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This article will review some of the efforts being undertaken by the international community to assist developing nations in developing and/or upgrading their laboratory testing capabilities.
These efforts have been undertaken for a number of reasons including, as a means of: reducing the spread of weapons of mass destruction by helping weapons scientists in the former Soviet Union adopt new careers; assisting countries with significant environmental problems in addressing these problems; improving the ability of countries to monitor compliance with international agreements to protect the environment; and helping developing countries increase their exports by ensuring that they have the quality testing laboratory infrastructure that will give their foreign customers confidence in the quality of the exported products.
In this article, I will concentrate on the efforts by the United States (US) to assist the Republic of Kazakhstan (RK) in establishing a modern analytical testing laboratory. The laboratory will support Kazakhstan’s environmental, scientific, and international trade building programs and provide employment for former weapons scientists. A similar effort is also underway in Central Russia.
The US Departments of Defense (DOD) and State (DOS) are responsible for implementing the US’s weapons of mass destruction threat reduction program, as a consequence of the passage of the Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991 (1). The DOD program assists the former countries of the Soviet Union in identifying and destroying stocks of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and the DOS Cooperative Threat Reduction Program retrains and redirects former weapons scientists and engineers into new fields of endeavor in order to counter the effort by rogue nations to recruit former bomb and biological/chemical-weapons makers. The DOS relies on a number of other federal agencies in carrying out their mission.
Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan was home to one of the largest biological weapons research and production facilities in the former Soviet Union. In the late 1990s, the governments of the RK and the US agreed that the US would begin a program to destroy the stockpiled weapons and the weapons production facility and retrain the former weapons scientists and engineers. Due to the large number of environmental problems facing the country and the lack of any modern analytical laboratories to support the RK’s environmental protection efforts, it was decided that the US would help Kazakhstan establish an environmental analytical laboratory in Stepnogorsk. In 2000, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was asked by the DOS for assistance and EPA assumed responsibility for the transformation. Soon after the effort began, the goal changed from that of just establishing a government laboratory modeled after an EPA Regional Laboratory to one of establishing a self-sustaining, commercial environmental and commercial analytical services laboratory modeled after the commercial laboratories that we have here in the US. The business focus of the laboratory was expanded
to include assisting companies in Kazakhstan comply with environmental regulations and providing them with a means of demonstrating to customers that their products meet product quality standards. Having an accredited in-country laboratory would eliminate the cost and delay of sending samples to laboratories in other countries for certification testing.
The Central Asian market is a rapidly growing one due to a number of factors, least of which are the rich deposits of petroleum and other natural resources in the region. In this article, I will illustrate some of the problems that were encountered and overcome in establishing the Stepnogorsk laboratory as a means of preparing American companies who may be thinking of doing business with or expanding into Central Asia to help service this growing market for the problems that they may face. Problems were encountered in training the scientists in environmental analytical chemistry and microbiology; in overcoming cultural barriers; in operating without the business support infrastructure that we take for granted in the US; in the day-to-day running of a laboratory without local sources of laboratory supplies; and in coping with bureaucratic roadblocks and a legal system that was inherited from the Soviet system. Space will only permit illustrating the problems with a few examples.
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Retraining the chemists, microbiologists, and engineers so that they could design and carry out environmental studies turned out to be less of a problem than we initially expected. The staff had the requisite scientific skills and were interested in learning a new discipline. By a combination of on-site training by EPA and instrument vendor staffs, having Kazakh scientists work alongside EPA scientists in EPA laboratories, and by having them attend formal training courses conducted by instrument vendors, we found that they quickly learned how to design site or waste characterization studies that focused on answering environmental questions and generating data to meet specified degrees of statistical confidence. They were able to conduct the necessary field sampling, and to perform the needed analyses using appropriate EPA, Russian, and Kazakhstan analytical methods.
One of the most time consuming problems was inculcating an understanding and appreciation for the need to document all the work performed and of international standards of laboratory quality assurance and quality control. The laboratory staff were not used to documenting exactly what was done (i.e., how the experiments were conducted) and the resulting quality of the experimental results. The Soviet weapons program had been cloaked in secrecy and obfuscation and detailed documentation was not the norm. In our training program we made extensive use of National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Conference (NELAC) standards and of laboratory quality manuals used in EPA’s own laboratories. The concept that if something had not been written down and documented, then the assessor will assume that it had not been done, was a new concept to them and it took us a very long time and constant emphasis before they fully internalized and adopted the new philosophy.
Under the Soviet system, and also in a number of other cultures, scientific organizations operate in a very hierarchical manner. Employees are discouraged from acting on their own initiative to address problems. People carry out their assigned responsibilities and will await management action rather than trying to solve problems themselves. This often leads to significant delays and losses in productivity. It was a major cultural shift to transform the staff into a team where everyone works together to ensure that mistakes are caught and corrected before they reach the client.
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Teaching laboratory management the skills one needs to operate a commercial business (e.g., people management, budgeting, accounting, conducting market research and identifying market opportunities, advertising) consumed more time than any other aspect of the redirection effort. These skills were not needed under the former Soviet command and control system. In the past the laboratory was told what to work on, given its budget and priorities, provided with staff, equipment and supplies, and did not have to worry about finding customers or work in order to survive and flourish. |
In closing, I want to touch on one of the most serious problems that we faced and which anyone doing business in this part of the world will face—and that is the problem in getting the government to make decisions and issue permits in a timely manner. Obtaining the permits just to store laboratory solvents took months of efforts due to the bureaucratic process. Clearing laboratory supplies through the customs process, even though the program had an exemption from having to pay duties, was often a slow and arduous process. It took many months to develop operating procedures that the laboratory could use to reduce the delays and problems.
While the US continues to assist the laboratory in expanding its capabilities, the new Monitoring Laboratory (2) is operational and, in 2005, became the first laboratory in Kazakhstan to be accredited by the Kazakhstan national laboratory accreditation organization (National Center for Accreditation or NCA) against the ISO 17025 standard. Since NCA accreditations are not yet recognized internationally, the laboratory applied to the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA) for accreditation and, in January 2006, was awarded its accreditation as a chemical analytical laboratory. Companies or individuals desiring further information on this program or the laboratory situation in Kazakhstan or Central Russia, where the US has a similar effort underway, should contact the author (3).
(1) Soviet Nuclear Threat Reduction Act of 1991 (or Nunn Lugar Act) (22 USC 2551) and amended in 1993, 1996 (22 USC 5951); and 2003 (50 USC 2301).
(2) Monitoring Laboratory
National Center for Biotechnology
Building 3, Microdistrict 9
Stepnogorsk, 021500
Kazakhstan
Telephone: 7-31645-51982
Email: monitlab@astanabc.com
3) David Friedman
Friedman Consulting, LLC
10817 Rippon Lodge Drive
Fairfax, VA 22032-2931
Telephone: 703-389-3821
Email: friedmanconsulting@cox.net
Reprinted with permission from Environmental Express (Volume IV; Number 1; May 2006).
Over the last 25 years APG has developed working relationships with organizations like Environmental Express which deliver similar quality and services to their customers. For more information about Environmental Express and the products and services offered by the company please call 800-343-5319.
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