Experts say IBCs are a crucial tool for ensuring the safety of biomedical research. Critics say they are too opaque.

In 2004, an activist named Edward Hammond fired up his fax machine and sent out letters to 390 institutional biosafety committees across the country. His request was simple: Show me your minutes.

Few people at the time had heard of these committees, known as IBCs, and even today, the typical American is likely unaware that they even exist. But they’re a ubiquitous — and, experts say, crucial — tool for overseeing potentially risky research in the United States. Since 1976, if a scientist wants to tweak the DNA of a lab organism, and their institution receives funding from the National Institutes of Health, they generally need to get express safety approval from the collection of scientists, biosafety experts, and interested community members who sit on the relevant IBC. Given the long reach of the $46-billion NIH budget, virtually every research university in the U.S. is required to have such a board, as are plenty of biotechnology companies and hospitals. The committees “are the cornerstone of institutional oversight of recombinant DNA research,” according to the NIH, and at many institutions, their purview includes high-security labs and research on deadly pathogens.

The agency also requires these committees to maintain detailed meeting minutes, and to supply them upon request to members of the public. But when Hammond started requesting those minutes, he found something else. Not only were many universities declining to share their minutes, but some didn’t seem to have active IBCs at all. “The committees weren’t functioning,” Hammond told Undark. “It was just an absolute joke.”