BIOSAFETY An activist who has been both loathed and lauded for his criticism of safety at the United States's booming biodefense labs is closing his doors. Edward Hammond, director of the Austin, Texas-based watchdog group called the Sunshine Project, earlier this month posted a note on his Web site saying he is suspending operations. For 8 years, he has survived on a shoestring budget, he says, and he has had enough. ![Figure][1] Muckraker. Ed Hammond's digging into safety at biodefense labs found problems. CREDIT: COURTESY OF E. HAMMOND The news may come as a relief to microbiologists and university officials who have been subjected to Hammond's relentless probing. But even some of those scientists say Hammond has had a positive influence. Virologist C. J. Peters of the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston says that although Hammond was a “pest” who often exaggerated risks to the public, his work has “made the community more careful” about biosafety. “I think the country works best with watchdogs,” he says. “I am, strangely, sad to see him go.” Hammond's causes included destroying smallpox stocks and sharing flu strains, but his greatest impact may be his scrutiny of the U.S. biodefense labs that sprang up after the 2001 anthrax attacks. He filed open-records requests for the minutes of nearly 400 institutional boards that oversee safety at biology labs ( Science , 6 August 2004, p. [768][2]). This revealed that some met infrequently, if at all. And last summer, after Hammond uncovered an unreported infection and other safety violations at Texas A&M University in College Station, federal authorities suspended the lab's biodefense research. A few months later, Congress held a hearing on safety at biodefense labs and called for stricter oversight. Despite these accomplishments, Hammond says he had had enough of a “totally consuming” job on a budget “well under $100,000 a year” cobbled together from small foundation grants. (The Sunshine Project's other staffer in Germany was part-time, he says.) Last year's fund-raising didn't go particularly well, he says, and “I hit my breaking point.” He says he hasn't figured out what he'll do next; for now, he's planning to spend a couple of years in Bogota, with his wife, a Colombia-born attorney, and young daughter. Some observers, meanwhile, are lamenting the Sunshine Project's demise. “[Hammond] called attention to very real problems in the way that biosecurity has been funded and research reviewed,” says Gigi Kwik Gronvall of the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland. “There's no one else I know of that will look over at that level of detail and keep things transparent.” [1]: pending:yes [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.305.5685.768