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Texas A&M Biosafety Director Brent Mattox resigned on Friday, the same day the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention issued an exhaustive rebuke on the university's repeated lab security breaches, A&M officials said Wednesday.Mr. Mattox, who oversaw lab inspections and infectious disease safety in his role in the university's environmental health and safety department, said in his resignation letter that "it has reached a point in my career at Texas A&M that I no longer can effectively perform my duties in the present environment."The 21-page CDC report, released by the university on Tuesday, prolongs the ban on Texas A&M's biodefense research until federal agents are sure campus labs no longer pose a threat to public health.And it documents across-the-board problems with A&M's federally-funded, nationally recognized infectious disease research-everything from giving unauthorized access to high-security labs to misplacing vials of dangerous agents.The report follows months of scrutiny over the university's failure to report lab workers exposure last year to "select agents," bacteria or viruses that could be used as bioterrorist weapons.Mr. Mattox's resignation isn't the first in the aftermath of Texas A&M's biodefense scandal. Last month, Dr. Richard Ewing, the university's vice president for research, stepped down over the security breaches and returned to the university's mathematics department. A principal investigator who supervised some of the select agent experiments remains on leave.Texas A&M is still awaiting news on whether it will face fines or criminal penalties for not reporting lab workers' exposure to Q Fever and Brucella. Meanwhile, several congressmen have pledged to hold hearings on safety inside the country's bioweapons labs."I do this with regret," Mr. Mattox wrote of his resignation, "and will dearly miss my staff. I was proud to have led them in making Texas A&M University a safer place to work."As in the days of Noah...
