• Agency overview

• Formed 1928^[1]

• Preceding agency Hygienic Laboratory

• Headquarters Hamilton, Montana

• Employees 400^[1]

• Parent agency National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, National Institutes of Health, United States Department of Health & Human Services

Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) is part of the NIH Intramural Research Program and is located in Hamilton, Montana. Operated by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, RML conducts research on maximum containment pathogens such as Ebola as well as research on prions and intracellular pathogens such as Coxiella burnetti and Francisella tularensis.^[2][3][4] RML operates one of the few Biosafety level 4 laboratories in the United States, as well as Biosafety level 3 and ABSL3/4 laboratories.^[5]

In February 2020, electron microscope images of SARS-CoV-2 were collected at RML.^[6]

References

• ^{a b} "Rocky Mountain Laboratories Overview, NIAID, NIH". niaid.nih.gov. Retrieved 2016-10-28.

• ^ "Heinz Feldmann, M.D., Ph.D., Laboratory of Virology". niaid.nih.gov. Retrieved 2016-10-28.

Early map of the Bitterroot valley. Area in red shows where spotted fever infection occurred

Although the construction of the first building of The Rocky Mountain Labs was completed in 1928, RML evolved as a result of research on Rocky Mountain spotted fever that began around 1900, in the Bitterroot Valley of Western Montana. Early settlers of the valley were plagued with a deadly disease of unknown origin that seemed to be concentrated on the west side of the Bitterroot River.

The “black measles” rash characteristic of later stages of spotted fever infection.

It was known locally as "black measles" because of its severe dark rash, and folk wisdom of the day suggested that infection occurred from drinking the melted snow water that gushed out of the west side canyons during spring runoff. Fatal in nearly 4 out of 5 adult cases, local residents appealed to the state governor for help.

Montana had been granted statehood in 1889, and in 1901, the Montana State Board of Health was created. Its first priority was to bring health scientists to the Bitterroot Valley to investigate the cause, treatment and prevention of spotted fever. During the next three decades a memorable cast of characters was engaged in a drama that provided an interesting chapter in the annals of medical history.

Howard Taylor Ricketts, 1871-1910. Ricketts identified the causative agent of Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

Among the first was Dr. Howard Ricketts, a young pathologist from the University of Chicago, who in 1906, showed that the disease was transmitted by the bite of the Rocky Mountain wood tick (Dermacentor andersoni). Returning each summer to continue his work, by 1909, he had isolated the bacterial organism that was responsible for spotted fever, and that organism was later named Rickettsia rickettsii in his honor.

A state budget shortage made it questionable whether Montana could continue to fund Ricketts' research during the summer of 1910. Because of the uncertainty, he accepted funding to work on a typhus outbreak in Mexico City. Shortly before his work there was concluded, Ricketts himself contracted typhus and died soon after.

In front of the cabin that had been dubbed “Camp Venustus.” Clarence Birdseye of the U.S. Biological Survey stands in the doorway.

Clarence Birdseye was another interesting character to play a role in spotted fever research in the Bitterroot Valley. As part of an effort to understand the life cycle of the wood tick, Birdseye, a college student working for the US Biological Survey, spent the spring and early summer of 1910 shooting and trapping wild game and rodents to collect ticks. Reportedly, he bagged 717 small animals and collected nearly 4,500 ticks. After his work in Montana, Birdseye went to Labrador where he developed the concept of frozen foods and later established the company that bears his name.

Early Tick Research

In the years that followed, a number of state and federally funded researchers continued their investigations of spotted fever. The Montana State Board of Entomology under the direction of Dr. Robert Cooley developed a tick eradication program. Dipping vats were placed at several locations throughout the valley and ranchers were encouraged (by threat of quarantine) to drive their herds to the nearest station so that the cattle could swim through a trough of arsenic solution. However, preparing an arsenic solution strong enough to be effective, but not so strong as to burn the hides and udders of cattle, was accomplished by trial and error. This situation bolstered the resentment among local ranchers who already harbored a healthy distrust of government-imposed programs. In addition, two young brothers who had been helping at a dipping station on their family ranch both contracted the infection and died.

In June 1913, matters came to a head when the vat located near Florence was destroyed by dynamite and one outside of Hamilton was damaged with sledgehammers.

Dr. Roscoe Spencer, primarily responsible for the Spencer-Parker tick tissue vaccine.

Despite local hostility, work on spotted fever continued on several fronts. Within a few years Drs. Roscoe Spencer and Ralph Parker produced the first effective vaccine against the disease by emulsifying infected tick tissue and inactivating the rickettsiae with phenol.

