded his compliance with the deportation of 20,000 children to Chełmno extermination camp. In August 1944, Rumkowski and his family joined the last transport to Auschwitz,[2] and were murdered there on August 28, 1944 by the Jewish Sonderkommando inmates who beat him to death as revenge for his role in the Holocaust. This account of his final moments is confirmed by witness testimonies of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials.

Dov Lopatyn was the head of the Judenrat in Łachwa, Poland (present-day Lakhva, Belarus) in 1941-42. He refused the demand of the Einsatzgruppen that the Lakhva Ghetto inhabitants line up for deportation, and, on 3 September 1942, he led one of the first ghetto uprisings of the war.[1]

More than half of the ghetto population was either killed in the fighting or taken to nearby pits and shot.[citation needed] A number did escape to the Pripet Marshes, where some joined partisan units. Lopatyn joined a communist partisan unit, and was killed on 21 February 1944 by a landmine.