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BU BIOLAB
Be "fearless" against biolab: Rivera
BY DEIRDRE FULTON
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"What we have to be today is fearless," District Six city-council candidate Gibran Rivera told the receptive crowd at Jamaica Plain’s English High School auditorium last Thursday evening. "This biolab is a central part of rightward momentum" on the part of the Boston City Council and the nation, he continued. At that, the group — about 40-strong, mostly older women with some younger alternative types thrown in — cheered. Rivera wasn’t alone in his hard-line stance against the proposed Boston University level-four biosafety laboratory, which will study infectious diseases and handle dangerous organisms. At-large council candidates Sam Yoon (who also outlined why he "vehemently opposes the BU biolab"), Matt O’Malley, Joe Ready, and Laura Garza, and mayoral candidate Maura Hennigan, all stopped by last week’s forum, organized by the Jamaica Plain Action Network and several anti-biolab groups. The lab, which supporters say will bring more jobs to the city while providing important research, is under fire because of its environmental-justice (the lab will be on the border of one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods) and foreign-policy/homeland-security (scientists inside the lab could cook up bioterror agents) implications. Anti-lab activists are hoping to gain influence in this fall’s city-council elections (nine of the current councilors support the lab, four oppose it). "Y’all need to get on Tobin," community organizer and anti-lab activist Klare Allen said to the JP residents (referring to their current councilor, John Tobin). "It doesn’t take multitudes. It takes people who are committed and people who are down enough to say, ‘We’re not going to stand for it.’"
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