The early facilities in which spotted fever research was conducted were makeshift at best. Ricketts worked in tents set up in the yard of the Northern Pacific Hospital north of the valley in Missoula.

Dr. Ralph Parker served as Director of the Rocky Mountain Labs from 1930, until his death in 1949.

Others worked out of cabins and farmhouses, and Parker for a time conducted his studies in a woodshed. Finally, in 1921, Parker found an abandoned schoolhouse on the west side of the valley and arranged to have it rented by the U.S. Public Health Service. The "Schoolhouse Lab," as it was known, was the facility where Spencer and Parker ground up tick tissue to produce their vaccine.

This deserted farmhouse in the Bitterroot foothills was rented in the spring of 1910, and converted to a laboratory for tick research. In 1909, several people in the vicinity had died of spotted fever.

Progress had been made toward controlling spotted fever, but much more awaited. In 1926, the Board of Entomology asked the state legislature to provide enough money to build a modern entomological laboratory. In the spring of 1927, the legislature appropriated $60,000 for the new building and a site in the town of Hamilton was chosen.

The woodshed used by Dr. Ralph Parker to perform tick research during the summer of 1920.

By this time, local sentiment toward medical investigators had softened considerably, but pockets of fear and distrust remained. Each spring newspapers reported new cases of the illness. While the annual number of deaths from spotted fever had fallen significantly from the record high of 17 in 1901, every year more victims succumbed to the disease. In addition, during the previous 16 years, 5 laboratory workers had become infected and perished.

The Lab is Built

When news hit the valley that a new laboratory would be built in Hamilton, a group of citizens immediately formed a coalition in opposition and it became clear that the facility would not be built without a fight. Unlike previous workstations, this site lay east of the river that bisects the valley.

Laboratory facilities at Victor, Montana, used from 1911-1916.

Since infection only occurred on the west side, residents worried that ticks might escape the facility and pose a danger to the town. To stop construction, homeowners in the neighborhood of the proposed site filed a lawsuit. At trial, plaintiffs argued that the location was particularly dangerous since it was only a block away from the high school. And, homeowners feared that property values in the area would plummet. Ultimately, the judge decided that construction could go forward, but in an effort to alleviate town fears, a small moat was built around the perimeter of the facility to be filled with water. Ticks, it was supposed, could not swim the moat.

The "schoolhouse lab" where Spencer and Parker produced the first effective vaccine against spotted fever. Extensively renovated over the years, this building has served as a museum and is currently the Hamilton Playhouse on Ricketts Road.

The building was completed in early 1928. It provided space for the state-administered control programs and rented space to the Public Health Service for Dr. Parker and his colleagues to continue research and vaccine production. By 1930, the laboratory employed four professionals and 22 support staff. In that year Parker was appointed scientific director, a role he continued in for the next 19 years. In February of 1932, the federal government purchased the facility from the state of Montana for $68,757 and several of the Board of Entomology employees were transferred to the Public Health Service.

Building 1 of the current RML campus was completed in 1928. Citizens filed an unsuccessful lawsuit to stop construction.

In 1937, RML became part of the National Institute of Health. During World War II, the laboratory joined in the war effort by becoming a "national vaccine factory," producing vaccines to protect soldiers against spotted fever, typhus, and yellow fever. After the war, work at the lab returned to its primary mission of basic scientific research of infectious diseases. In 1948, the National Institute of Health was reorganized, and RML became part of what is now called the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

Today, scientists at RML investigate a wide variety of infectious diseases. Supported by state-of-the-art genomics and electron microscopy units, current research includes the study of chronic wasting disease, chlamydia, Q-fever, tularemia, Salmonella, Staphylococcus, Lyme disease, relapsing fever, and plague. An Integrated Research Facility with maximum-containment laboratories allows scientists to use advanced technology in their quest to protect people from the emerging infectious diseases.

Three interesting reads on the story of early spotted fever research and the origins of the Rocky Mountain Laboratories are: Fighting Spotted Fever In the Rockies by Ester Gaskins Price, Naegele Printing Company, 1947; Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, History of a Twentieth-Century Disease by Victoria A. Harden, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990; Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in Western Montana, Anatomy of a Pestilence by Robert N. Philip, Stoneydale Press, 2000.

Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID, is a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NIAID conducts and supports research—at NIH, throughout the United States, and worldwide—to study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases, and to develop better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating these illnesses. News releases, fact sheets, and other NIAID-related materials are available on the NIAID website.

NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. Visit NIH(link is external) for more information about its programs.

For decades, Rocky Mountain Laboratory scientists [Dr. Vincent J. Munster (born 1973)] and [Dr. Emmie de Wit (born 1980(est.))] have been honing the skills they would use in helping in this year's fight against a global pandemic. That scientific expertise didn't go unnoticed.

