Tim Barr in Manhattan, Kansas

Life of Fitz: A Cancer Warrior's Conversations about Life

The National Bio and Agro-defense Facility (NBAF) will soon be in operation in Manhattan, Kansas. Its construction, which took more than 10 years, was recently completed. The facility was turned over to the USDA, which will operate NBAF. NBAF enhances the U.S. government's research, development, testing, and evaluation countermeasure capabilities by establishing a modern, integrated foreign animal and zoonotic disease research, development, and testing facility.

Overseeing the construction was a Kansas State graduate who returned to Manhattan to continue his work for the Department of Homeland Security. Tim Barr was eventually given the title of program manager to lead the facility through the construction process and into the handoff to the USDA. Barr and his wife, Cathy, also happen to be Tim and Becky Fitzgerald's neighbors. When the two couples gather, talk usually surrounds family, music, and their shared interest in landscaping, but Barr's work was rarely brought up because of its nature. Now that his job is complete — the project returned more than $10 million to the state of Kansas after coming in under budget — Barr received permission to discuss the project in depth.

Designed and built in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and operated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the new facility provides modern, safe, and secure biocontainment laboratories for licensing animal vaccines, defending against high-consequence diseases in livestock, and providing the essential infrastructure for threat characterization, forensics, and detection. NBAF sits on a forty-eight-acre lot in close proximity to the KSU Biosecurity Research Institute to allow for shared learning and research and costs $1.25 billion to build. Replacing and expanding upon the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, NBAF enhances the DHS's and USDA's capabilities to meet mandated national biological and agricultural defense mission requirements by creating an integrated and comprehensive system to rapidly recognize and characterize biological agents in animal populations, food, water, agriculture, and the environment.

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Tim Fitzgerald is a sports journalist who writes, does TV, radio, daily YouTube videos, and is a long-time podcaster. He has served as publisher of GoPowercat.com, a website that focuses on Kansas State sports, for more than 25 years. Fitz also has metastatic Stage Four prostate cancer, so during the initial stages of the pandemic, his doctors advised him to stay home and lay low. Now, after a brief period of remission, Fitz is back in the fight for his life, but this podcast lives on. Welcome to his life and the Life of Fitz podcast.

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