The married couple from Hamilton was recently selected as two of four recipients of the American Association for Advancement of Science’s Golden Goose Award. The award recognizes the benefits of federally-funded research by highlighting examples of studies that led to breakthroughs resulting in significant societal impacts.

The award’s focus this year was on a group of National Institutes of Health scientists who used their collective knowledge gained in studying other dangerous coronavirus outbreaks around the world to respond quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the couple works in separate RML labs, the common thread of their research involves investigating outbreaks. They work with animals to learn about viruses and then create tests to determine if vaccine candidates and treatments have the potential to work in humans.

They are among a small core of researchers who study coronaviruses. Before COVID-19 was even a blip on the radar screen, their work was unlocking mysteries about how the viruses operated and ways they could be treated.

At about the same time the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in Wuhan, China last December, a study led by de Wit was published that showed the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir was effective in treating rhesus macaques infected with the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronavirus.

By April, de Wit’s team showed that it also worked on the virus that caused COVID-19.

The federal Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency-use authorization for the drug to treat COVID-19 patients requiring hospitalization in May.

Munster’s RML research team was one the first to investigate MERS in 2012 when it appeared in Arabian Desert camel handlers. They found that while camels wouldn’t get ill with the virus, they spread it effectively to humans.

Munster’s team is currently involved in several COVID-19 development programs, including the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine that could be next in line for an emergency authorization.

The first doses of COVID-19 vaccine are expected to arrive in Ravalli County this week. For that to happen so quickly, Munster said the stars needed to align just right.

“Surprised isn’t the right word for us that this has happened," he said. "We’re all aware of the new technologies that have been developed. Everything still needed to work and everything has. The laboratory work, the human clinical trials, all these things have lined up in record speed. It worked out in the way that it was planned. Nothing hit a snag. That’s really amazing.”

Both de Wit and Munster said it’s important for the general public to understand that the building blocks for this rapid development of a vaccine were put in place decades ago.

“If you are involved in it, it all makes sense,” Munster said. “For the general public, it seems unprecedented.”

Since the 2014 Ebola outbreak, public and private partnerships between scientists and pharmaceutical companies have been working to shorten the time frame for developing new vaccines so they can make a difference when a new pathogen appears.

“One of the big differences from the development of previous vaccines was the resources that were available this time,” de Wit said. “Everyone in the research community and all the pharmaceutical companies wanted to make a vaccine happen…The FDA made sure they were ready to make approvals so the next step could happen. And there were a lot of people who were willing to participate in vaccine trials.”

“Enrolling 30,000 people in vaccine candidate trials is quite unprecedented,” Munster said.

Munster and de Wit said all of this couldn’t happen without the cooperation of research teams from around the world.

“People have this old-fashioned idea about science,” de Wit said. “They think it’s one brilliant person who has this brilliant idea that’s made in a light bulb. That’s not really how science works. You really need to put a lot of brains and hands together.”

While the couple is appreciative of the recent award they were presented, both said the credit really belongs to all the people who work at Rocky Mountain Laboratories.

The two have been working at the Hamilton facility since 2009.

“We think we are extraordinarily blessed to be able to live here,” Munster said. “We have all the resources that we need to be able to do our work and then we can still go outside and enjoy nature.”

Since the pandemic's onset, the couple said they have been extremely diligent in maintaining social distancing. The only time they go out into a public space is a 7 a.m. grocery shopping trip on Sunday mornings.

“For us, this has been a crazy year,” de Wit said. “While other people are having to struggle to stay indoors, we have been able to do what we love by going to work. We love figuring out what kind of disease this is and what we can do to prevent people from getting sick.”

They hope their neighbors will continue to hunker down and do everything they can to stay safe for the next few months until the vaccine becomes readily available.

“With the vaccines, I think we are really getting close to the end of it,” Munster said. “Everyone just needs to be strong for the next couple of months until they can get vaccinated. People need to keep wearing their masks, keeping their distance and practice proper hygiene.”

The two scientists who have spent their careers studying some of the most infectious diseases known to the world are certain that masks work to control the spread of virus.

“We think it’s very simple concept,” Munster said. “This virus replicates the most in people’s noses. It’s transmitted when people inhale and exhale. The moment you wear a mask, it’s harder to get enough virus particles for someone to become infected.”

“Masks are such an easy thing,” de Wit said. “You just put them on before you go into the store. It’s something that everyone can do to keep everyone safe. We’re not all scientists who can work on a vaccine, but this is something that everyone can do to try to keep each other a little safer.”

“People should have the freedom of not being exposed to someone else’s virus,” Munster said.